Saving Seafood

NWAA’s Hugh Mitchell: Aquaculture is being unfairly demonized

February 14, 2019 — Aquaculture is being unfairly demonized, and that’s not good for industry or the planet, according to Hugh Mitchell, a newly appointed board member of the Northwest Aquaculture Alliance.

Mitchell, a fish health expert and co-owner the Kirkland, Washington, U.S.A.-based fish health supply distributor and consultancy company Aquatactics, said he joined the board of the organization formerly known as the Washington Fish Growers Association to help fight the stigma surrounding aquaculture, which he said is particularly virulent in the U.S. Pacific Northwest.

“The message [regarding aquaculture] right now is wrong,” Mitchell told SeafoodSource. “I think aquaculture is the key to saving the aquatic ecosystems. It’s not a threat by any means.”

Mitchell, a veterinarian with a bachelor’s degree in marine biology and a master’s degree in aquatic ecology, has been working in the field for 30 years. He said he looked forward to trying to make a difference in his role as a board member for the Northwest Aquaculture Alliance (NWAA). Founded in 2009, the NWAA is a trade association that recently went through a rebranding and now represents regional fish famers and aquaculture across the U.S. states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, as well as the province of British Columbia, Canada.

NWAA Board President John Dentler said that Mitchell’s appointment to the board is “an endorsement of our mission to bring a science-based discussion to the important conversation about aquaculture that is happening here and around the world.”

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Climate change is cooking salmon in the Pacific Northwest

February 11, 2019 — Warmer waters in the Pacific Northwest are killing salmon before they can reproduce.

Salmon that have died in Washington’s Wallace River before spawning.

The Tulalip Indian Reservation sits on the east side of the Puget Sound, about 40 miles north of Seattle, Washington, where the change in seasons is marked by the arrival and departure of salmon. At the heart of the reservation is Tulalip Bay, where salmon return every spring and fall before swimming upstream to spawn.

In tribal folklore, the Tulalip people are descended from salmon. As Cary Williams, who works at the tribe’s cultural center, tells the story, the ancient salmon saw people walking on land and wanted to become human. When they asked the grandfather salmon to give them human form, he granted their wish and told them, “I will take care of you, but you must take care of me.”

But it has become increasingly difficult for the Tulalip people to care for the salmon. Since the 1980s, wild Pacific salmon have faced a sharp decline due to overfishing, habitat loss and pollution, leaving several local populations threatened or endangered. Now, climate change is further imperiling the fish.

Read the full story at MSN

Dungeness crab season opens across Oregon coast

February 6, 2019 — Commercial Dungeness crab fishing has opened along the entire Oregon coastline after delays for low meat yields and domoic acid postponed the start of the season.

According to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW), crab samples from the Cape Blanco area and those taken in southern regions all the down to the US state’s border with California show biotoxin counts are within safe levels.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

 

IPHC agrees on halibut catch limit after 2018 impasse

February 4, 2019 — The International Pacific Halibut Commission (IPHC) has set 2019 catch limits slightly higher than last year’s levels, it announced.

The body, which sets halibut catch limits in the US and Canada, set the 2019 limit at 38.61 million pounds (17,513 metric tons) for the 2019 season, which should March 15 and must cease on Nov. 14.

In 2018, the IPHC was not able to agree on a catch limit. In a move called both “inevitable” and “disastrous”, the IPHC could not come to an agreement on the catch limits for the seasons in the US, off the coast of Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and California, and British Columbia, Canada. So, the US and Canada set limits independently, which totaled 37.2m lbs, a 9% decrease overall.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

California has a weird new desert. It’s in the Pacific Ocean.

February 4, 2019 — Six years after it was stricken by a wasting disease off the northern California coast, the sunflower sea star — one of the most colorful starfish in the ocean — has all but vanished, and the domino effect threatens to unravel an entire marine ecosystem.

The cause of the sea star’s demise is a mystery, but it coincided with a warming event in the Pacific Ocean, possibly tied to the climate, that lasted for two years ending in 2015. It heated vast stretches of water in patches, and likely exacerbated the disease, according to a new study released Wednesday.

