Saving Seafood

Pacific Fishery Management Council Chooses Options 2018 Salmon Season

March 19, 2018 — The following was released by the Pacific Fishery Management Council:

ROHNERT PARK, Calif. – The Pacific Fishery Management Council has adopted for public review three alternatives for the 2018 salmon seasons off the West Coast of the United States. The Council will select a final alternative at their next meeting in Portland, Oregon April 6-11. Detailed information about season starting dates, areas open, and catch limits for all three alternatives are available on the Council’s website at www.pcouncil.org.

Fisheries north of Cape Falcon (in northern Oregon) are limited by the need to reduce catch of lower Columbia natural tule Chinook and coho stocks of concern. Additionally, three stocks of coho (Queets River, Strait of Juan de Fuca, and Snohomish) currently meet the criteria for overfished status, which is also a concern when structuring 2018 fisheries. The Council also provided guidance to structure ocean fisheries so that the ocean escapement of Columbia River upriver bright fall Chinook is at least 200,000 fish, which will allow more access to that healthy stock in Columbia River treaty Indian and non-Indian fisheries.

Fisheries south of Cape Falcon are limited by the need to reduce catch of Oregon Coast natural coho, Klamath River fall Chinook, Sacramento River fall Chinook, and Rouge/Klamath coho.  Klamath River fall Chinook and Sacramento River fall Chinook contribute significantly to ocean harvest, but both met the criteria for overfished status as a result of poor returns over the past three years.  However, the forecast for Klamath River fall Chinook is substantially improved over last year, and both stocks are projected to meet their spawning escapement objectives under this year’s management alternatives.

“Although some abundance forecasts are improved over last year, the 2018 salmon runs still present a challenge for ocean fishermen and managers throughout the west coast,” said Executive Director Chuck Tracy. “In the north, low returns of some Puget Sound and Washington coastal coho runs and lower Columbia River natural tule fall Chinook will constrain fisheries. In the south, the conservation needs of Sacramento River fall Chinook and Rogue/Klamath coho will constrain fisheries.”

“Once again, the Council adopted a range of management alternatives for public review designed to conserve and rebuild a broad range of Chinook and coho stocks of concern. Commercial and recreational fisheries will face restrictions in areas along the entire west coast in response to the Council’s conservation efforts” said Council Chair Phil Anderson.

Northern Oregon and Washington (north of Cape Falcon)

Sport season alternatives

Ocean sport fishery alternatives north of Cape Falcon in Oregon and off the Washington coast include Chinook recreational quotas ranging from 22,500 to 32,500, a decrease from 2017. For coho, recreational quotas range from 16,800 to 42,000 hatchery coho, compared to 42,000 in 2017.  Starting dates range from June 23 to July 1, and in all alternatives, recreational fisheries are scheduled to run through early September. Both coho and Chinook retention are allowed in all alternatives.

Commercial season alternatives

Non-Indian ocean commercial fishery alternatives north of Cape Falcon include traditional Chinook seasons between May and September. Chinook quotas for all areas and times range from 22,500 to 32,500, compared to 45,000 in 2017. Coho quotas in the commercial fishery alternatives range from 3,200 to 5,600 marked coho, similar to 2017.

Read the release in its entirety here.

 

Pacific Heat Wave Known As ‘The Blob’ Appears To Be In Retreat

March 16, 2018 — Ocean conditions off the Pacific Northwest seem to be returning to normal after a three-year spike in water temperature.

It’s promising long-term news for fishermen who are looking ahead in the short term to yet another year of low salmon returns.

A report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) outlined the latest ocean observations for the organization that sets salmon catch limits off the West Coast. The Pacific Fishery Management Council will set those limits in early April.

The extended marine heatwave of the past few years has been nicknamed “the Blob.”

“The high pressure system over the North Pacific basically got stalled out and stuck there. And so the ocean warmed up about 6 degrees Fahrenheit,” NOAA’s Toby Garfield said.

Then a strong El Niño came through that reinforced these conditions.

“There have been a number of these events, these marine heat waves, that have occurred in the North Pacific. But the one we had in ’13, ’14, ’15 was the by far the largest in the record going back 45 years,” Garfield said.

And the effect on sea life was serious. Whales, sea lions and seabirds starved because the warm water didn’t support tiny nutrition-rich plankton called copepods at the base of the food chain.

Within the past year, the El Niño effect has dissipated, and other longer-term climate cycles are shifting back toward a more average level.

