Saving Seafood

US promises $240 million to improve fish hatcheries, protect tribal rights in Pacific Northwest

July 26, 2024 — The U.S. government will invest $240 million in salmon and steelhead hatcheries in the Pacific Northwest to boost declining fish populations and support the treaty-protected fishing rights of Native American tribes, officials announced Thursday.

The departments of Commerce and the Interior said there will be an initial $54 million for hatchery maintenance and modernization made available to 27 tribes in the region, which includes Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Alaska.

The hatcheries “produce the salmon that tribes need to live,” said Jennifer Quan, the regional administrator for NOAA Fisheries West Coast Region. “We are talking about food for the tribes and supporting their culture and their spirituality.”

Some of the facilities are on the brink of failure, Quan said, with a backlog of deferred maintenance that has a cost estimated at more than $1 billion.

Read the full article at the Associated Press

Canada to ban open-net salmon farms in British Columbia waters by 2029

June 20, 2024 — Canada will ban open-net salmon farms off the coast of British Columbia by the middle of 2029 in order to help protect dwindling wild Pacific salmon populations, the federal government said on Wednesday.

Salmon are a culturally and ecologically significant species on Canada’s west coast, but more than half of the 9,000 distinct populations in British Columbia are in a state of decline, according to the Pacific Salmon Foundation.

WASHINGTON: The decline of Pacific salmon is ‘death by a thousand cuts,’ expert says

December 14, 2023 — For all the impacts of other endangered species on the human communities they coexist with — owls and timber harvesting, wolves and ranching — there are few species that have affected more people than the decline of Pacific salmon.

And the people who have arguably been hit the hardest: the tribes of the Pacific Northwest.

“Salmon is really the heart of our culture. We’re salmon people,” said Donella Miller, a citizen of Yakama Nation. “When we’re born, we drink our mother’s milk, but salmon was always our first food. That was the first solid food that I ate.”

Miller is also the fisheries science manager for the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission. She helps evaluate hatchery programs, oversees the commission’s genetics lab in Idaho and manages their river ecology projects.

The threats facing salmon aren’t any one thing — and that’s what makes them so vexing.

“It’s a complex issue and you can’t pinpoint one specific thing,” Miller said. “I refer to it as death by a thousand cuts.”

Read the full article at WITX

Biden-Harris Administration makes $106 million available for Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund as part of Investing in America Agenda

December 5, 2023 — The following was released by NOAA:

Today, the Department of Commerce and NOAA are announcing the availability of up to $106 million in funding through the Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund (PCSRF) for Pacific salmon and steelhead recovery and conservation projects. This funding — which includes funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) — will support state and tribal salmon restoration projects and activities to protect, conserve and restore these fish populations and their habitats.

“Restoring Pacific salmon populations and their habitats is vital for communities on the West Coast and in Alaska,” said Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo. “This funding — supported  by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act, a key pillar of Bidenomics — will power transformational, high-impact projects and support efforts by states and tribes to protect and conserve salmon populations.”

Read the full release from NOAA

Fish out of water: North American drought bakes salmon

November 23, 2023 — One after another, salmon leapt out of the water and hurtled themselves at the falls, propelled by instinct to move upriver. They, like all Pacific salmon, were born in freshwater, migrated to the ocean and were now returning as adults to their natal streams to spawn and die. But the Fraser River was running low after months of drought. At this stretch near the Bridge River Rapids in southwestern British Columbia, Canada, the water was so low in mid-October that the salmon couldn’t access their usual passage up the fish ladder. Instead, they were desperately trying to find another way over the rocks, but they couldn’t make it.

For these fish, help was at hand. For days, members and friends of the Xwísten, an Indigenous group that is part of the St’át’imc Nation and whose territory encompasses this traditional fishing spot, scooped up salmon with large dip nets, passed them hand to hand in a human chain up the rocks, and released them above the falls. In all, they moved more than 7,000 fish. Eventually machinery was brought in; an all-terrain excavator chiseled out rocks to ease the salmon’s transit over the falls, and a helicopter dropped sandbags to raise the water level near the fish ladder.

“The project to save the fish is important to not only our community but to the St’at’imc Nation and many other Nations along the Fraser River,” says Xwísten Chief Ina Williams via text. “There are many animals, four-legged and winged, that also rely on the fish.”

Read the full article at Mongabay

Can the United Nations help save Pacific salmon?

April 25, 2023 — The high seas — the ocean waters that begin 230 miles offshore — cover 43% of the planet’s surface and are home to as many as 10 million species, yet remain one of the least understood places on Earth. Among the region’s many mysteries are how Pacific salmon, one of the West’s most beloved and economically important fish, spend the majority of their lives — and why many populations are plummeting. Combined with how little we know about what climate change is doing out there, such questions make the area an international research and conservation priority.

