Saving Seafood

ALASKA: Alaska lawmakers, residents ask feds to limit how much salmon industrial trawlers catch

May 1, 2024 — U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola, Alaskan Natives and family-owned fisheries are looking for a sea change in the fishing rights battle between local fishermen and industrial trawling fishing operations after a federal council recently denied a tribe-approved reduction in chum salmon catches.

In Western Alaska, local communities are experiencing a marked decrease in salmon populations. The reasons for the decline remain a subject of intense debate between industry executives, conservation experts and subsistence communities. Many residents point to the Seattle-based trawler fleets operating in the Bering Sea, which, while fishing for pollock, inadvertently capture large numbers of chum salmon as bycatch.

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council, which oversees the regulations for fish caught in federal waters, recommended an annual bycatch total of 100,000 − well above the 22,000 limit the advisory council sought in a motion April 8. The pollock industry already has a hard cap restricting its take of Chinook salmon

Read the full article at USA Today

Alaska asks judge to toss critical habitat for threatened seals

April 28, 2024 — Alaska’s fight against burdensome seal protections continued Thursday, when attorneys for the state and federal government debated whether the feds properly allocated a vast coastal area under the Endangered Species Act.

In April 2022, the National Marine Fisheries Service — also known as NOAA Fisheries — designated critical habitat off the coast of Alaska for Arctic ringed seals and the Beringia distinct population segment of bearded seals as required by the Endangered Species Act. The move came 10 years after the agency listed both species as “threatened” under the act, as actions to designate critical habitat for the seals were deferred when NOAA’s proposed listings were challenged in court.

NOAA’s legal challenges led to a settlement that allowed the agency to complete a final determination of critical habitat in 2022. But now that NOAA has designated critical habitat — 257,000 square miles for the ringed seal and 273,000 square miles for the bearded seals — Alaska claims too much land was designated and that the species are not even threatened.

“By comparison, the state of Texas contains 268,000 square miles while California contains 163,000 square miles,” Alaska wrote in its 2023 complaint. “All of this critical habitat is occupied by members of the two seal species, which are among the most common marine mammals found in the Arctic region.”

The following was released by Courthouse News Service

In Donlin lawsuit, Murkowski, Sullivan and Peltola come to mining project’s defense

April 25, 2024 — Alaska’s three-member, bipartisan congressional delegation is siding with boosters of the major proposed Donlin mine in an ongoing lawsuit filed by tribal governments that seeks to invalidate the Southwest Alaska project’s federal environmental approvals.

Republican U.S. Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan and Democratic U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola, in documents filed in federal court late Tuesday, called the proposed Southwest Alaska mine one of the state’s “most important and necessary economic development projects.”

And they say that blocking the mine’s construction would stop one of the state’s largest Alaska Native-owned corporations, Calista, from “developing its natural resources in defiance of the commitment to economic self-determination” contained in the federal legislation that settled Indigenous land claims.

Read the full article at Anchorage Daily News

Alaska appeals Kuskokwim River fisheries lawsuit that pitted AFN against state officials

April 23, 2024 — The state of Alaska is appealing its defeat in a lawsuit brought by the federal government over control of salmon fisheries on the Kuskokwim River in Southwest Alaska.

In a notice published Tuesday with the U.S. District Court for Alaska, the Alaska Department of Law said it was appealing Judge Sharon Gleason’s decision to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Read the full article at KYUK

ALASKA: Alaska Senate proposes $7.5M aid package for struggling fish processors

April 22, 2024 — The Alaska Senate has proposed a new aid package for the state’s fish processing companies — some of which have been teetering among a crash in prices that’s caused an industry-wide crisis.

The Senate, in its capital budget passed last week, included the $7.5 million grant to a nonprofit organization called SeaShare. Most of the cash would go toward buying out what SeaShare calls an “oversupply” of seafood from last year’s harvest, which it says is costing processing companies money to store in freezers.

The program would add to more than $100 million in salmon and Alaska pollock purchases — more than 1,500 truck loads — announced earlier this year by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

SeaShare would use the state money to support smaller Alaska processingcompanies that couldn’t match the scale of the federal purchases, said Hannah Lindoff, the organization’s executive director.

