Saving Seafood

Three Contenders Emerge to Lead Fisheries Service

May 5, 2017 — SEAFOOD NEWS [E&E News] — A former Louisiana official, an Alaskan fishery manager and a Sea Grant program director are reportedly in the running to head the National Marine Fisheries Service.

NMFS — an agency within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — oversees fishing regulations, endangered species listings and fisheries research. It is headed by an assistant administrator for fisheries, a position that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross can fill without Senate confirmation.

It’s unclear when Ross — or the White House — will make that decision. But three names have popped up as contenders, according to several sources inside and outside the agency: Robert Barham, Chris Oliver and LaDon Swann.

Barham was once Louisiana’s wildlife and fisheries secretary, Oliver heads the North Pacific Fishery Management Council and Swann is the director of the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium.

Fishermen are split in their support.

Robert Barham

Barham served as wildlife and fisheries secretary under former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R). Some recreational fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico — as well as the shrimp and menhaden industry — recently sent letters to Ross emphasizing Barham’s Louisiana experience and his identity as a hunter and fisherman.

“We have had the opportunity to work with Mr. Barham over the years and … it is evident that he possesses the management ability and understanding of the nuances of maintaining sustainable fish populations, while maximizing their economic value,” wrote officials from Omega Protein Corp. and other companies that harvest menhaden, a tiny forage fish used in fish oil.

Some Gulf of Mexico anglers have also tried to propel Barham to the NMFS spot, with the hope that he will come down on their side in the controversy over red snapper quotas. The debate has made its way to Capitol Hill, with some Republicans newly enraged by this year’s three-day recreational fishing season.

In a Facebook post shared among anglers, fisherman Steve Hoyland Jr. provided a form letter to send to Ross that praised Barham’s ability to “manage the public’s fish and wildlife resources in a manner that balances conservation and access.”

“If Robert Barham could get this position, it would totally change how our fishery is managed,” Hoyland wrote in one post. “THIS MAN IS ON OUR SIDE!!! We need him in this seat.”

Barnum’s tenure at the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries was marred after auditors found questionable spending between 2010 and 2015. A report from the state legislative auditor found, among other things, that the department spent some Gulf oil spill recovery money on boats, cameras, iPads, clothing and “an abundance of fishing and water sports equipment.”

The money was part of $10.5 million BP PLC provided for a seafood safety program to test fish. According to the Associated Press, Barnum has said the program came in under budget and properly tested fish. He has also emphasized that it wasn’t a taxpayer-funded program.

Chris Oliver

Oliver is the longtime executive director of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, which is based in Anchorage, Alaska. Commercial and charter boat fishermen have endorsed him as an experienced leader, with groups from New England, the Pacific, the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico sending letters of support to the Commerce Department.

Most recently, the Gulf Seafood Institute, the Louisiana Restaurant Association, the Charter Fisherman’s Association and similar groups wrote in an April letter to Ross that Oliver “has proven to be a motivated and talented leader with a passion for bridging divides among diverse fishing interest in the Pacific Northwest and beyond.”

Oliver has helmed the fishery council for 16 years. In an interview with the Alaska Journal of Commerce earlier this year, he said he would be “inclined” to take the NMFS job if asked.

“There’s no guarantee … that I would say yes if they offered it to me,” he told the newspaper. “But I’ve got a lot of people who’ve expended a lot of effort, and my understanding is I’ve got a pretty strong backing from our congressional delegation.”

Oliver began at the council in 1990 as a plan coordinator. He is from Texas and worked on Gulf of Mexico shrimp fishery management issues, according to his biography on the council’s website. He has advocated for a more regional approach to fishery management.

Several council decisions in recent years have been reversed by the courts. Last year, for example, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a 2011 decision to remove an Alaskan salmon fishery from federal oversight. Fishing groups won a lawsuit in 2012 to overturn the council’s fishing closures to protect Steller sea lions.

LaDon Swann

Swann directs one of 33 Sea Grant programs President Trump has proposed eliminating, citing its primary benefit to “industry and state and local stakeholders.”