These sprawling waters, though, are a mostly lawless zone, beyond the reaches of any national authority and governable only by international consensus and treaties. They face tremendous challenges that no nation can address alone: Climate change is causing marine heat waves and acidification, while overfishing and pollution are crippling ecosystems, even as pressure grows from companies and nations eager to drill and mine the ocean depths. In early March, negotiators representing nearly 200 nations came to a historic agreement aimed at protecting the ocean’s creatures and ecosystems. When the new United Nations High Seas Treaty was announced, marine scientists and conservationists around the globe rejoiced.

But what will the treaty actually mean for conservation in a region about which humanity knows less than the moon? When it comes to Pacific salmon, will the new treaty’s tools — and the international symbolism and momentum involved in agreeing to them — aid efforts to manage and protect them? Do the provisions go far enough? Here’s what the experts say.

The treaty’s protective tools may not be what salmon need

The treaty’s top provision establishes a road map for creating marine protected areas (MPAs) in international waters. Like national parks for the ocean, MPAs are zones that typically limit fishing or other activities to preserve ecosystems and species. When adequately enforced, they are widely considered to be a powerful tool for ocean and coastal conservation. They are also seen as key to reaching the U.N.’s goal to protect 30% of the planet’s oceans by 2030 — a goal the world is woefully behind on, with just 3% to 8% currently protected.

But when it comes to Pacific salmon, it is unclear whether MPAs can do anything at all. Salmon fishing in international waters has been banned since the 1990s, so future MPAs there will not reduce fishing. And while boosting enforcement of fishing bans may benefit other species, many believe illegal salmon fishing on the high seas is extremely low.

Still, some salmon experts believe that high-seas marine preserves could provide indirect protection: By limiting other fishing, they could prevent salmon from being caught accidentally. They might also help preserve important marine food webs, though such ecosystems are vast, mobile and hard to monitor.

“If salmon used those [protected areas] as part of their migration and ocean habitat, then, yes, it could be beneficial,” said Brian Riddell, retired CEO and current science advisor to the Canadian nonprofit Pacific Salmon Foundation. “But to associate changes in marine survival to [an MPA], I think would be very, very difficult.”

MPAs also don’t address climate change or the marine heat waves that many researchers believe are a key factor in recent salmon declines. Matt Sloat, science director at the Oregon-based Wild Salmon Center, said that limiting global emissions would do more to protect salmon.

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Although much remains unknown, recent research suggests that salmon ranges in the ocean are shifting or shrinking because of temperature changes. Salmon are also getting smaller, suggesting there may be more competition for fewer resources. “And then [hatcheries] are putting billions more hungry mouths into that smaller area,” Sloat said, referring to the sometimes-controversial state, federal and tribal hatcheries in the U.S. and other countries that raise and release quotas of juvenile salmon each year to maintain local fisheries. He believes that improving international coordination of the scale of those releases, rather than governing remote ocean habitats, might also improve salmon survival in the ocean.

Read the full article article at Crosscut

North Pacific council holds to status quo on salmon bycatch

April 16, 2023 — The North Pacific Fishery Management Council again drew fire from critics for its inactions to stop salmon bycatch  during its meetings in April, when it reviewed information presented by its Advisory Panel and from its newly-formed Salmon Bycatch Committee.

But in the end, it voted to continue using prohibited species caps based on historical bycatch numbers, until more detailed information becomes available.

The motion chagrined commercial and subsistence users living in villages dotting the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers and along the northern Bering Sea. They argue that the historical caps don’t reflect present populations, which have declined to the point that they no longer have their salmon fisheries

SalmonState, a non-profit organization dedicated to reducing bycatch, delivered some 700 written comments to the council, most of them urging the 11-member panel to put a more restrictive cap on the incidental take of salmon. Other concerns include the incidental take of crab and other species in the mix that comes up mostly during the B season when pollock trawlers tow in the eastern Bering Sea.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Will the new U.N. High Seas Treaty help protect Pacific salmon?

April 13, 2023 — The high seas — the ocean waters that begin 230 miles offshore — cover 43% of the planet’s surface and are home to as many as 10 million species, yet remain one of the least understood places on Earth. Among the region’s many mysteries are how Pacific salmon, one of the West’s most beloved and economically important fish, spend the majority of their lives — and why many populations are plummeting. Combined with how little we know about what climate change is doing out there, such questions make the area an international research and conservation priority.

These sprawling waters, though, are a mostly lawless zone, beyond the reaches of any national authority and governable only by international consensus and treaties. They face tremendous challenges that no nation can address alone: Climate change is causing marine heat waves and acidification, while overfishing and pollution are crippling ecosystems, even as pressure grows from companies and nations eager to drill and mine the ocean depths. In early March, negotiators representing nearly 200 nations came to a historic agreement aimed at protecting the ocean’s creatures and ecosystems. When the new United Nations High Seas Treaty was announced, marine scientists and conservationists around the globe rejoiced.

But what will the treaty actually mean for conservation in a region about which humanity knows less than the moon? When it comes to Pacific salmon, will the new treaty’s tools — and the international symbolism and momentum involved in agreeing to them — aid efforts to manage and protect them? Do the provisions go far enough? Here’s what the experts say.

Read the full article at High Country News

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