Saving Seafood

Biden administration advances bid to list Gulf of Alaska king salmon as endangered or threatened

May 26, 2024 — The Biden administration says that listing numerous Alaska king salmon populations under the Endangered Species Act could be warranted, and it now plans to launch a broader scientific study to follow its preliminary review.

Citing the species’ diminished size at adulthood and spawning numbers below sustainable targets set by state managers, the National Marine Fisheries Service announced its initial conclusion early Thursday in a 14-page federal notice.

It said a January 2024 listing request from a Washington state-based conservation group had met the legal criteria to advance the agency’s examination of Gulf of Alaska king salmon populations to the next stage, which is a rigorous scientific review expected to take at least nine months.

Endangered Species Act experts said the initial hurdle is typically an easy one for advocacy groups to clear, while the second stage can take much longer — with the courts often brought in to settle disputes over delays and scientific conclusions.

“The review really starts in earnest now,” said Cooper Freeman, Alaska director for the Center for Biological Diversity, a conservation group that isn’t involved in the king salmon proposal but frequently petitions and litigates for protections for other species. The preliminary decision, he added, is “part of the process, but the initial finding in no way predetermines an outcome.”

The listing petition was submitted by the Wild Fish Conservancy, which has previously filed Endangered Species Act lawsuits to protect other populations of Alaska and Washington salmon and steelhead.

The group’s previous efforts threatened to close down a longstanding small-boat king salmon fishery in Southeast Alaska and drew broad condemnation from fishermen, state wildlife managers and even conservation groups.

Read the full article at Northern Journal

Long-term study hopes to unlock secrets of Gulf of Alaska ecosystem

June 9, 2023 — The University of Alaska Fairbanks is using underwater autonomous vehicles in order to learn more about the ecosystem in the Gulf of Alaska.

After more than a month apart, Gretel and Shackleton began their reunion with a slow dance.

The autonomous underwater vehicles circled each other in the Gulf of Alaska in April, gathering data about ocean conditions: temperature, light, salinity, chlorophyll, fluorescence, and even acoustically determined densities of fish and zooplankton.

The torpedo-shaped vehicles, known informally as gliders, met after taking separate journeys to the middle of the continental shelf south of Seward, about 70 miles offshore. Seth Danielson, a University of Alaska Fairbanks oceanographer, expects it to become a spring ritual.

Read the full article at KINY

A busy summer for Alaska’s bycatch task force

August 15, 2022 — Healthy and sustainable Alaska fisheries are important for everyone in our state. Last November, Gov. Mike Dunleavy took action to build on Alaska’s record as a fisheries conservation leader by creating the Alaska Bycatch Review Task Force, or ABRT. As chairman of the ABRT, I want to provide an update on our work and share how members of the public can engage.

Bycatch is an important issue, and Gov. Dunleavy created this task force to ensure that a broad cross-section of Alaskans are involved in reviewing its impacts and making recommendations. The task force is composed of 13 public members — including Western Alaska in-river users, fishermen, community representatives and two legislative non-voting members. All task force members are committed to doing the work the governor set out in Administrative Order (AO) 326.

While the full task force has continued to meet monthly, four distinct subcommittees have also been established. The objective of these subcommittees is to ensure that we examine bycatch from a range of angles, covering different areas and species of interest. Three separate subcommittees are working to review bycatch issues affecting Western Alaska salmon, Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands crab, and Gulf of Alaska salmon and halibut. The fourth subcommittee is focused specifically on science, technology and innovation. These subcommittees have been meeting multiple times a month, working hard to gather information that can help build alignment around paths forward.

Read the full article at Anchorage Daily News

ALASKA: Salmon bycatch, electronic monitoring on the table at Sitka meeting of North Pacific Fishery Management Council

June 9, 2022 — The bycatch of chinook and chum salmon is on the agenda, as the spring meeting of the North Pacific Management Council gets underway in Sitka this week (June 9-14).

In addition to hearing how much salmon is being intercepted in the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea by the trawl fisheries, the council will review a proposal to supplement the human observer program with electronic monitoring.

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council regulates the so-called “federal fisheries” which take place outside the three-mile limit of Alaska’s state waters, and within the exclusive economic zone of the United States which extends 200 miles offshore.

Read the full story at KCAW

Scientists examine Gulf of Alaska sea floor to see effects of bottom trawling

June 8, 2022 — A group of researchers is hoping that data collected from the Gulf of Alaska’s sea floor will shed new light on the effects of bottom trawling.

Scientists from the conservation group Oceana, which is based in Juneau, spent eight days aboard a research vessel circumnavigating the Kodiak archipelago late May. Jon Warrenchuck is a senior scientist and fisheries campaign manager with Oceana.

“The Gulf of Alaska is a very special place and a very productive ecosystem,” Warrenchuck said. “Our timing of our survey here in the spring means we saw just an abundance of life, from the phytoplankton to the fish to the birds feeding at the surface.”

The focus of the trip, though, was to document life at the very bottom of the sea to better understand the impacts of commercial trawling, Warrenchuck said.

Read the full story at KTOO

Alaska community fishing groups buy pollock assets with Maruha Nichiro

February 3, 2022 — Two Alaska Community Development Quota groups partnered with Japanese-owned Maruha Nichiro in the purchase of inshore pollock quota, vessels and processing capacity from Evening Star Fisheries and Cooke-owned Icicle Seafoods.

On Feb. 1, Alaska’s Norton Sound Economic Development Corp. and Coastal Villages Region Fund announced an expansion of their partnership with Maruha Nichiro to catch and process Bering Sea pollock quota.

The Coastal Villages Region Fund and Norton Sound Economic Development Corp. investment accounts for 75 percent ownership of the fishing assets, while Maruha Capital Investment is a 25 percent stakeholder (a limitation on foreign ownership of fishing vessels or companies that own fishing vessels, stipulated by the American Fisheries Act). That purchase includes nine fishing vessels from Evening Star Fisheries and four percent of Bering Sea pollock quota. The fleet, which includes the recently rebuilt F/V Progress, can operate in both the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Past heat waves and low sea ice continued to impact Alaska’s waters in 2021

January 18, 2022 — The so-called blob that brought warm surface water temperatures to the Gulf of Alaska between 2014 and 2016 has passed.

But the effects of that blob, and a subsequent heat wave in 2019, are not all in the rearview mirror. And researchers are bracing for more as climate change brings with it more ocean warming.

“For an area like the Gulf of Alaska, definitely this is a topic we need to understand better,” said Bridget Ferriss, a research fish biologist with NOAA Fisheries. She edited this year’s Ecosystems Status Report for the Gulf of Alaska, used by federal managers to inform fisheries policy in Alaska.

Last year, researchers continued to track the impacts of recent heat waves on Alaska’s marine species.

Ferriss said a heat wave happens when the sea surface temperature on a given day is warmer than 90% of the temperatures on record for that same day, for five days in a row.

Read the full story at KTOO

NMFS Revises TAC Amounts For Gulf of Alaska Pollock, Pacific Cod

January 6, 2022 — The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) revised the 2022 total allowable catch (TAC) amounts for pollock and Pacific cod in the Gulf of Alaska. The changes, which increases the pollock TAC and decreases the Pacific cod TAC, were put into effect at 12 noon Alaska local time on January 1, 2022.

According to NMFS, the pollock TAC will increase from 99,784 metric tons (mt) to 141, 117 mt. The TAC for Pacific cod decreased from 27,961 mt to 24,111 mt.

Read the full story at Seafood News

NOAA Releases 2021 Ecosystem Status Reports for the Eastern Bering Sea, Gulf of Alaska, and Aleutian Islands

December 21, 2021 — These reports are a compilation of inputs from our own research and the work of many contributors from fishing, coastal and Alaska Native communities, academic institutions, the State of Alaska and other federal agencies.

Today, NOAA Fisheries released three key reports on the state of Alaska’s marine ecosystems. For more than two decades, Alaska has been using this ecosystem information to inform fisheries management decisions. To assess the status of Alaska’s marine ecosystems, scientists look at a variety of indicators.

For instance, they monitor oceanographic conditions. These include sea surface temperatures and temperatures near the sea floor, plankton, and wind and weather patterns in the Bering Sea, Gulf of Alaska, and Aleutian Islands annually and over time.

Read the full story at NOAA Fisheries

 

NPFMC approaches pivotal decision on halibut bycatch, with USD 100 million potentially at stake

December 9, 2021 — The North Pacific Fishery Management Council (NPFMC) is once again considering whether or not to implement abundance-based management for halibut bycatch on the groundfish fleet, a decision stakeholders say could cost Alaska’s Amendment 80 fleet over USD 100 million (EUR 88 million).

The council faces four separate alternatives on how to handle the amount of halibut bycatch the Amendment 80 fleet – which harvests various flatfish, rockfish, Atka mackerel, Pacific Ocean perch, and Pacific cod in the Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands and Gulf of Alaska – should be allowed to catch. The four alternatives call for the council to either continue with the status quo on halibut bycatch, or ask the Amendment 80 fleet to reduce it by various amounts, up to a maximum of 40 percent.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource