Saving Seafood

CALIFORNIA: Commercial crab season delayed again, set to start Dec. 1 north of Sonoma County

November 24, 2021 — An abundance of endangered whales still feeding off the California Coast has forced the continued delay of commercial crabbing off the shore of Monterey, San Francisco and Bodega bays, at least until Dec. 15.

The delay will help ensure marine animals don’t become entangled, according to state Fish and Wildlife Director Chuck Bonham.

The season will open Dec. 1 north of Sonoma County, allowing the harvest of North Coast Dungeness crab there to proceed on time, furnishing fresh crab for winter holiday feasts and an opportunity for some commercial crabbers to get some action even if they usually fish in areas that remain closed.

Read the full story at The Press Democrat

 

CALIFORNIA: More Whales Are Washing Up Dead on Bay Area Beaches. Why?

November 19, 2021 — Nineteen gray whales have washed up on California’s coast this year, and in many cases there were no clear signs of what killed them. Communities all along the whales’ long migration route are noticing a similar trend, and whale deaths have been above normal for the past three years.

Crabbers team up with scientists

Even as the scientists puzzle out what’s going on, there is some good news.

Back in 2016, there was a spike in West Coast whale entanglements — 48 of the big animals got caught in fishing lines and gear, some of them fatally. Of those, 19 were traced to commercial Dungeness crab gear. So the state worked with fishermen to try to understand what was happening, and what they could all do to prevent the problem.

Dick Ogg is a commercial Dungeness crab fisherman who got involved with the state effort. On a clear morning, with the sun just rising, Ogg maneuvers his boat out of the harbor in Bodega Bay. He’s been fishing these waters for more than two decades, captaining his small boat with two hired workers. He says he often sees whales.

Read the full story at KQED

Alaska crab population crash blamed on mysterious mortality event

November 5, 2021 — A crash in crab populations in the U.S. state of Alaska is being partially blamed on a mortality event scientists cannot fully explain.

A catastrophic drop in Alaska’s snow crab population led the state to set a much lower quota for the upcoming season. Along with a significant drop to the Bering Sea bairdi crab quota and the closure of the winter Bristol Bay red king crab fishery, Alaska’s overall crab fishery could lose up to USD 100 million (EUR 86.5 million) or more in value in the 2021-2022 season, according to the Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

The Real Reasons Crab Fishing Is So Dangerous

November 4, 2021 — If you’ve ever watched “Deadliest Catch,” you know commercial crab fishing is dangerous. It’s right there in the title. But the Alaskan king crab fishery — where crews featured on the show risk their lives to put seafood on our tables — isn’t the deadliest place to go crab fishing in US waters. That unsavory distinction, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, goes to the West Coast Dungeness crab fishery.

The Bering Sea/Aleutian Island crab fleet — of “Deadliest Catch” fame — averaged eight fatalities a year in the late 1990s, adding up to a death rate of 770 people out of 100,000, the CDC notes. But after the Coast Guard began dockside stability and safety checks, fatalities fell to less than one per year.

Compare that with the West Coast Dungeness fishery where eight crew members died between 2010 and 2014, the government health body said. Five perished in vessel disasters while three died in falls overboard. In the Atlantic crab fishery off the West Coast, three fishers lost their lives while fewer than five Gulf of Mexico crabbers died in that time. Another CDC report notes that 33 West Coast Dungeness crab fishermen drowned between 2010 and 2013.

Read the full story at Mashed

Dungeness emerges as Alaska’s top crab fishery

November 4, 2021 — It’s hard to believe, but Dungeness crab in the Gulf of Alaska is now Alaska’s largest crab fishery — a distinction due to the collapse of stocks in the Bering Sea.

Combined Dungeness catches so far from Southeast and the westward region (Kodiak, Chignik and the Alaska Peninsula) totaled over 7.5 million pounds as the last pots were being pulled at the end of October.

Ranking second is golden king crab taken along the Aleutian Islands with a harvest by four boats of about 6 million pounds.

For snow crab, long the Bering Sea’s most productive shellfish fishery, the catch was cut by 88% to 5.6 million pounds this season.

The Gulf’s Dungeness fishery will provide a nice payday for crabbers. The dungies, which weigh just over two pounds on average, were fetching $4.21 per pound for 209 permit holders at Southeast who will share in the value of over $14 million.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

California Orders Delay In Start Of Dungeness Crab Season Off Northern California Coast

November 2, 2021 — State fishery officials have delayed the start of Dungeness crab fishing season from Monterey to Point Arena along the Mendocino County coast at least until just days before Thanksgiving, threatening to eliminate the dining favorite from your holiday table.

Last year, the Californian Department of Fish and Wildlife delayed the commercial crab fishing season shortly before Thanksgiving in order to protect whales and sea turtles.

