Saving Seafood

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 King Salmon Runs In Western Alaska Trigger Bering Sea Bycatch Caps

September 29, 2021 — Unofficial estimates of this summer’s king salmon run in Western Alaska rivers show a lower than average return, which will trigger stricter limits on the Bering Sea pollock fishery’s bycatch caps for king salmon next year.

State biologists said that about 129,000 king salmon returned to the Kuskokwim River this year. Of those, the state estimates that about 28,000 were harvested, and 101,000 made their way upriver to spawn.

The state’s escapement goal of 65,000 to 120,000 kings was met, but federal and tribal managers’ escapement goal of 110,000 king salmon was not. This year’s king salmon run is slightly higher than last year’s estimated run size of 116,000 king salmon, but much lower than the 2019 run of 233,000.

Read the full story at KYUK

NMFS approves plan to restrict salmon fishing, protect orcas

September 17, 2021 — King salmon fishing could be cut back from Puget Sound to Monterey Bay if king salmon numbers fall too low to feed the 75 endangered Southern Resident orcas, under a plan approved Sept. 14 by NMFS.

Non-tribal fishing would be restricted when king salmon numbers appear heading toward that threshold — a key recommendation from a working group convened by the Pacific Fishery Management Council, including representatives from West Coast states, tribes, and NMFS.

In late 2020 the council adopted the work group’s suggestions, including limiting commercial and recreational fishing in certain places off California, Oregon, and Washington when estimated king salmon numbers north of Cape Falcon, Oregon, fall below a certain level of abundance.

That level would be set as the average of the seven lowest years of forecast king salmon abundance off the northern Oregon and Washington coasts, currently estimated at 966,000. In recent years salmon numbers held above that level, and 2007 was the last year when forecasts would have fallen below the threshold.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

 

Amid an unprecedented collapse in Alaska Yukon River salmon, no one can say for certain why there are so few fish

September 7, 2021 — A single slick silver salmon lay flat in the center of a floating dock.

The lone coho was the only fish that turned up in the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s test net that mid-August evening. A technician stooped low in her orange rubber gloves and sandals for measurements.

Test nets are one of the tools that fisheries managers use to understand what’s happening with the salmon runs on the Lower Yukon River. Any of the fish caught, once sampled, are given to local residents for food. In normal times, when big pulses of chum surge into the river, managers sometimes have 50 or a hundred fish at a time to donate. But this year, test nets sometimes went as long as three days without a single salmon. People stopped bothering to even check the bins set down the road from the AC store.

So it was a big deal that hours earlier during the morning run, the test nets yielded a catch.

“Word traveled fast that we got three fish,” said biologist Courtney Berry.

“Fishing for water all summer has been … boring,” Berry said.

The salmon situation this year on the Yukon is bad. Kings have been in decline for years, here and almost everywhere else in the state. This summer was the fourth lowest count of kings in the Yukon since 1995.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

 

ALASKA: Yukon subsistence users go to new lengths for food after chums don’t return

August 20, 2021 — This has been the worst salmon fishing season on record for the Yukon River.

King salmon, a regional favorite, have returned in low numbers for years. But now a typically stable species, chum salmon, has also collapsed this year. Subsistence fishing on the lower Yukon River for both species is now closed. Residents, like Jason Lamont, who usually depend heavily on the fish are pivoting toward other ways to get protein.

“I started fishing on the Yukon when I was 6 years old,” said Lamont. “There was one point, me and my grandpa were coming down here for supplies and we had a summer chum jump into the boat. But those days are gone.”

Lamont is from Emmonak and lives off of subsistence food, which in past summers has meant salmon. His family doesn’t buy meat from the store: Salmon caught during the summer will help carry his family through the winter.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

Alaska groundfish: Covid’s hangover and bycatch caps slow the season

August 10, 2021 — King salmon caps, covid and stiff tariffs on the China end of business have stymied the Gulf of Alaska groundfish industry so far this year. As of March 26, trawlers targeting Pacific cod in the western gulf harvest area hit the hard cap of 3,060 kings.

