Saving Seafood

WASHINGTON: Gov. Jay Inslee’s orca-recovery agenda advancing, but billion-dollar funding yet to be seen

April 22, 2019 — Gov. Jay Inslee’s orca agenda is advancing in the Washington state Legislature, but with the budget yet to be decided how much of the governor’s billion-dollar-bold ambition will be accomplished is yet to be seen.

Budgets passed by the House and Senate so far contain no funding to continue the governor’s task force on orca recovery. There’s no agreement yet on funding the governor’s proposed panel to consider the effects of breaching the Lower Snake River dams. And revenue measures to help pay for everything, from increasing hatchery production to enforcement of habitat protections, have yet to be decided.

There also were policy disappointments for the governor, who got no takers for his request for legislation to put a temporary stop on whale watching of southern resident killer whales; no lawmaker would introduce the bill. A vessel noise-reduction package will take years to implement with rule making yet to be done, and because U.S. Coast Guard regulations include important exemptions, including for commercial shipping that makes most of the noise that can disrupt orcas as they hunt.

Read the full story at the Seattle Times

Feds Agree to Expand Habitat Protections for Northwest Orcas

April 16, 2019 — The federal government says that by October it will propose expanded habitat protections off Washington, Oregon and California for Pacific Northwest orcas.

The announcement comes in response to a lawsuit filed by the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity, which sued in 2018 to make officials move more quickly to protect the endangered orcas.

The whales spend their summers in the waters between Washington state and Canada, but about two-thirds of the year they migrate and forage for salmon off the West Coast. The conservation group said the National Marine Fisheries Service had been dragging its feet in designating “critical habitat” for the whales in those foraging and migration areas.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at U.S. News

WASHINGTON: 2.75 million salmon fry distributed to Gig Harbor hatchery after 6.2 million died in power outage

December 27, 2018 — Windstorms on Dec. 14 caused the power outage at the Gig Harbor state-run hatchery. A backup generator that would have powered a pump that supplies water to the incubators failed, and 6.2 million chinook salmon fry destined for release in Deschutes, Minter Creek and White River died.

Now, up to 2.75 million excess chinook fry — which accounts for less than half of the fry that were lost — will be transferred to the Minter Creek Hatchery to replace those salmon, the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife said in a Monday news release.

“This won’t fully replace the salmon lost last week, but it will allow us to put a significant number of fish into these waters next year,” WDFW Director Kelly Susewind said in the release. “I want to thank our tribal co-managers and federal partners for helping to make this happen.”

The replacement fry came from six other hatcheries. The move was approved by NOAA Fisheries on Friday, and the fish are set to be released in May and June of 2019.

Before the power outage on Dec. 14, 507,000 salmon were set to be released in White River, intended to provide food for Southern Resident orcas. The remaining 5.7 million salmon fry were part of ongoing operations to support state fisheries.

“Losing those fish was a painful setback for state and tribal fishers, for the communities that depend on fishing, and for Southern Resident orcas that feed on chinook,” Susewind said.

Read the full story at SeattlePI

Not Too Late To Save Critically Endangered Orcas Say State Leaders And Feds

March 15, 2018 — The Pacific Northwest’s beloved orcas will not survive unless humans do more to ensure adequate food and cleaner, quieter waters. That was one of the messages at a crowded signing ceremony in Seattle convened by Washington Gov. Jay Inslee.

The population of genetically-distinct resident orcas has dwindled to a critically low level. Deaths outpace births. Only 76 remain as of the last count.

“This is a dangerously low number for a species that is already endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act,” Jeff Parsons of the Puget Sound Partnership said at a legislative hearing in Olympia earlier this month.

”We’re at a critical juncture with orcas and we need to act now if we’re to save the species,” added Bruce Wishart, a Sierra Club lobbyist.

The resident killer whales face three main threats topped by lack of prey. Their favorite food is Chinook salmon, which is also dwindling. Then there’s disturbance from vessels and underwater noise. A third threat is toxic pollution in the water and marine food chain.

“If they’re not getting enough food, they’re going to use their blubber where contaminants can often be stored,” said Lynne Barre, the federal orca recovery coordinator at NOAA Fisheries. . “But once they’re using that blubber and they circulate, it can cause immune dysfunction and that may be affecting reproduction as well.”

So is this dwindling population doomed?

“I don’t think it’s doomed,” Barre said. “We have seen the whales be at an even lower level in the past but that was following removals for public display and aquariums. So following those removals and low numbers we’ve seen in the past, we have seen this population be resilient and be able to grow—and even at a pretty high rate of two percent or more per year.”

That’s what Barre is hoping happens again now that the federal and state governments have complementary recovery plans. Inslee on Wednesday signed an executive order directing seven state agencies to take a wide variety of short and long-term actions.

Read the full story at NW News Network

 

This Is Why You Don’t See People-Size Salmon Anymore

March 13, 2018 — While the orcas of Puget Sound are sliding toward extinction, orcas farther north have been expanding their numbers. Their burgeoning hunger for big fish may be causing the killer whales’ main prey, Chinook salmon, to shrink up and down the West Coast.

Chinook salmon are also known as kings: the biggest of all salmon. They used to grow so enormous that it’s hard to believe the old photos now. Fishermen stand next to Chinooks almost as tall as they are, sometimes weighing 100 pounds or more.

“This has been a season of unusually large fish, and many weighing from 60 to 70 pounds have been taken,” The Oregonian reported in 1895.

Now, more than a century later, “it’s not impossible that we see individuals of that size today, but it’s much, much rarer,” University of Washington research scientist Jan Ohlberger says.

Ohlberger has been tracking the downsizing of salmon in recent decades, but salmon have been shrinking in numbers and in size for a long time. A century’s worth of dam-building, overfishing, habitat loss and replacement by hatchery fish cut the size of the average Chinook in half, studies in the 1980s and 1990s found.

Dam-building and fishing have tailed off, but Chinooks have been shrinking even faster in the past 15 years, according to a new paper by Ohlberger and colleagues in the journal Fish and Fisheries. Older and bigger fish are mostly gone.

Read the full story at KUOW

 

Endangered Orcas Are Starving. Should We Start Feeding Them?

January 25, 2018 — Washington state officials have proposed a new tack to save the Pacific Northwest’s critically endangered orca population. Their idea is to boost salmon hatchery production by 10 to 20 million more fish per year to provide more food for the iconic killer whales.

No one wants to see orcas starve, but reliance on fish hatcheries leaves some whale advocacy groups uneasy.

There are just 76 orcas left in the pods that call the inland waters of the Northwest home. That’s the lowest number in more than three decades. Numerous factors take the blame for the dwindling population, but one of the biggest according to biologists is lack of prey. Chinook salmon are the preferred food for these orcas.

Sport fisherman Greg King can relate.

“The science is there. They’re dying,” he said. “We’re on a world stage here right now. The whole world is watching us. Are we going to let these orca whales die and have that blood on our hands? I don’t think we want that.”

King trooped to the Washington Legislature this month to support spending tax dollars to increase hatchery production of Chinook—also known as king—salmon. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife first proposed this idea and the governor is running with it.

State Rep. Brian Blake, D-Aberdeen, independently put forward the concept and is getting traction with both parties in the legislature.

On one level, the idea is pretty simple: rear more salmon at maybe half a dozen or more existing hatcheries throughout the state with spare capacity and release them.

Some of that could happen at the Hoodsport salmon hatchery on Hood Canal.

“We want to see if we can add to that prey base here from Hoodsport,” State Fish and Wildlife Regional Hatchery Manager Rob Allan said.

Asked whether he thinks this will work, that enough of the fish will survive to grow big enough to interest the killer whales, Allan said he hopes so.

“All we know is that we release fish, they go out to the salt (water) and then they come back,” Allan said. “So then it’s up to the whales to go ahead and eat ’em. We think it’s going to help.”

But potential complications abound. The federal government will need to give the OK because both the Puget Sound orcas and many wild salmon runs they used to feed on are listed as endangered.