The seafood purchases would then be donated to Alaska food programs and food banks, she said. A smaller share of the grant would also pay for the purchase of new freezers in communities around the state that could store more fish in the future.

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media

Developing Alternative Fisheries Management Scenarios to Respond to Climate Change

April 8, 2024 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

Seafood is a vitally important source of protein. Worldwide, more than 3 billion people rely on seafood as a significant part of their diets.

The amount that we can sustainably fish and farm is based on historical catches and trends that have been monitored for decades. We need to understand their breeding cycles and growth rates, along with cyclical patterns of ocean currents and climate—and the ecosystems they live in. This allows us to build models that inform sustainable management strategies for harvesting seafood. However, climate change continues to disrupt long-standing expectations, strategies, and the communities that depend on them.

Scientists at the NOAA Fisheries Alaska Fisheries Science Center are collaborating with communities, managers, and other government and academic scientists in the Bering Sea region. They authored a new paper that develops climate-informed management scenarios for fisheries in the eastern Bering Sea.

“Several years ago, we recognized that climate change was going to affect our fisheries in Alaska. So, in 2015, we started a new initiative, the Alaska Climate Integrated Modeling Project, or ACLIM, with the goal of creating climate informed models to help us adapt to a warming planet,” remarks Anne Hollowed, lead author and retired center scientist.

ACLIM is a collaboration among more than 50 interdisciplinary experts that projects and evaluates climate impacts and effective responses for social and ecological systems in and around the Bering Sea. It is also part of NOAA’s Climate, Ecosystems, and Fisheries Initiative (CEFI) to build decision support systems for climate informed decision making in each region.

Kristin Holsman, co-author with the center and co-lead investigator on ACLIM, adds, “The climate change shifts and extreme events that have occurred over the past decade in the North Pacific and Bering Sea really underscore the need for climate innovation in fishery management. ACLIM lets us meaningfully connect cutting-edge science tools and information for fishing communities and resource managers to help prepare for and respond to climate change. The key in this is incorporating social and economic input in addition to biological and oceanographic information.”

The climate-related events that Holsman refers to are the 2015–2016 and 2018–2019 marine heat waves. They caused wide-scale declines in marine species such as snow crabs.

University of Washington scientist and co-author Andre Punt states, “The interdisciplinary nature of ACLIM is what makes it so valuable. Along with NOAA, we have representatives participating from our university, the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council, Native Alaskan communities, international organizations, among others—all dedicated to solving these important issues related to climate change.”

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

 

Controversial mine project sues over EPA veto

March 18, 2024 — In a statement Friday, the Pebble Partnership alleged the EPA’s veto was issued before the completion of the permitting process.

Rather than waiting for the Army Corps of Engineers’ (USACE) permitting process to conclude, the EPA made its decision under a provision of the Clean Water Act that allows it to restrict mining activity in the Bristol Bay watershed.

The bay contains the world’s single largest sockeye salmon fishery.

Read the full article at The Hill

ALASKA: High Liner, Ocean Beauty, Trident, E&E Foods enter 2024 Alaska Symphony of Seafood contest

October 31, 2023 — High Liner Foods, Ocean Beauty Seafoods, Trident Seafoods, and E&E Foods are among the competitors entering the 2024 Alaska Symphony of Seafood.

The event, organized by the Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation since 1994, is a competition for commercial-ready, value-added products, with the goal of promoting new products made from Alaska seafood. The product entries will compete for prizes in eight categories: the Grand Prize, Salmon Choice, Whitefish Choice, Seattle People’s Choice, Juneau People’s Choice, Bristol Bay Choice, Best Packaging and Best Grab & Go in addition to the categories of Retail, Food Service, Beyond the Plate, and Around the Plate. The first-place winners from each category, plus the Bristol Bay Choice award winner, will receive booth space at the 2024 Seafood Expo North America in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A., entry into the SENA Seafood Excellence Awards, and airfare to and from the event.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource