Saving Seafood

NPFMC says pelagic trawl gear impact needs further evaluation

June 17, 2025 — Federal fisheries managers have given the Bering Sea pollock industry until the December of 2025 to develop spatial closures for the 2026 groundfish A season to protect Bristol Bay red king crab.

The decision reached by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council (NPFMC) at its June meeting in Oregon is based on new winter pot surveys, tagging data and other recent data sources, the council said in its motion of June 8. The council requested information from the industry to be presented at its December meeting in Anchorage.

The council also acknowledged the lengthy Pelagic Trawl Gear Innovation Discussion Paper available in May and requested an update on the progress of that initiative at its meeting of April 2026, by which time the field study portion of the protect for catcher processors is expected to be complete.

Read the full article at The Cordova Times

Alaska’s pollock industry looks to get to the bottom of a rising criticism

April 23, 2025 — Alaska pollock is one of the world’s most valuable fisheries, due to the enormous annual harvest volume and the versatility of the white, mild-flavored fish, federal economists say.

Fairly or unfairly, the pollock fishery’s prodigious size makes it an easy target on controversial issues such as salmon bycatch.

Lately, another criticism has taken on a higher profile – the charge that the pollock industry’s pelagic nets aren’t really “midwater” gear, but rather touch bottom much of the time, damaging seafloor habitat and mangling king and Tanner crab. These crab fisheries have seen total closures in recent years due to stock declines primarily attributed to changes in the marine environment.

To address the bottom contact issue, the pollock industry is embarking on an ambitious project to gain a better understanding of how its trawl gear works in the water and, possibly, to develop improved designs.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

ALASKA: Board of Fish approves state-backed changes for Southeast Alaska red king crab fishery

February 26, 2025 — Red king crab commercial permit holders in Southeast Alaska will have a better chance of fishing in the coming seasons.

The Alaska Board of Fisheries approved a change in management regulations proposed by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADFG) that allows for a conservative commercial fishery when crab stocks aren’t enough for a typical competitive opening.

Red king crab is a low-volume, high-value fishery. The crab can bring in over $100 each. But commercial openings have been few and far between — just one in over a decade.

Several commercial crabbers testified to the Board of Fish at their meeting in Ketchikan in January. Andy Kittams crabs out of Petersburg, a town with over half of the fishery’s permit holders.

“Had we fished that 117,000 pounds in 2024, it would have been worth over $2 million to the state of Alaska’s fishermen. The economic trickle down to our processors and coastal communities would have doubled that,” Kittams said. “So let’s move this arbitrary threshold — simple enough: change regulation, harvest the surplus king crab when available.”

Read the full article at KFSK

ALASKA: King crab fishery approved in Southeast AK

February 13, 2025 — Crabbers in Southeast Alaska could soon be able to harvest red king crabs after the Alaska Board of Fisheries approved a proposal enabling regulators to open a small, limited commercial king crab fishery.

Previous regulations banned officials from opening a commercial king crab fishery in Southeast Alaska unless the estimated biomass of legal male red king crab exceeds 200,000 pounds. The requirement has made it nearly impossible for regulators to open a season in the region; Southeast Alaska has only authorized three commercial red king crab seasons over the last 20 years.

The Alaska Department of Fish & Game (ADF&G) and commercial fishers argue that the requirement was based on an outdated claim that it wasn’t financially viable for crab processors to open for anything less than a harvest based on that 200,000-pound threshold.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Federal fisheries study finds new climate-resilient genetic diversity in crab stocks

January 21, 2025 — Results of new genetic research on Alaska red king crab stocks – included in the depressed Gulf of Alaska fishery – suggest the species has previously undetermined genetic diversity, making these crab more resilient to climate change.

Researchers at the NOAA Fisheries’ Alaska Fisheries Science Center collaborated with Cornell University, the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game on the study involving whole genome sequencing data on red king crab across Alaska.

The benefit of genome sequencing over previous methods is that it’s akin to reading the full story of an organism’s makeup rather than just a chapter or two, said the study report released on Jan. 2.

Red king crab inhabit diverse environments, from coastal bays in the north to open sea shelves in the Bering Sea, as well as small bays and fjords fed by glacial melt in the Gulf of Alaska and Southeast Alaska. This environment generally includes the Gulf of Alaska, Southeast Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, the Eastern Bering Sea, Norton Sound and the Chukchi Sea. Scientists previously hypothesized that king crab in these regions are divided into three genetic groups: Gulf of Alaska/East Bering Sea, Southeast Alaska, and Aleutian Islands/Norton Sound.

Read the full article at The Cordova Times

ALASKA: Alaska’s crab catch expected to rise with announcement of higher TACs

October 9, 2024 — The Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) has released its total allowable catch (TAC) figures for the state’s fall and winter crab fisheries, with higher levels set for several key commercial species.

The Bering Sea red king crab TAC was set at 1,048 metric tons (MT), or 2.3 million pounds, up from the 2023 TAC of 975 MT (2.2 million pounds), with the season set to open 15 October. The TAC closely followed the recommendations of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council’s (NPFMC) crab plan team, delivered in September 2024.

Read th full article at SeafoodSource

Boosting wild red king crab populations through hatcheries

March 21, 2024 — Anew study found that releasing red king crabs as early as possible after they are reared in a hatchery may improve young crab survival and save operational costs. Researchers at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center have noted that the optimal time to release hatchery-raised red king crabs is immediately following their transition from freely swimming planktonic larvae to settling as bottom-dwelling juveniles.

The red king crab was one of Alaska’s most important commercial and subsistence fisheries. In the 1960s, it was especially commercially important around Kodiak. However, the stock crashed in the late 1970s. Researchers believe the crash was a combination of climatic shifts, changes in the food web structure, recruitment failure, and overfishing.

According to NOAA Fisheries and the Alaska Fisheries Science Center, the commercial fishery has been closed since 1983, and the Kodiak stock still has not recovered. Due to the lack of recovery, the consideration of stock enhancements has grown through the release of hatchery-reared juveniles to bolster the wild population.

The Alaska King Crabs Research Rehabilitation and Biology program (AKCRRAB) was formed by NOAA Fisheries, commercial hatcheries and fishing groups, university groups, and State and Tribal governments. As an Alaska Sea Grant partnership and conducted by a research program coalition of state, federal, and stakeholder groups’ views to examine the region’s long-term economic development and sustainability.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

 

Murkowski calls proposed endangered listing for Alaska king salmon ‘wrongheaded’

February 28, 2024 — U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski believes an effort by a Washington-state conservation group to put Alaska king salmon on the federal endangered-species list is misguided.

The Wild Fish Conservancy filed a petition with NOAA Fisheries in January, but Murkowski says the organization has missed the mark.

“They are attempting to utilize a very legitimate law, the Endangered Species Act, for what I would consider to be a very wrongheaded purpose,” Murkowski said by phone. “And that is to basically stop our wild fisheries.”

Murkowski says Alaska’s fisheries are under threat from several sources, including environmental pressure from climate change and warming oceans, and economic pressure from Russia’s oversupply of traditional seafood markets. And there’s also ongoing litigation by the Wild Fish Conservancy itself, which sued NOAA Fisheries in 2020 to shut down the commercial troll fishery for kings in Southeast Alaska.

That tactic has yet to succeed, so Murkowski is not surprised that the Wild Fish Conservancy is trying another.

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media

Roman Tkachenko: Ukraine war is “horrible,” but US seafood ban not hurting Russia

January 31, 2024 — Roman Tkachenko, the CEO of Direct Source Seafood, a seafood importer based in Bellevue, Washington, U.S.A., is not thrilled with the U.S. government’s decision to implement and then expand a ban on Russian seafood entering the U.S.

Russian king crab inventories are almost extinguished in the U.S., and it’s impossible to bring more in as cooked frozen legs and claws, even with third-country processing that would change the country of origin. That’s because the only way to achieve a “deep transformation” of king crab to qualify it for the change is to process it into crab meat. Cooking from live king crab it is not enough for U.S. customs authorities, Tkachenko said. And Russia is getting such high prices from Chinese and Asian buyers for whole live and frozen crab, they don’t need to sell to the U.S., he said.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

ALASKA: Alaska’s snow crab season canceled for second year in a row as population fails to rebound

January 7, 2024 — Gabriel Prout is grateful for a modest haul of king crab, but it’s the vanishing of another crustacean variety that has the fishing port in Kodiak, Alaska, bracing for financial fallout; for the second year in a row, the lucrative snow crab season has been canceled.

“We’re still definitely in survival mode trying to find a way to stay in business,” he told CBS News.

When the season was canceled last year, there was a sense of confusion among the Alaska crab fisher community. Now, a sense of panic is taking hold in the state’s fisheries, which produce 60% of the nation’s seafood.

“It’s just still extremely difficult to fathom how we could go from a healthy population in the Bering Sea to two closures in a row,” Prout said.

And while he is barely holding on, others — like Joshua Songstad — have lost almost everything.

Read the full article at CBS News