Saving Seafood

Warm Pacific Ocean ‘blob’ facilitated vast toxic algae bloom

September 30, 2016 –SEATTLE — A new study finds that unusually warm Pacific Ocean temperatures helped cause a massive bloom of toxic algae last year that closed lucrative fisheries from California to British Columbia and disrupted marine life from seabirds to sea lions.

Scientists linked the large patch of warm ocean water, nicknamed the “blob,” to the vast ribbon of toxic algae that flourished in 2015 and produced record-breaking levels of a neurotoxin that is harmful to people, fish and marine life.

The outbreak of the toxin domoic acid, the largest ever recorded on the West Coast, closed razor clam seasons in Washington and Oregon and delayed lucrative Dungeness crab fisheries along the coast. High levels were also detected in many stranded marine mammals.

“We’re not surprised now having looked at the data, but our study is the first to demonstrate that linkage,” said Ryan McCabe, lead author and a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean. “It’s the first question that everyone was asking.”

Read the full story from the Associated Press at WSBT

Notifications sent following fishing license data breach

September 6, 2016 — BOISE, Idaho — ” Notices that personal information might have been compromised will be sent to hunting and fishing license holders in Idaho and Oregon following the breach of a vendor’s computer system. They likely will be sent in Washington state, too.

Officials in Idaho and Oregon said Dallas-based Active Network will mail the notices to people in their states following the computer hack last week that shut down online license sales.

Washington officials said they’re in contact with the company and expect similar letters to be sent in their state, but that hadn’t been finalized Friday. Officials say the number of records exposed could be in the millions.

Online license sales have been halted in all three states until the extent of the hack is fully understood.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Scientists looking to understand future ocean acidification effects on commercial fishing

August 26, 2016 — NEWPORT, Ore. — The future is now at the Hatfield Marine Science Center.

In the facility’s laboratories scientists are creating conditions to resemble ocean conditions years from now. The goal is to find out how sea life will react to higher levels of ocean acidification that climate change scientists predict will occur in the not-to-distant future.

Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have been pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The ocean absorbs a lot of this CO2, raising its level of acidity. It is feared an ocean that is more acidic will negatively affect sea life, including commercial fishing.

So for those whose livelihoods depend on commercial fishing the scientists’ work is important in understanding what ocean acidification will mean to the fish stocks of the future.

“There is a lot of general concern about the fact that we don’t know a lot about this,” said Lori Steele, the executive director of the West Coast Seafood Processors Association, which is based in Portland. “It’s potentially having an impact, and it’s going to have a much more significant impact, and unless we can really get a handle on it, there’s a potential that fisheries managers aren’t going to be able to do a lot besides controlling fishing.”

Read the full story at KATU

U.S. appeals court upholds Pacific whiting fishing quotas

August 8, 2016 — A federal appeals court upheld the government’s annual fishing quotas Thursday for the Pacific whiting, which dwells near the ocean floor off the coast of California, Oregon and Washington.

A vessel owner and a fish processor, both from Washington state, filed suit in San Francisco challenging the National Marine Fisheries Service’s limits on harvesting the whiting, which took effect in 2011. The rules, aimed at preserving the fish supply and discouraging frenzied activity at the outset of the fishing season, assigned each permit-holder a share of the overall catch based on their shares in past years — 2003 for fish harvesters, and 2004 for processors. Those years coincided with the start of the government’s rule-making process.

Other fishing companies and the Environmental Defense Fund supported the quotas. Their opponents argued that the selection of past years was arbitrary and violated a law requiring federal officials to take into account “present participation in the fishery” and “dependence on the fishery” when setting limits.

Read the full story at the San Francisco Chronicle

Consider the Crab: The year California’s Dungeness crab industry almost cracked apart (but didn’t)

July 28, 2016 — Lori French, the daughter-in-law of a crab fisherman, the wife of another, and the mother of a third, placed two large bowls on a table. The one labeled “California” sat empty. The other, reading “Oregon,” was filled to the brim with bright-lavender-and-orange Dungeness crabs. It was early February, the night before the annual hearing of the Joint Committee on Fisheries and Aquaculture at the state capitol, and French, who’s the president of a nonprofit called Central Coast Women for Fisheries, had organized a banquet that was part festive crab feed, part bare-knuckled lobbying effort.