Cod that have been scattered in their concentrations during winter form into tight schools as the calendar rolls toward March, but king salmon inhabit the same waters. Though the fleet can roll over unused caps from other fisheries, it wasn’t enough to warrant the continuation of the fishery. Trawlers will be able to fish on a new cap beginning Sept. 1.

Even if the fleet of about 40 shoreside-delivering vessels hadn’t hit the king salmon caps and had been allowed to fish later, covid conundrums and tariffs put the kibosh on moving product through processing plants and toward end markets.

“We don’t even have a flatfish market this year,” says Julie Bonney, executive director of the Alaska Groundfish Data Bank, in Kodiak. “The plants can’t sell it and make any money,” she adds. As of July 9, landings to plants in Kodiak totaled 4,060 tons. “We’ve caught 17,500 fewer tons than last year at this time,” she says. 

Read the full story at National Fisherman

What’s to blame for Alaska’s poor king salmon runs? Submarines, suggests Rep. Young.

August 3, 2021 — Chinook salmon runs are in decline across Alaska, and research suggests a host of factors are to blame, from ocean predators to warmer streams and excess rain. But Alaska Congressman Don Young recently added a novel suspect to the list: nuclear submarines.

“We have to figure this out. Have to work on it and make sure there’s not something going on,” he said of the poor runs. “Is it climate change? Are they moving north? Is there a nuclear sub stuck out there somewhere?”

Young spoke at a subcommittee hearing Thursday, and acknowledged his theory sounds unusual.

“Everybody laughs at me but at one time I counted 64 nuclear subs from Russia,” he said. “We kept track of them as they came off the coast of California.”

A spokesman said Young was referring to matters like those described in a 2020 BBC article on radioactive submarine wrecks.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

 

King salmon in Western Alaska are getting smaller, and research suggests predators could be the reason

April 15, 2021 — The size of king salmon returning to Western Alaska rivers to spawn has been decreasing over the past few decades. Researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks think that they’re closer to understanding why.

Peter Westley and Andrew Seitz are fisheries scientists at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who helped publish new research on king salmon in February. To answer why these salmon are getting smaller, researchers attached tags to the fish that can record the depth and temperature of the water around them. Seitz said that many of the tags on the salmon were recording temperatures above 70 degrees Fahrenheit.

“And we thought, ‘Well, where is it, you know, in the high 70s in the winter in the Bering Sea, even at depth?’ And the only place that we can infer that is that warm is in the belly of a salmon shark,” Seitz said.

Westley and Seitz’s research indicates that returning king salmon are getting smaller because the bigger ones are getting eaten. They said that predators, like salmon sharks, may target the older, larger kings because they stand out. Seitz said that predators’ preference for larger fish may have always existed, but there could just be more predators now than in the past.

Read the full story at KTOO

2020’s Southeast salmon harvest among worst on record, according to Alaska Fish & Game data

April 1, 2021 —  Last year’s salmon harvest across all species in Southeast Alaska was one of the worst in 50 years. Here’s what Southeast’s regional commercial fishery supervisor had to say about the terrible season, and about his hopes for the coming year.

A special report released in March paints a stark picture of 2020’s salmon harvest in Southeast Alaska.

“Overall, it was one of the lowest harvests we’d seen, I think since the ’70s,” says Lowell Fair. He’s the Southeast regional supervisor for the commercial fisheries division of Alaska Department of Fish and Game. It was already clear from preliminary reports that last year’s salmon season was a rough one. But just how rough?

For sockeye, the harvest was the second lowest since 1962 — that’s just a couple of years after the Department of Fish & Game was formed and started collecting data.

King harvest was in the bottom five harvests since the early 1960s as well.

Coho and pink harvests came in stronger than kings and sockeye, but were still among the lowest years in recent memory, ranking 48th and 53rd since 1962, respectively.

Read the full story at KNBA