On Monday, they delayed the season again, but this time the State cast an even larger net, including sport fishermen as well.

The delay is based on data from the state’s recently created Risk Assessment and Mitigation Program and has been put into place to protect the migrating pods of humpback whales off the California coast.

State official said aerial surveys on Oct. 18 and 19 counted 48 humpback whales along fishing zones in the area between the Sonoma-Mendocino line and Half Moon Bay.

Aerial surveys undertaken by NOAA researchers throughout October showed at least four distinct individual Pacific leatherback sea turtles also in the fishing grounds.

Read the full story at KPIX

Tribal, commercial fishing groups call for drastic reductions in trawl salmon bycatch

October 14, 2021 — Fisheries managers allow whitefish trawlers to inadvertently scoop up halibut, crab and salmon in their nets. The bycatch rate is relatively low, but because the trawlers catch so much of their target species, the unintended harvest adds up.

In rural western Alaska, where chum and king salmon runs have been performing poorly, the bycatch is raising alarms. While the bycaught salmon is often donated to food banks, it’s of little assurance to those living along the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers, where subsistence is a way of life.

“We eat dry fish like people from the Midwest eat bread, with every meal,” Mary Peltola told the North Pacific Fishery Management Council this month. She’s the executive director of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, and lives in the largely Yup’ik community of Bethel. “Our babies teethe on dry fish, it’s the first food most Yup’iks eat, and it’s something that we crave year-round.”

She testified that fishing on the Kuskokwim has been severely restricted to preserve wild salmon stocks. Meanwhile, trawlers haven’t faced new restrictions of their own as they scoop up lucrative whitefish like pollock, cod and halibut. She’s asked the council to work to put an end to bycatch in the industrial commercial trawl fleet.

Read the full story at KSTK

 

Trawl overhaul? Alaska fishermen go to bat for kings and crabs

October 8, 2021 — Animosity toward Alaska’s trawl fleet reached a fever pitch over the summer. In most parts of the state, where salmon fishing would have kept stakeholders busy, lackluster returns and some closures instead gave thousands of fishermen more time to mull over answers to where the fish may have gone.

Although Alaska’s overall salmon returns have been strong this year, the results are stratified. King salmon returns, specifically, have been in a long and steady decline. Statewide, king landings — by number of fish — have declined by more than 70 percent in the last 40 years, from a high of 875,630 fish in 1982 to 265,081 in 2020. The harvest so far for 2021 is about 212,000 fish.

When accounting for landings by weight, the reduction is almost 85 percent over the same period, from 16.9 million pounds in 1982 to 2.9 million in 2020, according to the Alaska Department of Fish & Game.

As council meetings went virtual during the pandemic-induced shutdowns, participation and feedback from local stakeholders increased significantly.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

 

Low oxygen levels along Pacific Northwest coast a ‘silent’ climate change crisis

September 29, 2021 — Nearly two decades ago, fishers discovered an odd occurrence off the coast of Oregon. They were pulling up pots of dead or lethargic crabs.

At first they suspected a chemical spill or a red tide. But instead, they learned, dangerously low levels of dissolved oxygen in the ocean water were to blame.

The crabs had suffocated.

These swaths of hypoxic areas have surfaced every summer on Pacific Northwest shores since it was first recorded in 2002. They are spurred by naturally occurring coastal upwellings and algae blooms, exacerbated by climate change, said Francis Chan, director of the Cooperative Institute for Marine Resources Studies at Oregon State University.

Akin to fire season, hypoxia season arrived earlier this year – the earliest start in 20 years, according to Chan. But unlike wildfire, or other visible climate emergencies, it’s gone largely unrecognized.

“It’s kind of a silent problem happening out there,” said Chan. “This year, I can look out and see trees with one side burnt because of the heat wave. As I’m driving on McKenzie highway, I can see Mount Jefferson has no snow on it. But when you drive out to the ocean, it looks exactly the same as last summer.”

Read the full story at the Spokesman-Review

 

Lobster Lawsuit: Maine org sues feds over right whale rules

September 28, 2021 — On Monday, Sept. 21, the Maine Lobstermen’s Association filed a lawsuit challenging NMFS’ new rule for Northeast lobster and Jonah crab fisheries.

The rule, filed on Aug. 31, is a modification of the Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Plan and is supposed to reduce the risk of entanglements to North Atlantic right whales in U.S. waters. The association says the modifications address only the perceived risk of Maine fisheries, which have no documented right whale interactions.

The lawsuit, filed against NMFS and the Secretary of Commerce in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, argues that “the federal government’s draconian and fundamentally flawed 10‐year whale protection plan… will all but eliminate the Maine lobster fishery yet still fail to save endangered right whales.” The result would put both fishermen and whales in harm’s way, industry leaders have said.

Read the full story at National Fisherman