For the benefit of her attendees, who included elected officials, bureaucrats, scientists, and fishermen and their families, she had shipped hundreds of pounds of Dungeness down from Oregon, where, unlike in California, the annual crab season was already under way. She believed that state officials were being too cautious in prohibiting commercial crabbing due to an outbreak of toxic domoic acid, an embargo that had decimated the fortunes of some 1,800 crab-fishing captains and crews in California. Domoic acid, she pointed out, had neither killed nor caused a reported sickening of anyone so far this year. Washington State had let commercial fishermen on the water. Why not reopen the waters in California?

It wouldn’t be that easy. The California Department of Public Health requires scientists to confirm two consecutive clean tests for potentially harmful toxins in locally caught crabs. Since the fall, at least one of every two tests had reported unacceptably high levels of domoic acid, which can poison all kinds of sea life and can sicken and potentially kill humans. By the time I caught up with French again in mid-March, several weeks after the banquet, the state’s crabbers were still out of luck. One recent test had come back clear, French told me over the phone. With one more clean bill of health, her husband and hundreds of other fishermen working the coastline from Santa Barbara up to Crescent City would have been able to drop pots and catch crabs. But when the subsequent test results came back, they weren’t good: A crab had been found with domoic acid levels in its organs at 38 parts per million, 8 above the cutoff level. French was devastated: “Our last bit of hope was just jerked away,” she said.

Read the full story at the San Francisco Chronicle

Life on the Line: OSU scientists track effects of a changing ocean on tiny sea life

July 22, 2016 — NEWPORT, Ore. — In a cold mist under gray skies, the Pacific Ocean heaved against the boat as two scientists from Oregon State University pulled a net full of life from the deep.

It was a July day, but it felt like a day in December.

In the net life swarmed, much of it too small to be seen with the unaided eye. The net held the keys to help scientists unlock how creatures of the sea are affected by changing ocean conditions and those effects on the aquatic food chain. And more specifically, the effects to salmon, a fish of much importance to humans.

For 20 years scientists have made bi-monthly trips on what is called the Newport Hydrographic Line, which takes them to the same seven sampling stations along a 25-mile path perpendicular to the coast. The stations are physical points on a map. There are no buoys or other structures that mark their locations. The scientists find them using GPS.

They launch their research vessel, the R/V Elakha, from a dock in Yaquina Bay that sits along a jagged bulge of land on which OSU’s Hatfield Marine Science Center resides. The trips have amassed an extraordinary amount of data about the sea and the life within it. The data is routinely posted on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center website and is used primarily to help forecast salmon runs. But the data has also told the story of changing ocean conditions and its impact on the food chain.

“We can also look at the changes in the bioenergetics of the food chain across the whole 20-year time series,” says OSU research assistant Jennifer Fisher. “It doesn’t just relate to salmon; it relates to sardines and (other) fish. It gives us an idea of ocean acidification, toxic algae – lots of things.”

Fisher has been going on these trips to sea for five years aboard the 54-foot research vessel owned and operated by OSU.

On this day, Fisher, OSU lab technician Tom Murphy and deckhand Dave Weaver use two different cone-shaped nets to capture organisms that live in the sea and that form the basis of the oceanic food chain.

Fisher’s primary interest in the day’s catch is in a tiny crustacean called a copepod. These creatures feed on the sea’s phytoplankton. Copepods are animals with large antennae and are only a millimeter or two in length. Under a microscope their bodies are an elongated oval protected by an exoskeleton. But they are nearly transparent. And inside their bodies scientists have discovered a lipid sac, or stored fat.

Read the full story at KVAL

Ocean monument: Growing momentum for Obama to establish new Pacific marine preserves before leaving office

July 15, 2016 — A new effort to convince President Barack Obama to establish a huge new national monument in the Pacific Ocean off California before he leaves office six months from now is gaining momentum.

More than 100 scientists — including some of the top marine biologists in the world — and two dozen environmental groups are pushing a proposal that would ban offshore oil drilling, undersea mining and potentially some types of fishing in nine areas between San Diego and the Oregon border.

The areas singled out are a collection of underwater mountains, known as seamounts, along with several dormant underwater volcanoes, deep-sea ridges and concentrations of natural vents that spew hot water. Ranging from 45 to 186 miles off the California coast, and plunging more than 1 mile under the ocean’s surface, the remote locations are rich with sharks, whales, sea turtles and exotic sea life, including forests of coral, sponges and sea urchins. Many of the species have been discovered only in recent years as deep-sea exploration technology has improved.

Read the full story at The Mercury News

CDC: Highest suicide rates found among fishermen, farmers, foresters

July 11, 2016 — Greg Marley has lived on the coast of Maine for 35 years, and in that time the licensed clinical social worker has seen a lot of sad things, including the death by suicide of too many of his hard-working neighbors.

“This is a field I’ve worked in for a long time,” Marley, the clinical director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness Maine, said recently. “I know fishermen, I know foresters, I certainly know people in the construction industry who have died by suicide.”

That’s why a recent report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the suicide rates among people working in different occupationswasn’t surprising to the social worker, who’s part of the Maine Suicide Prevention Program. In the CDC’s weekly morbidity and mortality report on July 1, the agency found that persons working in the farming, fishing and forestry fields had the highest rate of suicide overall, with 84.5 deaths by suicide among 100,000 people. The second highest suicide rate was found among people who work in the field of construction and extraction, with 53.3 deaths by suicide per 100,000 people.

In sharp contrast, the lowest suicide rate was found in the education, training and library occupational group, with 7.5 deaths by suicide per 100,000 people — more than a tenfold decrease from the farming, fishing and forestry group.

“The study is interesting, and it’s useful,” Marley said. “But for me, heavily steeped in this field, I found little of surprise. It does tell me that, hey, maybe we need to do better or more active outreach in those areas.”

The CDC’s suicide rate report used data provided by 17 states in 2012. Maine wasn’t one of those states, because the state didn’t start participating in the CDC’s National Violent Death Reporting System until 2014. Still, Maine has some commonalities with some of the states that were included in the report, Marley said, especially Alaska, Oregon, Colorado, Wisconsin and North Carolina. Those are all places with a large rural population and where many farmers, fishermen or lumbermen work. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, Maine is the most rural state.

Suicide is an important topic in Maine, where the suicide rate of people ages 10 and older is higher than the overall rate in the nation — 17.7 suicide deaths per 100,000 people in Maine compared to 14.6 deaths per 100,000 nationwide. Suicide also is the second leading cause of death among Mainers ages 15 to 34, and the fourth leading cause of death among Mainers ages 35 to 54. Men in Maine are four times more likely to die by suicide than women are, with firearms the most common suicide method used by men.

For the Pine Tree State, which has a rich and storied tradition of people — mostly men — working on the farm, on fishing boats and in the forests, the new study may highlight some old problems.

“I think there are a number of factors operating here,” Emily Haight, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Maine, said. “Farmers, fishermen and foresters — they are largely male-dominated professions, and we know that males are more likely to complete suicide. Farmers, fishermen and foresters also probably have more access to firearms. And my other guess is that we’re dealing with factors related to isolation.”

Among those factors is the way many parts of rural Maine are underserved, with respect to mental health care, she said, and the stigma about seeking help that still exists in many places.

“Suicide is a very striking and disturbing occurrence,” Haight said. “We still regard it as not common. But as researchers we want to be very aware of risk factors.”

According to Marley, additional factors that likely play a role in the higher suicide rate among farmers, fishermen and those in the forestry industry include substance abuse and higher accident risks in those fields.