Congress appears unlikely to follow through with that suggestion; an omnibus spending package slated to pass this week preserves the popular program. And Swann — who has also worked at the Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant College Program — is reportedly the pick of some Alabama lawmakers who see him as a good fit for NMFS.

In his position at Sea Grant, Swann must help coastal communities become resilient without stirring up debate about climate change. He recently told ProPublica that the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium is “a neutral broker of science information” that is there to give communities the data — not persuade them of the link between climate change and coastal hazards.

Swann is also a recreational fisherman. A 2015 al.com article detailed his record-breaking catch of a 94-pound cubera snapper.

Swann, who has a master’s in fisheries biology and a Ph.D. in curriculum, is also former president of the United States Aquaculture Society. In recent years, NMFS has attempted to promote sustainable aquaculture as a way forward for the increasing demands for seafood.

This story originally appeared on Seafoodnews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

NPFMC June 2017 Agenda

May 2, 2017 — The following was released by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council: 

The AGENDA and SCHEDULE are now available. Documents will be posted through links on the Agenda. The deadline for public comments is 5:00 pm (AST) Tuesday, May 30, 2017.

The Council meeting will be broadcast at npfmc.adobeconnect.com/june2017. Motions will be posted following the meeting. Alaska Airlines offers travel discounts to the meetings. Other meetings to be held during the week are:

Scientific and Statistical Committee: June 5-7, Ballroom 2
Advisory Panel: June 6-10, Ballroom 3
Enforcement Committee: June 6, 1-4pm, Egan Room
Council: June 7-13, Ballroom 1

Submit comments to npfmc.comments@noaa.gov.

Seven Gulf Groups Endorse Chris Oliver for Asst. NOAA Administrator

April 27, 2017 — The Gulf Seafood Institute joined six other Gulf of Mexico seafood industry organizations in endorsing Texas-native turned North Pacific Fishery Management Council Executive Director Chris Oliver for the open position of Assistant Administrator for NOAA Fisheries.

In a letter to Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, Jr., the fleet of Gulf supporters called Oliver “a motivated and talented leader with a passion for bridging divides among diverse fishing interests. Those qualities would benefit the “notoriously complex” environment in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Gulf-based groups to endorse Oliver include: 
Alabama Charter Fishermen’s Association (Orange Beach, AL), Charter Fishermen’s Association (Corpus Christi, TX), Clearwater Marine Association (Clearwater, FL), 
Gulf of Mexico Reef Fish Shareholders’ Alliance (Galveston, TX), Louisiana Restaurant Association (Metairie, LA), 
Southeastern Fisheries Association (Tallahassee, FL) and The Gulf Seafood Institute, (New Orleans, LA).

“Federal fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico…involve a host of competing user groups, including our hardworking commercial harvesters, professional charter boat operators, a growing private angling community, and of course, a skyrocketing tourism and consumer economy dependent on the long-term health of them all,” the letter stated.

Read the full story at the Gulf Seafood Institute

FFAW Says Hundreds of Crab Vessels Iced in Will Need Compensation Due to Late Start, As in Past

April 21, 2017 — SEAFOOD NEWS — The Fish, Food and Allied Workers union said that hundreds of snow crab fishing boats are being kept ashore by the ice that has built up around Newfoundland and Labrador. President Keith Sullivan called on the federal government to pay compensation to fish harvesters who are kept away from the fishery. “For many, E.I. benefits run out next week, which will leave families without any income for the foreseeable future, since ice is expected to be a problem until at least mid-May,” the FFAW wrote in a statement.

New England regulators will allow lobster fishing in proposed deep-sea coral protection zones on the Mount Desert Rock and Outer Schoodic Ridges. The New England Fishery Management Council voted 14-1 Tuesday to ban most fishing in the canyons and plateaus where slow-growing, cold-water coral gardens flourish in the dark waters of the Gulf of Maine. But pleas from Maine lobster fishermen who say a trap ban in fertile gulf fishing grounds would cost them millions of dollars helped sway an initially resistant council to grant a lobstering exemption. The Council will vote on the exemption at its meeting in June.

