Saving Seafood

OREGON: Whale permit uncertainty drives changes in Oregon crab fishery

May 20, 2026 — Oregon’s commercial Dungeness crab fishery is facing additional regulatory changes as the state works to address whale entanglements and move forward with a federal permit that could shape future fishing operations.

Many of the recent changes in the fishery are tied to conservation plan required for Oregon to obtain an incidental take permit under Section 10 of the Endangered Species Act. The permit would allow the fishery to have some level of impact on endangered humpback whale populations, according to reporting from KMUN. State fishery managers said the application process is underway, but it could take several years before a permit is issued.

At an industry meeting in Astoria, hosted by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, staff briefed commercial crabbers on potential regulatory changes connected to the conservation plan. Those under consideration include electronic vessel monitoring, the use of experimental fishing gear, and making a temporary early closure of the fishery permanent.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

OREGON: Questions about federal permit hang over commercial crab fishery

May 18, 2026 — Oregon’s valuable commercial Dungeness crab fishery has seen significant changes in recent years as the state looks to minimize and monitor whale entanglements involving gear used in the fishery.

Now more changes are on the horizon. And looming over everything is uncertainty around the details of a federal permit the state is seeking that would allow the fishery to have some degree of impact on endangered humpback populations.

Many of the recent tweaks and additions to Dungeness crab fishery operations are in fact tied to a conservation plan the state is required to complete in order to obtain the incidental take permit under Section 10 of the federal Endangered Species Act. This permit could provide some certainty to fishermen that even if their gear is implicated in humpback whale entanglements, fishing won’t immediately be shut down. The submittal process is underway now, but state fishery managers say it could be several years before a permit is issued.

An industry meeting in Astoria on Thursday hosted by Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife staff was intended to brief local commercial crabbers and gather input from them ahead of a meeting in August where Oregon Fish and Wildlife commissioners are expected to consider a suite of new regulations connected to the conservation plan, including the possibility of electronic vessel monitoring for the upcoming season, the use of experimental fishing gear and making what had been a temporary rule to close the fishery a month early permanent.

But the main question on crabbers’ minds was the federal take permit and how many whales NOAA Fisheries might allow the state fishery to impact. For them it is the question that nearly everything else revolves around.

Read the full article at KMUN

OREGON: Humpback tangled in fishing gear spotted near Oregon coast

May 18, 2026 — A humpback whale entangled in fishing gear was spotted Friday west of Winchester Bay, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife said Wednesday.

Justin Ainsworth, a marine resources program manager with the state agency, said in an email that the gear has a commercial crab buoy tag, but its owner hasn’t been identified because officials haven’t been able to make out the vessel name and permit number.

The whale, Ainsworth said, “appeared to be in good health and was quite mobile.”

He said the National Marine Fisheries Service is ultimately responsible for “gear attributions and entanglement accounting,” but that he expects the gear to be linked to the Oregon commercial Dungeness crab fishery. If that’s the case, he said, it would be the second confirmed humpback entanglement in fishery gear in 2026.

Read the full article at the Seattle Times

Rising fuel costs ripple through Northwest’s fishing industry

May 15, 2026 — On a sunny morning in Garibaldi, Oregon, Jesse Coon offloads his catch. Men in waterproof fishing bibs pack salmon into ice and hose out the boat, named Steel Fin.

Standing next to stacked coolers of freshly caught fish, Coon pulls out one of the Chinook salmon his crew just caught and explains how it senses bait in the water.

“If you look at it really close, there’s actually pores — holes right there — and that’s their nervous system. And they can sense electricity that’s put off by bait fish, and every living creature,” he said.

But to find salmon, Coon has to travel miles offshore, searching for dense shoals and burning lots of fuel. Oregon’s commercial troll salmon season opened April 14, but the biggest catches typically arrive later in the summer. It’s still early in the season, and it’s hard to know how good the fishing will be.

Since the war in Iran began in late February, another factor is compounding that risk. Diesel costs have surged, cutting thousands of dollars from already thin margins.

“ It just makes your decision-making harder on when to go and when not to go, and whether to go a little early in the season when the fishing might not be quite as good. It just really feels like a gamble,” he said.

Read the full article at OPB

 

WASHINGTON: Washington state reclassifying golden mussels as a banned invasive species

April 27, 2026 — The U.S. state of Washington is taking emergency action to reclassify golden mussels as a Prohibited Level 1 invasive species following the discovery of the species in Oregon earlier in the month.

Originally from China and Southeast Asia, golden mussels are an invasive species in the U.S. that are known to cause damage to infrastructure and reduce water quality, harming local fishing operations. The species was first detected in California in 2024, but a second instance was detected in Oregon in April 2026. According to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW), a watercraft was intercepted at the Ashland Boat Inspection Station carrying golden mussels.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Whale deaths are up on Oregon and Washington coasts, but what’s causing them?

April 22, 2026 — A stranded whale was found on Seaside Beach last week. It was the fourth whale found on the Oregon Coast this year.

The number of whales washing up on Oregon and Washington coasts have started to raise concerns for both scientists and beachgoers alike, who wonder why the giant mammals seem to be dying more frequently.

