Saving Seafood

Alaskan Indigenous leaders fear impacts on salmon streams by mining project

January 27, 2022 — For Indigenous tribes living in Alaska’s remote Yukon-Kuskokwim region, southwest of the state, the future is bleak and uncertain. Tribal councils worry that plans to construct a 6,474-hectare (15,990 acres) open-pit gold mine near the Kuskokwim River watershed will have grave impacts on salmon habitats, their traditional ways of life and their health.

“This development could possibly destroy our livelihood, rivers and sea mammals that we depend on,” said Fred Phillips, representative of the Indigenous Village of Kwigillingok tribal council. According to him, tribes are not willing to take the risk.

The Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta (YKD) drainage is part of a rich biome encompassing coastal wetlands, tundra and mountains that supports the subsistence lifestyle of three distinct Alaskan Native groups; The Yup’ik, Cup’ik and Athabascan. To access the remote region, one needs to go by boat when the Kuskokwim River is flowing, or truck, snow machine and four-wheeler when the river is frozen.

Draining into the Bering Sea to the west, the Kuskokwim River, and many of its tributaries, are designated as Essential Fish Habitat (EFH), under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act for Pacific Salmon. This is a legislation that manages marine fisheries in US waters.

The sprawling river is a vital source of food for the 38 communities that reside alongside it, serving as a running ground for the chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha), chum salmon (Oncorhynchus keta), coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch), pink salmon (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha) and sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka). Given the remoteness of the region, the communities rely on subsistence fishing. Salmon makes up more than 50 percent of the tribe’s annual diet.

Read the full story at Mongabay

 

Glaciers’ retreat could open new Alaska salmon habitat

January 12, 2022 — Melting glaciers in Alaska and British Columbia could open up new stream habitat for Pacific salmon – conceivably almost equal to the length of the Mississippi River by 2100, under one scenario of “moderate” climate change.

But on balance a warming climate will continue to take its toll on salmon populations on the U.S. Pacific coast.

Researchers from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and the NMFS Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, Wash., published their findings from modeling glacier retreat in the journal Nature Communications, looking at how new salmon spawning streams might appear as ice melts, bedrock gets exposed and new streams thread over the exposed landscape.

“We predict that most of the emerging salmon habitat will occur in Alaska and the transboundary region, at the British Columbia – Alaska border, where large coastal glaciers still exist,” lead author professor Kara Pitman of Simon Fraser University says in a NMFS summary of the findings.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Fishery Closures and the Ghosts of Past Mistakes

October 22, 2021 — David Christian, a 63-year-old gill-netter, first heard about the Pacific salmon fishery closures via cellphone while he was getting his 11-meter Grizzly King gill-netter ready to fish for salmon. The news spread quickly across the calm June waters off the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, as fishers jumped on the radio to figure out what had just happened.

The radio chatter was incessant as fishers wondered aloud where they’d be allowed to fish, if they would be out of business, and what the future would hold. “Everyone was freaking out because all of those questions were unanswered,” Christian says, adding this policy will likely end British Columbia’s commercial salmon industry.

Announced on June 29, the closures are part of the latest plan by Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) to overhaul the Pacific salmon commercial industry in an attempt to save crashing salmon stocks. Pacific salmon harvests are down to just eight percent of their historical averages. The fishers were reacting to the Pacific Salmon Strategy Initiative (PSSI), a CAN $647.1-million plan covering everything from habitat restoration to financial aid for fishers. Its goal: save the salmon and shrink the size of the commercial industry built around them.

Under the PSSI, DFO plans to close 57 percent of the 138 Pacific salmon fisheries along the west coast of British Columbia and Yukon. Closures will help protect at-risk salmon stocks from ending up as by-catch, says Neil Davis, DFO acting regional director of fisheries management. Fishing for salmon in the ocean—unlike traditional practices where Indigenous communities fish in rivers—makes it practically impossible to separate at-risk stocks from healthy stocks.

Davis says closures will protect more than 50 salmon stocks, such as the interior Fraser River coho and Okanagan River chinook, which are being evaluated by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada for listing under the Species at Risk Act.

Read the full story at Hakai Magazine

 

Canada announces big cuts to commercial fishing to protect wild salmon that Washington’s orcas eat

June 30, 2021 — Canada is slashing and closing commercial coastal fishing on more than 100 salmon stocks and permanently downsizing the fleet through voluntary license buybacks in an urgent effort to protect wild salmon from extinction.

Stating Pacific salmon are in long-term decline with many runs on the verge of collapse, Bernadette Jordan, minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard, announced Tuesday that bold action is needed now to stabilize and rebuild stocks before it is too late.

Salmon managers on the U.S. side of the border also are taking steps in an effort to respond to dwindling salmon stocks upon which endangered southern resident orcas rely, including increasing funding to certain hatcheries to increase production.

Some of the Canadian reductions announced in a video news conference Tuesday went into effect immediately. The cutbacks are part of a broader $647 million initiative to save wild salmon, including habitat improvements and a reconsideration of Canada’s aquaculture industry in B.C. waters.

The closures and reductions affect commercial salmon fisheries and First Nations communal commercial fisheries.

Read the full story at The Seattle Times

Pacific Salmon Recovery Report Gives 32 Recommendations to Reverse Salmon Declines

June 29, 2021 — Reversing the complex decline of Pacific salmon will take research, resources, leadership and collaboration, according to a new parliamentary report.