In other news, Greenpeace released its annual sustainability rankings of canned tuna products sold in the US market. John Sackton writes how these rankings have almost nothing to do with tuna sustainability. “Instead, like other supermarket rankings undertaken by Greenpeace, the ranking system is used to reward banners that conform to Greenpeace’s ideology and punish banners that don’t,” Sackton writes.

Meanwhile, the Gulf Seafood Institute and six other Gulf of Mexico seafood industry organizations endorsed North Pacific Fishery Management Council Executive Director Chris Oliver for the open position of Assistant Administrator for NOAA Fisheries. “It is imperative that NOAA Fisheries be guided by an experienced Administrator with a solid track record of uniting these varying interests with a spirit of positivity and mutual respect,” the groups said in a letter sent to Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, Jr.

Finally, biologists at NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center cracked the code on how to spawn Pacific sardines in the laboratory, opening a new window on the life cycle of the commercially important species. Some in the industry hope it will better inform industry and managers as to what environmental factors would augment wild reproduction and recruitment.

This story originally appeared on Seafoodnews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission. 

Researchers identify widespread parasite in Alaska scallops

April 20, 2017 — A lot of Alaska’s scallops are sick, and scientists are trying to figure out why.

Alaska’s scallop fishery is a small one — in recent years, four boats, with just one operating in Kamishak Bay in Lower Cook Inlet. The rest operate out of Kodiak. Most scallop beds straddle the three-nautical mile line between state and federal management areas and is jointly managed by the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. The permit system is attached to vessels rather than to individuals, restricting the entire fishery to nine vessels total under the federal system. Together, their 10-year average landing poundage of shucked meats is about 383,000 pounds, for total value of about $4 million, according to a report submitted to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council by the Scallop Plan Team.

But in recent years, the fishermen have had to start tossing a lot back. When they pull them up, a lot show signs of degraded meat with brown spots and a stringy texture and will occasionally slip off the shells at the processor. The condition, called “weak meats,” results in a lot of waste in the scallop fishery, as processors aren’t interested in buying scallops with weak meats.

“Weak meats are a very general term for the adductor muscles … being of a very low quality, very easy to tear,” said Quinn Smith, the Southeast Region fishery management biologist for Fish and Game in a report to the council on April 5. “High prevalence in 2014, 2015 was somewhere on the order of half of all scallops shucked couldn’t be marketed. That was much higher than the fleet had ever seen before.”

Read the full story at the Peninsula Clarion

NPFMC April Newsletter

April 19, 2017 — The following was released by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council:

Appointments

The Council appointed Davin Holen to the newly formed Bering Sea Ecosystem Plan Team. Holen is currently the Coastal Community Resilience Specialist at Alaska Sea Grant. Tyson Fick was appointed to the Pacific Northwest Crab Industry Advisory Committee (PNCIAC) as a non-voting member. Fick is based out of Juneau, and is currently the executive director of the Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers. We welcome them both to their new roles.

C1 Scallop SAFE and Plan Team Report

The Council reviewed the 2017 SAFE report for Alaska weathervane scallops. The Council’s SSC set the ABC at 1.161 million pounds of shucked scallops, a level equivalent to 90% of the OFL, and consistent with the ABC control rule for scallops. While the ABC is specified federally for the entire stock, guideline harvest levels (GHLs) are established by ADF&G for the State’s scallop registration areas and districts. Constraining harvest to the GHLs is facilitated by State monitoring of fishery CPUE, and districts are closed to scallop harvest when catch rates fall below established minimum performance standards.

More than 85% of the total Alaska scallop harvest occurs in the Yakutat and Kodiak registration areas. Catch rates have been variable among those areas with increases occurring in Yakutat, but decreases in Kodiak. Declines have been strongest in the Shelikof District of Kodiak and the State lowered GHLs there by about 30% (105k lbs to 75k lbs) in the 2015/16 season. While overall declines have occurred in statewide scallop harvest over the past seven years, revenue has been stable. The stock status of Alaska weathervane scallops is not viewed as a conservation concern since scallops are distributed in many areas that have been closed to fishing to protect crab populations and in areas not defined as commercial beds. Staff contact is Jim Armstrong.

Read the full newsletter here

Electronic monitoring finally catching on among Alaska’s commercial fishermen

April 10, 2017 — Automation is coming to Alaska fishing boats in the form of cameras and sensors that track what’s coming and going over the rails.

Starting next year, electronic monitoring systems can officially replace human observers as fishery data collectors on Alaska boats using longline and pot gear. Vessel operators who do not voluntarily switch to electronic monitoring remain subject to human observer coverage on randomly selected fishing trips.

The onboard observer requirement originally covered vessels 59 feet and longer, but was restructured in 2013 to include boats down to 40 feet and, for the first time, was applied to the halibut fishery.

“Those smaller vessels have had a hard time accommodating human observers,” said Bill Tweit, vice chairman of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, which oversees the program.

Smaller boats also had a hard time with skyrocketing observer costs under the restructured program, which in some cases went from less than $300-$400 per day to more than $1,000.

Starting in 2013, 15 pot cod boats aligned with the Homer-based North Pacific Fisherman’s Association and Saltwater Inc. of Anchorage field tested electronic monitoring in the Gulf of Alaska.

Read the full story at the Alaska Dispatch News

Fisheries Councils Express Concern Over Marine Monuments in Letter to President Trump

WASHINGTON (Saving Seafood) — March 24, 2017 — The Council Coordination Committee (CCC), comprised of representatives from the eight regional fisheries management councils, wrote to President Trump this month expressing its concern with the designation of marine national monuments under the Antiquities Act, and explaining how monuments have already adversely impacted commercial fishing activity.

“Designations of marine national monuments that prohibit fishing have disrupted the ability of the Councils to manage fisheries throughout their range as required by [the Magnuson-Stevens Act] and in an ecosystem-based manner,” the Committee wrote. “Our experience with marine monument designations to date is that they are counterproductive to domestic fishery goals, as they have displaced and concentrated U.S. fishing effort into less productive fishing grounds and increased dependency on foreign fisheries that are not as sustainably managed as United States fisheries.”

The Committee also reiterated its support for regional fisheries management, noting that through the Council process over 1,000 individual spatial habitat and fisheries conservation measures have been implemented, protecting more than 72 percent of U.S. ocean waters.

“The Councils use a public process, in a transparent and inclusive manner, and rely on the best scientific information available as required by the MSA,” the Committee wrote.

Read the full letter here

NPFMC Vacancy Announcement: Finance Officer/Admin Support

March 21, 2017 — The following was released by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council:

NPFMC is looking for a Finance Officer/Admin Support person to join our team. This person would be responsible for a variety of financial and administrative tasks in support of the activities of the Council and its staff, including budget preparation, grant reporting, accounts payable, travel and expense accounting, payroll, property, subcontracting, and other financial/administrative functions. Likely distribution of duties is 65% Finance related and 35% Administrative support.

The Council offices are located in Anchorage, Alaska

Full job description available on our website.

  • Minimum AA degree in accounting or finance, and minimum of 5 years similar professional experience in private, nonprofit, or governmental organization
  • This position is non-federal but subject to U.S. General Schedule federal equivalent, plus Alaska COLA/locality pay.
  • Application period closes April 15.

Send cover letter (statement of interest) and resume with three references to david.witherell@noaa.gov.

NPFMC April 2017 Agenda

March 7, 2017 — The following was released by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council:

The Council will begin meeting the week of April 3, 2017 at the Hilton Hotel in Anchorage, AK.

The AGENDA and SCHEDULE are now available. Documents will be posted through links on the Agenda. The deadline for public comments is 5:00 pm (AST) Tuesday, March 28, 2017.

Submit comments to npfmc.comments@noaa.gov.