“I’ve never seen a decline of this magnitude of a species so important,” Drew Harvell, the lead author of the study, published in the journal Science Advances, that documented the sunflower sea star’s retreat into possible extinction off California and Oregon.

If the study had a purpose, she said, it was to call attention to the sea star’s demise so that federal officials would take action to list it as endangered and work to save it, possibly with a breeding program using sunflower stars that are surviving in parts of Washington, Alaska and Canada.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

Senators file bill to mandate labeling requirements on genetically enhanced salmon

February 4, 2019 — A bipartisan group of U.S. senators from the Pacific northwest filed a bill last week that would require any salmon produced through genetic engineering to be labeled clearly as such on its packaging.

The bill, filed last week, comes a month after the Department of Agriculture published its final rule requiring producers, importers and other entities to reveal information about bioengineered products and ingredients. However, critics panned the measure saying companies could use digital QR codes, which would require a smartphone to scan, or list a toll-free number to meet the obligation.

Among those critics is U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who along with cosponsors U.S. Sens. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), Maria Cantwell (D-Washington), and Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) filed the Genetically Engineered Salmon Labeling Act on Wednesday, 30 January.

The two-page bill says the legislation would ensure buyers can make “informed decisions” when buying salmon.

“We have the right to know what we’re eating,” Murkowski said in a statement. “When you splice DNA from another animal and combine it with farmed salmon, you are essentially creating a new species and I have serious concerns with that. If we are going to allow this fabricated fish to be sold in stores, we must ensure there is at least clear labeling. Americans should not become test subjects for this new product without their full knowledge and consent.”

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Ocean heat waves like the Pacific’s deadly ‘Blob’ could become the new normal

February 1, 2019 — When marine biologist Steve Barbeaux first saw the data in late 2017, he thought it was the result of a computer glitch. How else could more than 100 million Pacific cod suddenly vanish from the waters off of southern Alaska?

Within hours, however, Barbeaux’s colleagues at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Seattle, Washington, had confirmed the numbers. No glitch. The data, collected by research trawlers, indicated cod numbers had plunged by 70% in 2 years, essentially erasing a fishery worth $100 million annually. There was no evidence that the fish had simply moved elsewhere. And as the vast scale of the disappearance became clear, a prime suspect emerged: “The Blob.”

In late 2013, a huge patch of unusually warm ocean water, roughly one-third the size of the contiguous United States, formed in the Gulf of Alaska and began to spread. A few months later, Nick Bond, a climate scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, dubbed it The Blob. The name, with its echo of a 1958 horror film about an alien life form that keeps growing as it consumes everything in its path, quickly caught on. By the summer of 2015, The Blob had more than doubled in size, stretching across more than 4 million square kilometers of ocean, from Mexico’s Baja California Peninsula to Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. Water temperatures reached 2.5°C above normal in many places.

Read the full story at Science Magazine

Killing Sea Lions to Save Salmon

January 31, 2019 — The following is excerpted from a story published today by The Atlantic:

Let us first establish that sea lions are supposed to live in the sea.

Since the 1990s, however, male sea lions—a handful at first, now dozens—have been captivated by the attractions of the Willamette River. They travel all the way from Southern California to Oregon and then swim up 100 miles of river to arrive at an expansive waterfall, the largest in the region. Here, salmon returning to spawn have to make an exhausting journey up the fish ladders of the Willamette Falls. And here, the sea lions have found a veritable feast.

“[They’re kind of sitting ducks,” the wildlife biologist Sheanna Steingass told me, describing the salmon. She paused to consider the metaphor. “Or sitting fish.” Every sea lion eats three to five fish a day.

In another world, this could just be a story about the intelligence of sea lions and their adaptability to river life. But in this world—where salmon populations throughout North America have plummeted, and where the winter steelhead run at Willamette Falls has fallen from 25,000 fish in the 1970s to just hundreds in 2018—it’s a dire story for the fish. After spending years trying and failing to deter the sea lions by nonlethal means, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, where Steingass leads the marine-mammal program, started “lethal removal” of sea lions in December. As of mid-January, they have trapped and euthanized five sea lions at Willamette Falls.