“The last month has started to get a little unusual in terms of the number of strandings of gray whales in particular,” said Michael Milstein, a spokesperson for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Fisheries Science Center.

Two of the whales found in Oregon recently were Gray whales. In Washington, there have been 13.

Read the full article at KOIN 

How the US rebuilt a collapsed fishery

April 9, 2026 — On the docks of Port Orford, a small fishing town on the southern coast of the U.S. state of Oregon, Aaron Longton runs a modest seafood business out of a garage converted into a processing room.

On a recent morning, he lifted a redbanded rockfish from a sink full of ice water and passed it to Brian Morrissey, who works beside a cutting table turning the fish into tidy fillets. That day’s catch included hundreds of kilograms of rockfish (Sebastes babcocki) and lingcod (Ophiodon elongatus). Two decades ago, such abundance would have been difficult to imagine, reports contributor Jules Struck for Mongabay.

The West Coast groundfish fishery, which spans more than 90 species living along the Pacific seabed from Washington state to California, once teetered near collapse. By 2000, federal authorities declared the industry a disaster. Stocks had been depleted by years of heavy fishing. Regulators responded with severe restrictions. Large sections of ocean were closed to trawling, quotas were slashed, and Congress funded a buyout that removed dozens of vessels from the fleet. Many fishers left the industry.

Read the full article at Mongabay

Fish traps return to the Columbia– opportunity or another fight over access?

April 3, 2026 — After nearly a century off the water, fish traps are back on the Columbia River – this time as part of a closely watched experiment that could reshape how salmon are harvested in the Pacific Northwest.

According to Smithsonian Magazine, Washington and Oregon authorized three commercial fish traps in 2025, marking the first time the gear has been used commercially on the river in almost 100 years. The goal: determine whether traps can compete economically with gillnets while reducing impact on threatened salmon stocks.

Read the full article at National Fisherman

Halibut quota hits record low as fishermen compete for shrinking catch

March 30, 2026 — Pacific halibut users – commercial, sport, subsistence and personal use – will compete for a total harvest of just 29.33 million pounds this year, the lowest yield determined by the International Pacific Halibut Commission (IPHC) in its 102-year-old history.

The new total is 1.3 percent below the 2025 coast-wide quota.

It breaks out at 24.27 million pounds for the U.S. portion, the same as last year, which includes Alaska, Washington, Oregon and California. A catch total of 5.06 million pounds is allocated for British Columbia.

The 2026 Pacific halibut fishery will close Dec. 7.

Read the full article at The National Fisherman

Fish Traps Have Been Banned on the Columbia River for Nearly a Century. Could Bringing Them Back Help Save Salmon?

March 27, 2026 — In the late summer of 1805, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s Corps of Discovery expedition came upon a camp of Shoshone Indians, who gifted the haggard explorers a meal that raised their spirits.

“This was the first salmon I had seen and perfectly convinced me that we were on the waters of the Pacific Ocean,” Lewis journaled.

He knew that Atlantic salmon moved between ocean and river, inhabiting both saltwater and freshwater environments. The presence of salmon, he thought, surely indicated that he and his group were near their destination on the Pacific coast.

What Lewis did not know was that those fish, caught in the Lemhi River in Idaho, had endured the longest migration of any salmon species on Earth. Certain sockeye salmon climb more than 6,500 feet as they swim from the Pacific upstream through the Columbia River and its tributaries, scaling waterfalls as tall as 20 feet to reach spawning grounds tucked in the snowcapped peaks of central Idaho. Unfortunately for the expedition, the mouth of the Columbia was still more than 600 miles away.

As the explorers followed the river to the west, they encountered an astonishing population of salmon. Historians estimate that at the time, up to 20 million salmon migrated inland in the Pacific Northwest annually

A combination of factors—including hydropower development, habitat loss, pollution, warming waters, overfishing and the introduction of hatchery fish—drove a dramatic decline in salmon population over time. By the late 1970s, those legendary runs had declined by nearly 97 percent. Today, approximately one million salmon and steelhead, an endangered species of trout often grouped with salmon, remain in the region. Seventeen salmon populations are listed as threatened or endangered on the West Coast.

Amid the wide-ranging threats to salmon, conservationists are considering whether a tool known as the fish trap could help protect endangered populations. The traps corral fish into a fenced-off area of the river, where they can then be harvested or released safely. The practice gained popularity among early settlers racing to catch salmon—but in the mid-20th century, following bitter disputes among fishers over the technology, Oregon and Washington banned it.

In 2025, those states authorized three fish traps to operate on the Columbia River—making them the first to harvest commercially in the region in nearly 100 years. The effort was the initial phase of an experiment to test whether the traps could be an economically viable alternative to gillnets, the leading method for catching salmon.

Other experiments, too, have trialed the traps for their economic and conservation potential throughout the past decade. But even as some people see promise in the tool, the work has reopened old wounds in the local fishing community—dredging up long-buried controversies and resurfacing the fish trap’s fraught history.

Read the full article at the Smithsonian Maganzine