Agriculture, for instance, is one of the nation’s most dangerous industries, with the injury rate in 2011 over 40 percent higher than the rate for all workers, according to the United States Department of Labor. The fatality rate for agricultural workers was seven times higher than the fatality rate for all workers in private industry.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

New Pacific Fishery Management Council Members Appointed

July 1, 2016 — The following was released by the Pacific Fishery Management Council:

PORTLAND, Ore. — U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker announced the appointment of Marc Gorelnik of California and the reappointment of Herb Pollard, of Idaho, to the Pacific Fishery Management Council on Monday. Nominations were submitted by the governors of the two states and approved by the Secretary. The appointments go into effect on August 11.

Mr. Gorelnik, a trademark and copyright attorney, will fill the California at-large seat on the Council, replacing Mr. Dan Wolford. Mr. Gorelnik received a J.D. from the King Hall School of Law at UC Davis in 1993. Prior to entering the field of law, he was a project engineer at Hughes Aircraft Company’s Santa Barbara Research Center, and earned degrees in physics and scientific instrumentation from UC Santa Barbara. He currently lives in northern California and has worked on fishery issues on behalf of California recreational anglers for several years. Mr. Gorelnik currently serves on the Council’s Salmon Advisory Subpanel, which advises the Council on decisions that affect commercial and recreational salmon fisheries. He is Chairman of the Coastside Fishing Club and is a member of the Coastal Conservation Association and the Golden Gate Salmon Association.

Mr. Pollard currently serves as the Vice-Chair of the Council and will begin serving as Chair in August. He is currently serving his second term representing the Idaho Obligatory seat. Mr. Pollard was born in Lakeview, Oregon, and spent his early life in Lakeview and Klamath Falls, graduating from Lakeview High School in 1962. He attended University of Oregon for two years, before transferring to Oregon State University where he graduated with a BS Degree in Fisheries Science in 1967. Herb earned an MS in Fisheries Management from University of Idaho in 1969, and immediately started work for Idaho Department of Fish and Game as a Fishery Research Biologist. After a 28 year career with IDFG, including stints as Regional and State Fishery Manager, Anadromous Fishery Coordinator, and Regional Supervisor, he spent 10 years with NOAA Fisheries, dealing with Endangered Species Act consultations and regulations regarding fishery management, fish hatcheries, and harvest issues that impact listed salmon and steelhead in the Snake and Columbia River basins. Currently Mr. Pollard is working as an independent contractor consulting on fishery management issues. In addition to a professional career as a Fishery Biologist, he is an avid and expert recreational angler and has written and spoken extensively about recreational fishing.

Chuck Tracy Named New Executive Director of the Pacific Fishery Management Council

June 29, 2016 — The following was released by the Pacific Fishery Management Council:

TACOMA, Wash. — The Pacific Fishery Management Council today named Mr. Charles “Chuck” Tracy as the new Executive Director for the Pacific Fishery Management Council. Dr. Don McIsaac, the former Executive Director, retired in April.

“We believe Chuck’s experience serving as both Deputy and Acting Executive Director and his in-depth knowledge of the issues facing the Council will allow for a seamless transition as the Council deals with important ongoing issues,” said Council Chair Dorothy Lowman. “We are convinced he will be able to motivate the Council staff to continue their high level of performance and enable the Council to successfully take on future challenges.”

Mr. Tracy’s appointment is effective immediately. He has been serving as the Acting Executive Director since Dr. McIsaac’s retirement; before that he served as Deputy Director for four years.

Mr. Tracy has a degree in biological oceanography from Humboldt State University with additional graduate level work in estuarine ecology. He has been with the Council since 2001, following several years of service with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife focusing on interjurisdictional fisheries issues, including Columbia River sturgeon research and salmon management. Before becoming the Deputy Director, Mr. Tracy was the Staff Officer responsible for coordinating Council activity on salmon fishery management matters.