Killing animals to save other animals is always controversial. Animal-rights groups like the Humane Society of the United States denounced the sea-lion killings, calling them a distraction from the salmon’s real problems. And it’s true that a long chain of human actions—overfishing, destruction of salmon habitats, dams blocking their migration, hatchery mistakes—have led to what everyone can admit is this nonoptimal situation.

“In a perfect world, in an unaltered world, this wasn’t a problem, because historically there were 16 million salmon in the Columbia River,” says Doug Hatch, a senior fisheries scientist at the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission. The sea lion’s appetites would have barely made a dent. It’s only because humans have so unbalanced the natural world that as drastic an action as culling sea lions could appear to be the fix.

Read the full story at The Atlantic

 

Coast Guard Assists 17 Crabbers off Pacific Northwest Coast in One Week

January 29, 2019 — SEAFOOD NEWS — U.S. Coast Guard crews along the Oregon and Washington coasts assisted 17 fisherman in five responses between Sunday, Jan. 20, and Friday, Jan. 25 — just as the weather was clearing up and more fishermen, especially smaller vessels, were headed to Dungeness crab grounds.

Response efforts included crews from Coast Guard Station Yaquina Bay, Coast Guard Station Cape Disappointment and Coast Guard Air Facility Newport, in coordination with members at Coast Guard Sector Columbia River and Coast Guard Sector North Bend.

The two-person crew aboard the F/V Zephyr was escorted across the Yaquina Bay Bar in Oregon by a 47-foot motor life boat crew from Station Yaquina Bay, Sunday, Jan. 20. The crew of the 31-foot fishing vessel reported taking on water 17 miles south of the bay with less than 500 pounds of crab aboard. The onboard pump and auxiliary pumps were able to keep up with the flooding as the fishing crew were escorted in. An MH-65 Dolphin aircrew from Air Facility Newport launched as well, according to the press release.

A four-person crew aboard the F/V Dream was escorted across the Columbia River Bar and safely moored in Ilwaco, Wash., by a Station Cape Disappointment boat crew aboard the 52-foot motor life boat Triumph, on Monday, Jan. 21. The 42-foot fishing vessel crew reported experiencing fuel injector issues while attempting to cross the bar with 1,000 pounds of crab aboard.

A three-person crew aboard the F/V Miss Jessie was towed into Ilwaco by a 47-foot motor life boat crew from Station Cape Disappointment on Monday as well. The crew of the 36-foot fishing vessel reported they lost propulsion almost 3 miles west of Ocean Park where they anchored with 1,500 pounds of crab aboard until the Coast Guard crew arrived.

A four-person crew aboard the F/V Redeemer was towed to Newport, Ore., by Station Yaquina Bay boat crew aboard the 52-foot motor life boat Victory, Monday, Jan. 21. The crew of the 51-foot fishing vessel reported they lost steering while on approach to the Yaquina Bay entrance with 5,000 pounds of crab aboard.

The motor life boat Victory was activated again on Thursday, Jan. 24, when a four-person crew aboard the F/V Triggerfish was towed into Newport. The 42-foot fishing vessel crew reported they lost steering almost 2 miles west of the Yaquina Bay entrance with no catch aboard.

Coast Guard stations along the coast maintain ready crews in the event of emergencies, which often involve the use of the 47-foot and 52-foot motor life boats. The 52-foot MLB is unique in that they are only located in the Pacific Northwest and that they are the only Coast Guard vessels under 65 feet with names. The four vessels are stationed at Grays Harbor and Cape Disappointment, Wash.; and Yaquina Bay and Coos Bay, Ore.

This story was originally published by SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

Oregon sets Feb. 1 as re-opening date for commercial crabbing

January 28, 2019 — The Department of Fish and Wildlife in the US state of Oregon (ODFW) on Thursday announced that it would allow the commercial Dungeness crab season to begin on the coast from Cape Arago to the California border on Feb. 1.

State officials closed the area in October due to concerns about a high level of the marine biotoxin domoic acid, which can cause minor to severe illness and even death in humans. ODFW said it took samples from the southern portion of the area and found levels of the toxin elevated in the viscera (guts) of the crab. As a result, all crab harvested from south of Cape Blanco along the west coast will be required to have their viscera removed by a licensed processor prior to sale.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News