Saving Seafood

ALASKA: Management council declines action on Bering Sea bycatch to address Yukon-Kuskokwim salmon subsistence worries

June 22, 2022 — Despite hours of testimony from residents of the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers who called for urgent action to curb the salmon bycatch by Bering Sea trawlers, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council decided to approach the problem more methodically.

In a unanimous vote near the end of its five-day meeting in Sitka, the Council recommended further study of salmon declines in the Bering Sea, and a closer look at their connection to climate change.

Salmon abundance in the Yukon River, the third-largest river in North America, has dropped sharply in the past two years.

The forecast is no better this season.

Many Yukon and Kuskokwim River residents voiced concern during last Monday’s call.

“At this point, there should be alarm bells going off all over not only in our communities, but all over the state and federal government agencies,” said Vivian Korthuis, the chief executive officer for the Association of Village Council Presidents, a consortium of 56 federally-recognized tribes on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

Scientists point to climate change as likely cause for Alaska snow crab decline

June 17, 2022 — Even as scientists are still trying to figure out why the Bering Sea snow crab stock crashed in 2021, federal managers are working on a plan to help rebuild it.

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council last week voted to accept alternatives for analysis on its snow crab rebuilding plan — a middle step before implementing an actual plan that will change fishing regulations or openings. The council is on track to approve a final plan for action in December, which would then go to the Secretary of Commerce and through the federal regulation process before becoming official.

Data from last year’s survey at this point seems to confirm that there was a massive decline in the number of young snow crab in the Eastern Bering Sea — something like 99% fewer female snow crab showed up in the survey from 2021.

There’s no complete consensus about why the stock crashed in the first place. Increasingly, however, the models seem to indicate that it’s due to temperature increases linked to climate change.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

Fishery managers call for deeper look at salmon bycatch, but decline to tighten rules

June 16, 2022 — Western Alaska villagers have endured the worst chum salmon runs on record, several years of anemic Chinook salmon runs in the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers, harvest closures from the Bering Sea coast to Canada’s Yukon Territory and such dire conditions that they relied on emergency shipments of salmon from elsewhere in Alaska just to have food to eat.

Many of those suffering see one way to provide some quick relief: Large vessels trawling for pollock and other groundfish in the industrial-scale fisheries of the Bering Sea, they say, must stop intercepting so many salmon.

Advocates for tighter rules on those interceptions, known as bycatch, made their case over the past several days to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, the organization that manages fish harvests in federal waters off Alaska.

‘Like fishing in the desert’

“The numbers are really low. There’s nothing out there. It’s like fishing in the desert,” Walter Morgan, of the Yup’ik village of Lower Kalskag, said in online testimony to the council, which met in Sitka.

Read the full story at the the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman

 

ALASKA: Salmon bycatch, electronic monitoring on the table at Sitka meeting of North Pacific Fishery Management Council

June 9, 2022 — The bycatch of chinook and chum salmon is on the agenda, as the spring meeting of the North Pacific Management Council gets underway in Sitka this week (June 9-14).

In addition to hearing how much salmon is being intercepted in the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea by the trawl fisheries, the council will review a proposal to supplement the human observer program with electronic monitoring.

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council regulates the so-called “federal fisheries” which take place outside the three-mile limit of Alaska’s state waters, and within the exclusive economic zone of the United States which extends 200 miles offshore.

Read the full story at KCAW

Alaska: What is the State Doing to Address Bycatch?

March 17, 2022 — There has been much discussion and debate about bycatch in marine fisheries off Alaska’s coasts recently, including several recent opinion pieces. All are chastising a perceived inaction to address bycatch, especially in the face of recent declines in salmon and crab in western Alaska.

Bycatch, by definition, is fish which are harvested but are not sold or kept. Simply put, bycatch is unintentionally caught fish that are unwanted, can’t be sold, or can’t be kept — like halibut, crab or salmon caught while targeting cod or pollock. While some bycatch occurs in state waters, most occurs in federal waters managed under plans established by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council. Bycatch is NOT the intercept of fish in mixed stock fisheries, such as occurs along the Alaska Peninsula when chum salmon of Yukon origin are harvested in directed sockeye salmon fisheries.

Let me begin by clearly stating that the state is concerned about bycatch. We should do our best to reduce the catch of unintended fish that are discarded and not used. That work is underway right now on multiple fronts.

Read the full story at Seafood News

North Pacific Council Opens Reallocation Issue For Halibut Charter vs Commercial Fishermen in Alaska

February 11, 2022 — The North Pacific Fishery Management Council took action yesterday that reopens the specter of “uncompensated reallocation” from commercial fishermen to charter operators in Alaska. The Council adopted a Purpose and Needs Statement to analyze a revision in the halibut Catch Sharing Plan (CSP) that would increase the halibut charter sector allocation by taking from the halibut longline fleet without compensation.

