September 22, 2022 — A lawsuit filed against the National Marine Fisheries Service in 2020 reared its head in a U.S. district court in Washington state on 8 August, 2022, and it could spell changes in fisheries management for Southeast Alaska trollers.
The case stems from a suit brought by the Wild Fish Conservancy that challenges the biological rationale in setting allocations of Pacific Salmon Treaty chinooks that local trollers catch.
September 20, 2022 — Scientists and fishermen have worked together over many years to develop bottom trawl survey gear that performs consistently, ensuring accurate and reliable data for U.S. fisheries management.
This summer they have been evaluating a potential way to better standardize survey gear – a ‘restrictor rope’ that helps keep the distance between trawl doors consistent while trawling in different conditions, depths, warp lengths, and gear configurations.
A summary of the project from the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center describes experiments in spring and summer 2022 at sea with scientists and fishermen with long experience in cooperative survey work.
Their main platform was the F/V Darana R, with Captain Jimmy Ruhle, his son Bobby Ruhle and their crew. Homeported at Wanchese, N.C., the Darana R has for years supported the bi-annual Northeast Area Monitoring and Assessment Program bottom trawl survey, led by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science at Gloucester Point, Va.
The NEAMAP program facilitates the collection of fishery-independent information in the Northeast, and standardizes survey procedures to improve data quality and accessibility.
Expanding offshore wind energy development off southern New England will force changes on bottom trawl surveys in just the next few years. The Vineyard Wind, South Fork Wind and Revolution Wind turbine arrays will be built between Martha’s Vineyard and Long Island’s East End.
“Existing surveys will need to adapt to operate in and around offshore wind farm areas,” according to the Northeast Fisheries Science Center. “Researchers will also need to develop new surveys to fill data gaps created when pre-existing survey locations can’t be accessed. A standardized gear configuration will need to be used so data collected during existing and new surveys can be used, and compared.”
For help with that redesign, the science center went to the Northeast Trawl Advisory Panel, a joint advisory panel composed of Mid-Atlantic and New England Fishery Management Council members, as well as fishing industry, academic, government and non-government fisheries experts. It identified the use of a restrictor rope as a possible way to standardize all Northeast bottom trawl surveys in the region. None have used restrictor ropes yet.
August 19, 2022 — A federal judge in Seattle has ruled that the National Marine Fisheries Service violated a key provision of the Endangered Species Act in 2019 when it published research on the harvest of king salmon in Southeast Alaska that failed to address its impact on a small population of killer whales in Puget Sound.
In a summary judgment granted to the Washington-based Wild Fish Conservancy, U.S. District Court Judge Richard A. Jones on Aug. 8 ordered that an “appropriate remedy” be found, that — while it could limit commercial trolling for chinook in Southeast — will more likely result in a rewrite of the biological opinion that led to the problem.
“I think we’ve won the recognition that this fishery was actually causing harm to threatened and endangered species, and for all intents and purposes was illegal,” said Kurt Beardslee, director of special projects for the conservancy.
The Wild Fish Conservancy filed suit against the National Marine Fisheries Service in March of 2020, arguing that the government failed to adequately address the impact of Alaskan king salmon harvests on southern resident killer whales, whose population has dropped to critically low levels.
The Wild Fish Conservancy says 97% of king salmon harvested by Southeast Alaska trollers don’t originate in Alaska, depriving southern resident killer whales of their primary food source.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game puts the share of out-of-state chinook in the Alaska harvest much lower — 30-80%, depending on the year.
Matt Donohoe, president of the Alaska Trollers Association, says few if any of those are from Puget Sound, where southern resident killer whales spend several months each year.
August 12, 2022 — A U.S. District Court judge in Seattle has found the National Marine Fisheries Service has failed to ensure that Southeast Alaska salmon harvests not harm protected Pacific Northwest chinook and endangered southern killer whales that prey upon them.
The Monday ruling came in a brief summary judgment from U.S. District Court Judge Richard Jones. It is a significant victory for the Washington-based Wild Fish Conservancy, which argued that the National Marine Fisheries Service approved a flawed plan to compensate for the harvest by increasing hatchery release of chinook.