Read the full story at OPB

 

West Coast Waters Returning to Normal; Some Fisheries Remain Disrupted

March 13, 2018 — SEAFOOD NEWS — Ocean conditions off most of the U.S. West Coast are returning roughly to average, after an extreme marine heat wave from about 2014 to 2016 disrupted the California Current Ecosystem and shifted many species beyond their traditional range, according to a new report from NOAA Fisheries’ two marine laboratories on the West Coast. Some warm waters remain off the Pacific Northwest, however.

The Southwest Fisheries Science Center and Northwest Fisheries Science Center presented their annual “California Current Ecosystem Status Report” to the Pacific Fishery Management Council at the Council’s meeting in Rohnert Park, Calif., on Friday, March 9. The California Current encompasses the entire West Coast marine ecosystem, and the report informs the Council about conditions and trends in the ecosystem that may affect marine species and fishing in the coming year.

“The report gives us an important glimpse at what the science is saying about the species and resources that we manage and rely on in terms of our West Coast economy,” Council Chairman Phil Anderson, of Westport, Wash., said in a press release. “The point is that we want to be as informed as we can be when we make decisions that affect those species, and this report helps us do that.”

Unusually warm ocean temperatures, referred to as “the Blob,” encompassed much of the West Coast beginning about 2014, combining with an especially strong El Nino pattern in 2015. The warm conditions have now waned, although some after-effects remain.

Warmer waters were blamed for increased growth of Pseudo nitzschia, which produces domoic acid. The domoic acid interrupted several fisheries, including Dungeness crab, rock crab and spiny lobster.

Read the full story with a subscription at Seafood News

 

A big drop in the pacific sardine population

March 9, 2018 — A small fish is taking a big hit on the west coast.

This is according to a recent study by the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Pacific Fishery Management Council.

They say that since 2006 there has been a 97% decrease in the pacific sardine population spanning from Mexico to British Columbia. A big change from the early 1900’s when the canning business was booming in Monterey. Because of this there are now only short seasons for fisherman to catch them… Which aren’t open every year.

Read and watch the full story at KION

 

West Coast sardine fishing closed for 4th year; ‘alarming’ 97% population decline

March 8, 2018 — Sardine fishing nets will remain empty for a fourth straight year along the West Coast, where biologists are comparing the dramatic decline of the schooling fish to the infamous collapse that led to the downfall of Monterey’s once-thriving Cannery Row.

The northern Pacific sardine population, stretching from Mexico to British Columbia, has plummeted 97 percent since 2006, according to an assessment released this week by the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Pacific Fishery Management Council.

The perilously low numbers give regulators no choice but to close fishing, which had been scheduled to start July 1, from Mexico to the Canadian border.

The 14 voting members of the fishery council, which makes policy along the coasts of California, Oregon and Washington, will meet April 8 in Portland, Ore., to discuss the results, but everyone agrees a fishing ban is inevitable. The council is required by federal law to close ocean fishing when the numbers fall this far below conservation objectives.

Read the full story at the San Francisco Chronicle

 

Salmon seasons off S. Oregon coast in jeopardy

March 6, 2018 — MEDFORD, Ore. — Continued problems with Sacramento River salmon survival means there likely will be very little, maybe even zero, sport and commercial salmon fishing this summer off the Southern Oregon coast.

The Medford Mail Tribune says preliminary stock assessments estimate only 229,400 Sacramento River fall Chinook will be in the ocean. That’s 1,300 fewer than last year’s small run, whose protection shut down sport and commercial Chinook fishing off Southern Oregon.

Salmon managers heading into the Pacific Fishery Management Council’s March 8-14 meeting say they think the council will be able to propose at least possible sport and commercial seasons with as little impact to Sacramento stocks as possible.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at KTVZ

 

D.B. Pleschner: Is court the right place to determine ‘best available science’?

February 12, 2018 — A U.S. District Court judge recently ruled that the federal government’s catch limit for California’s central stock of anchovy — currently 25,000 metric tons — is far too high.

But instead of weighing all the facts, the judge ignored them, shunned the established precedent of deference to federal agencies’ scientific determinations and instead endorsed the flawed arguments of the advocacy group Oceana.

So what happened?

It’s a well-accepted fact that the anchovy population on the West Coast has extreme natural variations in abundance, even without fishing. To account for these wild swings, scientists reduced the overfishing limit of 100,000 tons by 75 percent, setting the annual catch limit at 25,000 metric tons. The Pacific Fishery Management Council’s Science and Statistical Committee approved the numbers as “best available science” and the National Marine Fisheries Service agreed, recognizing that the anchovy resource ranges from peaks of more than two million tons to orders of magnitude lower and quickly jumps back up again.

In California, the anchovy fishery declined in the 1980s due to adverse market conditions and landings have averaged less than 10,000 tons a year ever since. But this fishery is still important because it keeps the local fleet on the water and processing plant doors open when no other fish are available.

Regardless, environmentalists began lobbying the council in 2015 to curtail California’s anchovy catch limit after one advocacy group funded a new research paper that reassessed the basis for anchovy management — a 1991 study based on egg and larval data that represented long-term average biomass abundance, not a single-year stock assessment. Because the reassessment had virtually no adult anchovy biological data from recent years to correlate, the authors had to make assumptions. They concluded that the anchovy population had collapsed, with current biomass estimated at only about 15,000 tons coast-wide.

But other scientists challenged the findings, in part because the new estimate excluded Mexico where a substantial portion of the stock resides, and it also omitted nearshore waters where fishermen were reporting masses of anchovy.

Richard Parrish, retired from NMFS after decades of experience with anchovy, critiqued the paper and stated, “The biomass estimates in the paper cannot be used to estimate the 2016 biomass of the northern stock of anchovy…” He continued, “Clearly, with northern anchovy a five-year-old biomass estimate is not significantly better at estimating current biomass than a 25-year-old biomass estimate.” That statement was included in the Administrative Record (AR) for the Oceana lawsuit, but the judge ignored it.

In 2016, the council sponsored a data-poor workshop where internationally recognized scientists reviewed the new egg-larval analysis along with other available data and also rejected the study’s findings. As one member said, “The estimate did not pass the straight face test.”

Here’s why: the new assessment did not consider anchovy fishery landings, which in 2015 totaled about 64,000 tons, only 17,000 tons in California (still under the 25,000 ton catch limit) and the rest from Mexico. As Parrish pointed out, “Clearly, the absolute minimum biomass estimate for 2015, assuming that the fishery caught every last anchovy in the population, would be 64,114 tons. If fishermen took 50 percent of the biomass, based on recorded landings, the estimate would be 128,000 tons and if they took only 20 percent of the biomass, the estimate would be 320,000 tons, massively above the study’s assertions.”

Read the full opinion piece at the Santa Cruz Sentinel 

 

Pacific perch stocks declared ‘rebuilt’

January 18, 2018 — PORTLAND, Ore. — In welcome news for commercial fishermen, an important West Coast groundfish stock that was formerly overfished has now been rebuilt.

Pacific ocean perch, which is managed by the Pacific Fishery Management Council and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS or NOAA Fisheries), has constrained the West Coast trawl fishery for decades.

Pacific ocean perch was overfished starting in the mid-1960s when foreign fleets targeted groundfish stocks, in particular Pacific ocean perch, off the U.S. West Coast. The mandates of the 1976 Magnuson-Stevens Act, the primary law governing U.S. fisheries management, eventually ended foreign fishing within 200 miles of the U.S. coast. The first federal trip limits to discourage targeting and to conserve a U.S. West Coast groundfish stock were implemented for Pacific ocean perch in 1979 by the PFMC and NMFS. Rebuilding plans for Pacific ocean perch were adopted in 2000 and 2003.

Managing groundfish fisheries under rebuilding plans has been an immense challenge for the Pacific Council and the NMFS, accoding to a press release from the agencies. These plans required sharp reductions in commercial and recreational fisheries targeting groundfish, and included widespread fishing closures through the establishment of Rockfish Conservation Areas off the West Coast and other measures.

“We are pleased to see that our management strategies have been successful in rebuilding this important groundfish stock, and want to acknowledge the industries’ cooperation and sacrifice in this effort,” said Council Chair Phil Anderson. “We also want to recognize NMFS for committing the resources to monitor and research groundfish stocks to improve the science used to sustainably manage these stocks.”

Read the full story at the Daily Astorian

 

Lori Steele: Flexibility with Choke Species Key Issue for Magnuson, Seafood News Missed the Mark

January 3, 2018 — SEAFOOD NEWS — The following is a letter form Lori Steele, the Executive Director of the West Coast Seafood Processors Association, responding to the Seafood News story, “MSA Reauthorization Veers From Core Principles After House Committee Vote; Would Allow Overfishing,” originally published on December 19, 2017: 

Your story on Dec. 19, 2017, “MSA Reauthorization Veers From Core Principles After House Committee Vote; Would Allow Overfishing,” contains some questionable statements, particularly the suggestion that core principles of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA) are being eroded by the changes proposed in the House bill, H.R. 200, the Strengthening Fishing Communities and Increasing Flexibility in Fisheries Management Act.

The assertion that, “changing words like ‘to the extent possible’ to ‘to the extent [practicable]’ when rebuilding stocks” will make the MSA weaker and less precise is incorrect and disingenuous. The West Coast Seafood Processors Association (WCSPA), along with the majority of the U.S. seafood industry, has supported this change through several MSA reauthorization bills over the last few years. The inclusion of this in H.R. 200 should be viewed as a success. This change will not compromise or weaken the effectiveness of the MSA; rather, it will help to truly fulfill one of the fundamental and original goals of the MSA, emphasized in National Standard 1, the Act’s guiding principle – to prevent overfishing while achieving, on a continuing basis the optimum yield from each fishery. From its beginning, the MSA has conserved, protected, rebuilt, and sustained our nation’s marine resources. As we move forward with this reauthorization, we have an opportunity to better conserve, protect, and sustain the people, the economies, the culture, and the communities that rely upon healthy and abundant fisheries.

Case in Point: The Pacific Fishery Management Council faced a situation like this in 2013 with rebuilding plans for two rockfish stocks. At that time, allowing 30-mt increase in the ACL of a single rockfish species while achieving rebuilt status in December of that year – vs. January of that same year – would have provided for another few hundred tons of associated rockfish landings. While the dockside landed value of those fish may not have been viewed as significant, the indirect value was enormous: Having more incidental species available would have provided additional opportunity for commercial, sport, and tribal harvesters to access abundant stocks of fish that currently go unharvested due to the choke species effect. In turn, local vessels would have had another few weeks on the water, processors would have had longer seasons, consumers would have had more healthy domestic seafood – all without any risk to the status of the rebuilding rockfish species. Yet, the interpretation of the law required selection of a rebuilding time that would be as short as possible, not as short as practicable.

Simply changing the terminology from “possible” to “practicable” in the rebuilding requirements of the MSA would provide Councils much needed flexibility and the option to choose between several rebuilding scenarios to achieve specified conservation and management objectives, not just the shortest and most harmful to fishing communities. This change could benefit coastal communities without undermining any conservation and stock rebuilding objectives. The Councils would be able to exercise some reasonable judgment so they could, for example, allow a fish stock to be rebuilt in December rather than January, which were the choices available for canary rockfish in the above example.

We certainly agree that there is a need to work towards a more bipartisan bill, but just as Rep. Huffman stated, the one sticking point is “how the bill dealt with annual catch limits and the rebuilding framework under Magnuson.” This is indeed a “big deal,” and it’s exactly why the industry must stand behind the elements of H.R. 200 that provide much-needed flexibility to the Councils to better meet the standards set forth in the Act while also better meeting the socioeconomic needs of regional fisheries and fishing communities.

I hope that seafoodnews.com will support the U.S. fishing industry with this effort. Thank you for your consideration of my perspective.

Sincerely,

Lori Steele

This letter originally appeared on Seafoodnews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

 

Ocean perch stock rebuilt, could lead to more commercial fishing opportunities in 2019

December 21, 2017 — Federal restrictions designed to protect Pacific ocean perch from overfishing have worked well enough for the Pacific Fishery Management Council to consider the fishery “rebuilt,” meaning it will relax restrictions. Once the new rules take effect in 2019 it should have significant economic value to the coast, experts say.

“It’s a big deal for fisheries along the coast,” said Phil Anderson, who works with Ocean Gold Seafood in Westport and serves as chairman of the Pacific Fishery Management Council. “It’s another one in the line of species that were determined to be overfished here about a decade ago that has since been rebuilt.”

Pacific ocean perch have been overfished since the mid-1960s when foreign fleets targeted groundfish stocks, in particular Pacific ocean perch, off the U.S. West Coast. The mandates of the 1976 Magnuson-Stevens Act, the primary law governing U.S. fisheries management, eventually ended foreign fishing within 200 miles of the coast. The first Federal trip limits to discourage targeting and to conserve a U.S. West Coast groundfish stock were implemented for Pacific ocean perch in 1979. Rebuilding plans for Pacific ocean perch were adopted in 2000 and 2003.

Pacific ocean perch is one of many species of groundfish, managed and regulated by the Pacific Fishery Management Council. The fish, which live near the bottom of the ocean, mingle and protection of the perch has constrained the West Coast trawl fishery for decades.

Read the full story at The Daily World