Saving Seafood

Fisheries Managers Face Mixed Forecast For Northwest Salmon, Concerns Over Endangered Orca

March 12, 2019 — About this time every year, the Pacific Northwest gets a report card from the natural world. It comes in the form of salmon run forecasts and gives us an indication of how healthy the Pacific Ocean and our rivers and streams are.

The grades are in, and here’s what you need to know about our scores.

How’d we do this year?

It’s definitely looking like we’re in for a “there’s room for improvement” kind of year.

Every spring, a group called the Pacific Fishery Management Council gets together and look at the salmon forecasts from the Puget Sound all the way down to the Sacramento River in California. They use this data to decide at a week-long meeting in April what overall catch limits will be. This catch allowance is then split between commercial, recreational and tribal fishermen in the Pacific Northwest. The goal is to make sure we don’t catch more salmon than the numbers can actually support.

Read the full story at KLCC

Feds inch closer to approving Alaska mining project seen as a threat to Pacific Northwest

March 11, 2019 — Over the past several decades, fishermen, business owners, Alaska Native organizations and environmental groups have protested a proposed open-pit copper and gold mine at the headwaters of Bristol Bay — a pristine salmon habitat.

Now the federal government is inching toward approving the mining project.

Nestled in southwest Alaska, Bristol Bay is home to the world’s largest wild salmon run. The watershed supports a teeming ecosystem of eagles, grizzlies and beluga whales.

It’s also an economic engine for the Pacific Northwest. Each year, the fishery contributes thousands of seasonal fishing and processing jobs and millions of dollars in economic activity to Washington, Oregon, and California, according to the University of Alaska Institute of Social and Economic Research.

Bristol Bay is where the Pebble Limited Partnership, the company developing the mine, plans to build a 10.7-square-mile open-pit mine to dig up copper, gold, molybdenum, and other minerals. The mine would require new infrastructure, including roads, a port and a 188-mile-long natural gas pipeline.

Read the full story at McClatchy DC

Scientists see improved ocean conditions for young salmon

March 11, 2019 — Ocean conditions are improving for salmon entering the ocean this year, several years after The Blob, an unusually warm water event that began forming in 2014, scientists announced Friday.

Research surveys in 2018 confirmed tiny animals that stoke the food chain were nice and fatty. Anchovies, an important forage fish, were increasing in number. Sea lion pups were numerous and growing well, and fish-eating sea birds going strong.

However, subsurface sea temperatures were still warmer than average in some areas. Pyrosomes, a warm-water animal that is not supposed to be in Northwest waters, were still numerous.

Forecasts for chinook salmon in 2019 also were for below-average salmon returns to the Columbia River. Extensive ocean acidification and poorly oxygenated waters off both Washington and Oregon also were predicted for this year.

Read the full story from The Seattle Times at The Spokesman-Review

Climate change is depleting our essential fisheries

February 28, 2019 — A new study published Thursday in the journal Science outlines the impacts warming waters are having on commercially important fish species.

The world’s fishing industry relies on what’s called fisheries, the clusters of regional fish populations that people can catch economically. And on average, the researchers found that the numbers of fish in critical fisheries around the world have decreased by four percent since 1930.

Fisheries located in the Sea of Japan and the North Sea were the worst off. They experienced as much as a 35 percent drop in their numbers. Other fisheries, however, benefitted from warmer waters, and their populations grew, an expansion scientists warn could create unsustainable competition for resources.

“We were surprised at the strength the impact of warming has already had on fish populations,” says the study’s lead author, ecologist Chris Free at the University of California Santa Barbara.

Read the full story at National Geographic

Few California sea lions from Willamette Falls euthanized, but program continues

February 15, 2019 — Only five California sea lions have been trapped at Willamette Falls and killed since the state received permission to launch the program to protect threatened winter steelhead and spring Chinook salmon.

The permit is for 93.

It was issued by the National Marine Fisheries Service after nonlethal methods, like relocating the mammals to the Oregon Coast, failed.

The sea lions simply swam back.

Euthanasia continues to be debated by advocacy groups and scientists alike, but the dire situation for the fish rarely is.

Last winter, a record-low 512 wild winter steelhead completed the journey past Willamette Falls, according to state counts. Less than 30 years ago, that number was more than 15,000.

Read the full story at the Salem Statesman Journal

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