“We applaud Judge Jones’ ruling that is finally calling into question decades of unsustainable Chinook harvest management in Southeast Alaska,” said Emma Helverson, Wild Fish Conservancy executive director, who in a statement called the decision a “watershed moment” for efforts to recover southern resident orcas and wild chinook.
The southern resident killer whales are an endangered community native to the Pacific Northwest that consists of 73 members across three pods: J, K and L, which have struggled amid a decline in wild chinook populations that are a key part of their diet. Some whale advocates have long looked with concern to Southeast Alaska harvests of the salmon.
It is still uncertain what the judge’s ruling will mean for Southeast Alaska fisheries catching salmon that would eventually head south to British Columbia or the Pacific Northwest to spawn.
August 11, 2022 — Republicans, Democrats and independents seeking a variety of elected offices across Alaska appear united by a desire to restrict deep-sea trawling.
In candidate questionnaires submitted to the Alaska Beacon, candidates for statewide and legislative races — regardless of party — say the restrictions are the best way to improve salmon returns on the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers.
“I support efforts to reduce the wasteful bycatch of Alaska’s seafood by Seattle-based high seas fishing corporations,” said Mary Peltola, the Democratic candidate for Alaska’s U.S. House seat.
“Science provides the best guide. However, I think most Alaskans agree it is past time to get high seas trawler bycatch under control,” said Tuckerman Babcock, a Republican candidate for an Alaska Senate district on the Kenai Peninsula.
Their comments were typical of those submitted to the Beacon, and Linda Kozak, a Kodiak fisher who has been following fisheries issues for three decades, said she’s seen a public reaction unlike anything in her career.
“For the first time in as long as I’ve been involved in fish politics, bycatch is a household name in Alaska. It’s something that the public is interested in,” she said.
Though Bristol Bay’s red-salmon fishery is enjoying a record year, fishing for king and chum salmon on the Yukon has been curtailed for a second straight summer because of low returns, leaving traditional subsistence fishermen unable to catch fish. Similar restrictions are in place on the Kuskokwim.
The low returns have been blamed on a variety of factors, including climate change, habitat destruction and bycatch, which occurs when ships catch salmon while pursuing other fish.
July 14, 2022 — A federal circuit court has reinstated a ban on lobster fishing gear in a nearly 1,000-square-mile area off New England to try to protect endangered whales.
The National Marine Fisheries Service issued new regulations last year that prohibited lobster fishing with vertical buoy lines in part of the fall and winter in the area, which is in federal waters off Maine’s coast. The ruling was intended to prevent North Atlantic right whales, which number less than 340, from becoming entangled in the lines.
The circuit court sent the case back to the district court level, but noted in its ruling that it does not think the lobster fishing groups that sued to stop the regulations are likely to succeed because Congress has clearly instructed the fisheries service to protect the whales.
Commercial fishing groups have filed lawsuits about new rules designed to protect the whales because of concerns that the regulations will make it impossible to sustain the lobster fishing industry. The industry, based mostly in Maine, is one of the most valuable in the U.S., worth more than $500 million at the docks in 2020, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Conservation groups have called for tighter laws. Tuesday’s ruling is “a lifesaving decision for these beautiful, vulnerable whales,” said Kristen Monsell, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity who argued the case at the circuit court.
July 6, 2022 — The contentious issue of chinook and chum salmon that are taken as bycatch in the Bering Sea pollock and groundfish trawl fisheries reached a new order of magnitude as the North Pacific Fishery Management Council grappled with concerns over declining salmon fisheries at its June meeting in Sitka.
The council and its scientific committees are no newcomers to the controversy pitting the Bering Sea trawl fleet against commercial and subsistence salmon fishermen along Alaska’s western coastline and the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers.
Genetic sampling and stock composition modeling of salmon caught in the trawl fisheries has been conducted by the National Marine Fisheries Service since 2011. Late last year ADF&G released new information to supplement those studies as an ongoing effort to combine state and federal scientific resources. “We want to work in a more unified front in presenting this information,” says Dianna Stram, a senior scientist with the North Pacific council, in Anchorage.