The possibility of that triggered strong testimony from both charter operators and halibut fishermen — over 130 written comments and 70 public testimonies, the majority of which were opposed to any notion of uncompensated reallocation. The commercial sector, many of whom had helped create the CSP a decade ago, made the case that the CSP is working as planned. Charter fishermen countered that their business models don’t work under these continued low levels of halibut abundance. Charter operators in Area 2C are constrained from allowing their clients to catch two halibut a day. Area 3A charter operators can offer two halibut, but are under size restrictions as well.

Low levels of halibut abundance impact all stakeholders, and commercial skippers pointed out that their investment in quota shares over the years has lost value as abundance declines but the loan payments are still due.

Read the full story at Seafood News

 

AK Bering Sea snow crab: Still on hold

February 7, 2022 — What’s the plan for Alaska’s Bering Sea snow crab fishery? As it turns out, we may not know until June.

An unexpected and precipitous drop in the snow crab (Chionoecetes opilio) estimated biomass resulted in an official “overfished” designation from NMFS on Oct. 19, 2021. The designation was not unexpected, given the 2021 stock assessment. The path forward, however, is as clear as Bering Sea chop in a February storm.

“What we do know is that snow crab is a variable stock where highs and lows are not unexpected. What is different is the magnitude of the high and quickly falling to a historic low,” Jamie Goen, executive director of the Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers, told National Fisherman. “We’re hopeful seeing some crab out there this season and look forward to working with the federal and state managers through the rebuilding plan process to help bring snow crab stocks back to higher levels.”

The 2021 stock assessment, which was presented to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council in October, reported that the minimum threshold for the biomass of mature male opilios is 76,700 metric tons, and the most recent assessment estimated it at 50,600 metric tons — a historic low.

“A large year class recruited to the survey gear in 2015 and was tracked until 2018 and 2019,” the assessment report says. “But it appears to have since disappeared from the eastern Bering Sea shelf before reaching commercial size.”

Read the full story at National Fisherman

 

New NOAA reports on Alaska’s oceans highlight disruptive warming trends

December 27, 2021 — The annual Ecosystem Status Reports from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration collect a wide range of data to better assess maritime trends and help steer fisheries management.

Elizabeth Siddon, who edited a report on the eastern Bering Sea, called the annual documents “anthologies of the ecosystems as we know them” — collaborative efforts pulling information from scientists, community members and industry groups, among others. The reports released this week also cover the Gulf of Alaska and Aleutian Islands.

If there’s any theme in this year’s detailed surveys of Alaska’s marine systems, it’s heat. The three areas assessed all involve “sustained warm conditions” that are affecting environment dynamics like sea ice and water columns, as well as the composition of animal stocks thriving and failing in recent years. The assessments factor into harvest policies set by the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council and touch any Alaskans who depend on sea animals, whether for work or food.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

 

Fishery council adopts tighter Bering Sea halibut bycatch limits based on stocks

December 22, 2021 — The governing body in charge of regulating halibut bycatch limits in the Bering Sea has adopted a new management system based on stocks of the valuable groundfish.

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council adopted the policy earlier in the month on an 8-3 vote. It’s set to go into effect in 2023.

Currently, there is a static cap on halibut bycatch for the Amendment 80 trawl fleet. If the fleet hits that cap, the fishery would close.

Advocates of tighter bycatch limits have said the current cap is too high. Since 2015, when the council last amended bycatch regulations, they have pushed for them to be lowered.

Read the full story at KTUU

 

Fishing council ties bycatch limits on Bering Sea trawlers to halibut abundance

December 16, 2021 — The council that manages fishing in federal waters voted this week to link groundfish trawl fishing in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands to halibut abundance. The action caps — at least for now — a six-year debate about curbing halibut bycatch in Alaska.

For many who have been following that debate, the decision comes as a surprise because it’s expected to deal what trawlers say is a crushing blow to their fishery.

But members of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council said it was also important for them to consider how high levels of bycatch hurt small-boat halibut fishermen in Western Alaska — even if they didn’t go quite as far as advocates from those communities had hoped.

The action that ultimately passed Monday came from Rachel Baker, the deputy Fish and Game commissioner who represents Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s administration on the council. She said it will incentivize the trawl industry to reduce the halibut they incidentally catch in their nets.

When halibut stocks are low, the cap on prohibited species catch, or PSC, will also drop.

Read the full story at KTOO