“Hatchery fish has been identified as a bit detrimental to recovery of wild stocks,” Allan explained. “They want us to put the reins on it a bit.”

That’s because hatchery fish could compete for resources with wild stocks and they might interbreed. So it’ll be a challenge to identify the right salmon stocks, hatchery locations and run timing.

Read the full story at KUOW

 

Government Scientists Say A Controversial Pesticide Is Killing Endangered Salmon

January 12, 2018 — The federal government’s top fisheries experts say that three widely used pesticides — including the controversial insecticide chlorpyrifos — are jeopardizing the survival of many species of salmon, as well as orcas that feed on those salmon.

It’s a fresh attack on a chemical that the Environmental Protection Agency was ready to take off the market a year ago — until the Trump administration changed course.

Chlorpyrifos is widely used by farmers to protect crops like strawberries, broccoli and citrus fruit from insect pests. In recent years, though, scientists have found evidence that exposure to chlorpyrifos residues can harm the developing brains of small children, even in the womb.

Two years ago, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a proposal that would have stopped farmers from using chlorpyrifos. The final decision, however, fell to the Trump administration, and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt decided to keep the chemical on the market while the agency continues to study its risks.

This new report, however, examines another danger entirely — the risk that chlorpyrifos and two other pesticides, diazinon and malathion, are washing into streams and rivers and harming wildlife.

The National Marine Fisheries Service concluded that continued use of the chemicals is likely to jeopardize the survival of endangered species of salmon, as well as orcas that eat the salmon. According to the report, use of chlorpyrifos is affecting 38 species of endangered fish, and it’s having negative effects on 37 areas that have been designated as “critical habitat” for endangered species.

Read the full story at New England Public Radio

 

Conservation groups petition President Obama to create ‘safe zone’ for orcas

November 7, 2016 — SEATTLE — Conservative groups from the Pacific Northwest petitioned President Obama on Friday in an effort to protect the Puget Sound orcas.

The Orca Relief Citizen’s Alliance and Project Seawolf want the Obama administration to create a ten square mile “whale protection zone” near San Juan Island.

The groups claim the noise and pollution from boats and other human disturbances interfere with the orcas’ feeding.

Read the full story at KATU

Orca Killed by Satellite Tag Leads to Criticism of Science Practices

October 7, 2016 — They bounced around the coast in a 22-foot Zodiac, a team of federal scientists with a dart rifle trying to nail the dorsal fin on a killer whale. The seas had been calm when they came across the pod of orcas along the Pacific Ocean near the U.S. border with Canada. But then the winds exploded and the waters turned rough, and the satellite tag and dart they fired missed the mark and smacked the water.

It was February 2016, and the scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had been trying to attach tiny satellite transmitters to the endangered cetaceans to track where they go in winter, to help see why their populations are so depressed. So the researchers retrieved the dart, reloaded the rifle, and took another shot, this time hitting the animal, a healthy-looking 20-year-old male known as L95.

The darting seemed “routine in all regards,” a report would later state, until the orca wound up dead and that dart became the prime suspect. On Wednesday, an expert panel of scientists agreed that efforts to attach the satellite tag to L95 likely paved the way for a rare fungal infection that killed the endangered mammal, leaving only 82 orcas left in that population.

The accident and findings left whale scientists reeling. NOAA is “deeply dismayed that one of their tags may have had something to do with the death of this whale,” said Richard Merrick, the agency’s chief scientist, himself a former whale researcher.

Read the full story at National Geographic

Endangered Puget Sound orcas to get personal health records

April 1, 2016 — SEATTLE — The killer whales that spend time in the inland waters of Washington state already are tagged and tracked, photographed and measured.

Researchers follow them by drone and by sea, analyzing their waste and their exhaled breath.

Now, experts want to add another layer to the exhaustive studies: individual health records for each endangered whale.

The records would take existing research on the creatures and combine it in one place. The idea is to use them to monitor the orcas’ health trends individually and as a population. It’s similar to people having one medical record as they move from one doctor to the next or between specialists.

Eighty-four orcas typically appear in Puget Sound from spring to fall.

Read the full story at KRON 4