Saving Seafood

Could Prize-Based Competitions Help Pacific Northwest Shellfish Cope With Acidic Seawater?

April 1, 2019 — As human activities continue to add greenhouse gases to the planet’s atmosphere, the oceans absorb nearly one-third of all CO2 emissions. Through a series of chemical reactions, increasing CO2 levels in the ocean have caused seawater to become 30% more acidic over the past century. This process, termed “ocean acidification“,  can disrupt animals’ abilities to smell, regulate their metabolism, and build their shells.

The Pacific Northwest region of the United States, where many economically and culturally valuable fisheries and shellfish farms exist, is especially vulnerable to ocean acidification. The shoreline that stretches from northern California to Alaska is the final destination for globally circulating seawater that accumulates nearly 1,000 years worth of CO2 from the respiration and decomposition of flora and fauna. Seasonal “upwelling” of these millennium-aged deep sea waters and additional CO2 from human activities makes them particularly acidic. Thus, understanding how these acidic waters affect the $220 million Dungeness crab fishery and the $9.4 billion mussel, clam and oyster farming industries in Washington (among many other potentially susceptible operations) is becoming increasingly urgent.

Earlier this week, four United States Congressmembers from Washington, Oregon and Alaska reintroduced a bill called the “Ocean Acidification Innovation Act”. Just like its predecessor from 2017, this bill would allow federal agencies to run prize-based competitions that would increase capacity for studying ocean acidification and mitigating its impacts.

“Our coastal communities depend on a healthy shellfish and fishing industry,” says one of the bill’s co-sponsors Rep. Herrera Beutler (WA-3), while another co-sponsor, Rep. Derek Kilmer (WA-6) added, “There are generations of folks in our coastal communities who have worked in fishing and shellfish growing, but that’s endangered if we don’t maintain a healthy Pacific Ocean.”

Read the full story at Forbes

Research expedition reports surprising findings on coho, sockeye salmon in Pacific Ocean

March 28, 2019 — After five weeks at sea, a team of 21 scientists from five countries returned Monday with some surprising findings about the mysterious lives of salmon in the Pacific Ocean, according to Laurie Weitkamp, a salmon biologist with NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Newport, Oregon.

“It was quite an experience,” said Weitkamp, one of three chief scientists aboard the Russian research vessel Professor Kaganovsky.

The expedition was part of activities associated with the International Year of the Salmon and was meant to look at how salmon fare in the open ocean. Among the surprises that emerged from the cruise was the relatively small number of pink salmon. Pinks, the most abundant salmon in the Pacific Ocean, normally make up about half of all the salmon in the region. Yet during the expedition — which covered some 345,000 square miles — pink salmon made up only about 10 percent of the salmon caught in the researchers’ nets.

“We kept asking, ‘Where are the pinks? Why aren’t you here?’” Weitkamp recalled.

Read the full story at the Statesman Journal

Trump’s National Monument Changes Return to Spotlight

March 13, 2019 — As Democrats in Congress prepare to scrutinize President Donald Trump’s review of 27 national monuments, most of the recommendations made by ex-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke remain unfinished as other matters consume the White House.

Trump acted quickly in December 2017 on Zinke’s recommendations to shrink two sprawling Utah monuments that had been criticized as federal government overreach by the state’s Republican leaders since their creation by Democratic Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

But in the 15 months since Trump downsized the Utah monuments, the president has done nothing with Zinke’s proposal to shrink two more monuments, in Oregon and Nevada, and change rules at six others, including allowing commercial fishing inside three marine monuments in waters off New England, Hawaii and American Samoa.

Zinke resigned in December amid multiple ethics investigations — and has joined a Washington, D.C. lobbying firm. Trump has nominated as his replacement Acting Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, a former lobbyist for the oil and gas industry and other corporate interests.

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

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