The report, tabled in the House of Commons on June 21 by Fleetwood-Port Kells MP Ken Hardie, caps an investigation into B.C.’s declining salmon populations by Canada’s Standing Committee on Fisheries & Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard.

Read the full story at Seafood News

Scientists push for joint effort to better understand Pacific salmon trends

March 23, 2021 — Forecasting models used to determine stocks and expected landings of Pacific salmon have been rendered obsolete by climate change, and a global effort is needed to update them, a conference of leading marine scientists has concluded.

The conference, “Abundance Dynamics, Stock Status, and Artificial Reproduction of Pacific Salmon in the Northern Pacific,” took place in late February and was initiated by the Russian Federal Agency for Fisheries. Held in both online and offline formats at the Sakhalin branch of the Russian Research Institute of Fisheries and Oceanography (VNIRO), in the Russian city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the event was attended by 500 participants from Russia, the United States, Canada, South Korea, and Japan.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Cardiorespiratory fitness of farmed Atlantic salmon unaffected by virus

March 14, 2019 –The respiratory systems of Atlantic salmon function normally even when carrying large loads of piscine orthoreovirus (PRV), new UBC research has found.

“We didn’t find significant harm to the fish’s respiratory physiology despite the virus replicating to a load equal to, if not higher, than those seen naturally in wild or farmed fish” said Yangfan Zhang, a Ph.D. student in UBC’s faculty of land and food systems and lead author of the study published today in Frontiers in Physiology.

PRV is present in nearly all farmed Atlantic salmon on Canada’s west coast, and various strains of PRV have been detected in many salmonid species around the world. Consequently, the results are a positive step in reducing the uncertainty about the potential of infected farmed Atlantic salmon in marine pens to negatively impact migrating wild Pacific salmon.

Read the full story at Phys.org

New Pacific Salmon Treaty cuts chinook catch

January 9, 2019 — The new Pacific Salmon Treaty went into effect on the first of the year after the treaty’s last 10-year iteration expired on its own terms on 31 December.

The Pacific Salmon Treaty is renegotiated every decade between the United States and Canada to govern salmon catch, research, and enhancement in Alaska, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game made public last week the sections of the treaty that will directly affect Alaskan salmon fisheries, which deal with Transboundary Rivers, Northern British Columbia and Southeastern Alaska, and Chinook salmon.

In an attempt to battle a dramatic multi-year drop in Chinook stocks off of the Pacific coast, the countries agreed to cut their catch of Chinook salmon, with a reduction of up to 12.5 percent in Canada and up to 7.5 percent in the United States.

Some in the industry are not pleased with the new treaty.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

OSU scientist studies slimy new way to count salmon

January 3, 2019 — Scientists have published a novel method for counting Pacific salmon – analyzing DNA from the slime the fish leave behind in their spawning streams.

The study, funded by The National Geographic Society, is published in the journal Molecular Ecology Resources.

“When we analyzed the environmental DNA sloughed into water from salmon tissues, including mucus and skin cells, we got very accurate counts,” said Taal Levi, an ecologist at Oregon State University and lead author on the study. “This is a major first step for more informed salmon management decisions because it opens up the possibility to affordably monitor many more streams than the few that are currently monitored.”

Pacific salmon are a keystone resource in the Pacific Northwest, with an economic impact of well over $500 million each year in Alaska alone. Currently, spawning salmon are counted at just a few streams due to the reliance on human counters, or in rare cases, sonar. Five species of Pacific salmon – pink, chum, sockeye, coho, and chinook – are distributed through more than 6,000 streams in southeast Alaska alone. More than 1,000 of those streams host spawning salmon.

Salmon are anadromous: They migrate from home streams to the ocean as juveniles, and return a few years later as adults to spawn. Anadromous fish such as salmon provide a straightforward scenario for testing whether environmental DNA (eDNA) can be used to count fish, because large numbers of salmon release their DNA as they pass a fixed sampling point, either as they swim up a river or stream as inbound adults or swim downstream as outbound juveniles.

In many rivers and streams, including the majority of freshwater systems in Alaska, adult salmon returning to spawn are poorly monitored, as are fry and smolt production resulting from spawning salmon.

For the study, researchers collected water samples in 2015 and 2016 near the Auke Creek research weir, nearly 16 kilometers north of Juneau. Weirs consist of a series of closely spaced bars across an entire stream to prevent the passage of salmon, except through a single, narrow gate over which a human observer tallies and identifies salmon as they file through.

The Auke Creek weir, cooperatively operated by the National Marine Fisheries Service, in collaboration with the University of Alaska and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, is known as one of the most accurate fish counters in the world, Levi said.

Read the full story at KTVZ

Feds: US fishermen had good year aided by lobsters, scallops

December 14, 2018 — PORTLAND, Maine — U.S. commercial fishing generated more than $144 billion in sales in 2016, buoyed by growth in key species such as sea scallops and American lobsters, the federal government reported on Thursday.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the total of $144.3 billion in sales from commercial fishing in 2016 was up about $100 million from the previous year. The agency released the figure as part of its annual Fisheries Economics of the United States report, one of two reports about the health of fisheries that came out on Thursday.

The economics report states that the industry was boosted by growth in value of some economically critical species, also including shrimp, but other big-money species such as Alaska pollock and pacific salmon were down from the previous year.

The report shows U.S. fisheries holding steady, and continuing to play a critical role in the economies of states from Maine to California, said Ned Cyr, director of NOAA Fisheries Office of Science and Technology.

Read the full story at the Associated Press