Random sampling of one in ten chinooks in 2021 rendered genetic material from 2,614 fish, of which 52 percent were linked to Coastal Western Alaska. The 52 percent was higher than the previous 10-year average of 44 percent. And of that 52 percent, an estimated 2 to 4 percent were headed to Middle and Upper Yukon River tributaries. Breaking those percentages down to the actual numbers of fish, scientists estimate that 16,796 chinooks were Coastal Western Alaska stocks, and of those, 670 chinooks were stocks bound for the Middle Yukon, with 729 fish headed for the Upper Yukon.
In response to the higher bycatch, the North Pacific council called upon Rachel Baker, who represents the State of Alaska in federal fishery management issues on behalf of ADF&G, to present a list of actions put forth by the council’s science and statistical committee.
Those actions include the implementation of new chum salmon avoidance strategies immediately; formation of a working group of scientists, fishermen and industry and tribal leaders to examine causes of declining western Alaska salmon; updating a 2012 analysis of chum salmon bycatch; and research focused on correlations between seawater temperature, forage species and young salmon.
Gruver and partner John Gauvin, fishery science project director with the Alaska Seafood Cooperative, have been working for years in the development of the salmon excluders used in trawls. Early models destroyed the netting in the trawls, or made the trawls fish incorrectly, which meant starting over on the new prototypes and subsequent test sessions in a giant glass tank made for trawl development in Newfoundland.
Gruver reports that the excluders had an 80 percent success rate in the Gulf of Alaska and ranged from 30 to 50 percent success rates during trials in the Bering Sea.
At the same time, many other salmon-dependent communities beyond 50 miles inland got cut out of the 10 percent allocated to CDQ groups. The seasonal run of chinooks and chums are all they have.
June 27, 2022 — The commercial fishing industry in the U.S. is calling for more federal funding for studies on the impact of offshore wind development on marine fisheries.
In an open letter, the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance and Seafood Harvesters of America contend that the $46 million that the administration is asking Congress to allocate in the 2023 financial year to the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to conduct surveys and research activities related to offshore wind is too low, given the rapid pace of offshore wind energy leasing.
The letter, addressed to key House and Senate leaders, represents the interests of 75 fishing associations and businesses in the U.S commercial fishing industry. These groups are asking Congress to increase research funding to a total of $73.7 million, including $43.7 million allocated for scientific survey mitigation and $30 million for cooperative research projects that address the impacts of offshore wind.
Read the full story at The Maritime Executive
April 29, 2022 — Wire leaders will no longer be legal in the waters around the Hawaiian archipelago after the National Marine Fisheries Service prohibited its use to cut down on the accidental deaths of the threatened whitetip shark.
“In an effort to improve survival of oceanic whitetip sharks unintentionally caught in the FEP longline fisheries, this rule prohibits the use of wire leaders, specifically steel wire line within 1 meter of the hook, in the Hawaii deepset fishery,” the National Marine Fisheries Service said in publishing a final rule on Wednesday.
Wire leaders are used by commercial and sport fishermen to ensure that predatory fish are not able to bite through the line when ensnared. The rule is relevant throughout the longline fisheries in the waters off of the Hawaiian Islands.
Read the full story at Courthouse News Service
April 13, 2022 — The following was released by the Pacific Fishery Management Council:
The Pacific Fishery Management Council has adopted ocean salmon recommendations for 2022. The seasons provide recreational and commercial opportunities for most of the Pacific coast and achieve conservation goals for the numerous salmon stocks on the West Coast.
The recommendations will be forwarded to the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) for approval by May 16, 2022.
The decision must be approved by NMFS. Coastal states will adopt fishery regulations for state-managed waters that are compatible with the Council’s actions.
Download the full April 13, 2022 press release available from the Council’s website..
Contact:
•Robin Ehlke, Salmon Staff Officer, robin.ehlke@noaa.gov
•Mike Burner, Deputy Director, mike.burner@noaa.gov
•Council Office 503-820-2280 (toll free: 1-866-806-7204)