Saving Seafood

Alaska: What risk do hatchery fish pose to Prince William Sound’s pinks?

August 31, 2018 — Recently, an argument over whether hatcheries are causing more harm than good has been heating up. The debate is nothing new. But an Alaska Department of Fish and Game study is about to take a step toward answering a question central to the debate: do hatchery fish that spawn with wild populations pose a threat to those stocks?

“You want to make two cuts: one to get at the heart and one to get at the otoliths,” Pete Rand told a group of new filed staff.

Rand is a research ecologist with the Prince William Sound Science Center, and he’s explaining how to sample pink salmon carcasses on the banks of Hartney Creek just outside of Cordova.

Rand picks up one of several pinks lined up on the rocks in front of him and cuts just behind its gills before using a pair of tweezers to tear off a tiny piece of its heart. Then, he cuts into the skull or “brain case” as he calls it and extracts two white otoliths or ear bones. They’re smaller than the head of a pin.

“I put my fingers in the eye socket and you basically want to take the top of the head off,” Rand said as his knife crunched into the decomposing skull of a pink salmon.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

 

Alaska: Pink salmon harvest below forecast, slightly up from 2016

August 31, 2018 — Though pink salmon harvests are ahead of what they were in 2016, the last comparable run-size year, they are still significantly below the forecast level.

As of Aug. 28, Alaska’s commercial pink salmon harvest was 38.2 million fish, about 4 percent ahead of the harvest in 2016. Pink salmon have a two-year life cycle, with large runs in even years and smaller runs on odd-numbered years, so the harvests are compared on every other year as compared to year-over-year like other species. Two years ago, the pink salmon runs returned so small that the U.S. Secretary of Commerce declared a fishery disaster on the Gulf of Alaska pink salmon fisheries.

The total harvest so far is slightly more than half of the forecasted 69.7 million fish for this season. Cook Inlet’s fishermen have harvested about 965,000 pinks, significantly more than the 465,000 in 2016. The vast majority of those — about 838,815 pinks — have been harvested in Lower Cook Inlet, largely the southern district bays around the lower edge of the Kenai Peninsula south of Kachemak Bay. The Port Graham Section alone has harvested 345,648 and the Tutka Bay Special Harvest Area has harvested 269,165, both of which have pink salmon hatcheries nearby.

Pink salmon harvest varies in other areas of the state. Kodiak’s harvest of pinks so far is behind the forecast but significantly better than in the 2016 disaster year. The Alaska Peninsula and Aleutian Islands and Bristol Bay are both behind both their forecasts and the 2016 harvest. Southeast’s pink salmon is about 67 percent below its normal even-year harvest, with about 7.3 million pinks harvested so far compared to the 18.4 million harvested in 2016.

Read the full story at the Peninsula Clarion    

 

ALASKA: Southeast pink salmon catch lowest in over four decades

August 30, 2018 — Southeast Alaska’s commercial pink salmon catch will wind up way below forecasts, the lowest harvest in more than four decades. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s pink and chum salmon project leader for Southeast Andy Piston said the region’s commercial catch this summer is 7.3 million fish.

“And that would be the lowest region-wide harvest since 1976,” Piston said. “And our Southeast purse seine catch, and that’s the gear group that catches most of our pink salmon, is about 6.5 million which again is the lowest we’ve seen since the mid-1970s.”

It’s not the lowest catch ever. There were a handful of years in the 1960s and 70s with lower. The fishery is essentially over and the total catch is not expected to increase very much. This year’s harvest is well below the department’s pre-season forecast of 23 million fish. Two years ago, when the parents of this year’s run spawned, the catch was 18 million and the federal government declared a fishery disaster.

Recent even years have seen very poor returns to inside waters in northern Southeast. Managers were forecasting better runs in the southern Panhandle but those runs fell short. Piston said restrictions on fishing time did allow enough pinks to return to their spawning streams at least on the southern end.

“That’s a positive,” Piston said. “Obviously from a harvest perspective it looks poor but I guess the good thing is that we, it appears we have enough fish in our streams in southern Southeast that if survival rates turn around it gives you the potential to spring back pretty quickly. If you see a turnaround in survival you have enough eggs in the gravel that you can have a turnaround quickly.”

Read the full story at KFSK

Alaska salmon catch down by a third in most regions

July 25, 2018 — Alaska’s salmon fisheries continue to lag alarmingly in several regions, with overall catches down by a third from the same time last year.

The single exception is at the unconquerable Bristol Bay, where a 37 million sockeye catch so far has single-handedly pushed Alaska’s total salmon harvest towards a lackluster 60 million fish.

It’s too soon to press the panic button and there is lots of fishing left to go, but fears are growing that Alaska’s 2018 salmon season will be a bust for most fishermen. Worse, it comes on the heels of a cod crash and tanking halibut markets (and catches).

State salmon managers predicted that Alaska’s salmon harvest this year would be down by 34 percent to 149 million fish; due to an expected shortfall of pinks. But with the exception of Bristol Bay, nobody expected fishing to be this bad.

Catches of sockeye, the big money fish, are off by millions at places like  Copper River, Chignik and Kodiak, which has had the weakest sockeye harvest in nearly 40 years.

The weekly update by the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute said that coho and Chinook catches remain slow, and while it is still way early in the season, the “bread and butter” pink harvests are off by 65 percent from the strong run of two years ago.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

ALASKA: Hatchery debate wages on as research continues

July 13, 2018 — A conflict is intensifying over hatcheries in Prince William Sound.

For the second time this year, Alaska’s Board of Fisheries will weigh an emergency petition to block a Solomon Gulch Hatchery from increasing its production.

This is the latest skirmish in a battle over whether pink salmon hatcheries are causing more harm than good.

“This is the incubation room in here, and what we’re having here is stacks of incubators,” Cook Inlet Aquaculture Association executive director Gary Fandrei said, pointing toward stacks of incubators that look like the drawers to a really large tool chest. “We actually have a total of 359 incubators that we have available to us in here.”

Fandrei gives a tour of the Tutka Bay Lagoon Hatchery near Homer.

The facility will harvest up to 125 million pink salmon eggs this summer. Depending on survival, most of those eggs will hatch in the fall.

Like other pink salmon hatcheries, the one at Tutka Bay has attracted scrutiny in the past couple of years over growing environmental concerns.

Read the full story at KTOO

Disaster Declared for West Coast Fisheries

January 23, 2017 — SEATTLE — Nine West Coast salmon and crab fisheries have been declared a disaster, allowing fishing communities to seek relief from the federal government.

Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker declared the disaster on Jan. 18.

Nine salmon and crab fisheries in Alaska, California and Washington suffered “sudden and unexpected large decreases in fish stock biomass or loss of access due to unusual ocean and climate conditions,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.

The fisheries include Gulf of Alaska pink salmon, California Dungeness and rock crab, and several tribal salmon fisheries in Washington.

Read the full story at Courthouse News

ALASKA: State Rep. Stutes moves for disaster declaration for pink salmon

September 1, 2016 — Wheels are already in motion to provide two measures of relief for Alaska’s pink salmon industry, which is reeling from the lowest harvest since the late 1970s.

Rep. Louise Stutes, R-Kodiak, began the process last week to have the Walker Administration declare the pink salmon season a disaster, which would allow access to federal relief funds.

Pinks are Alaska’s highest volume salmon fishery and hundreds of fishermen depend on the fish to boost their overall catches and paychecks. So far the statewide harvest has reached just 36 million humpies out of a preseason forecast of 90 million. That compares to a catch of 190 million pinks last summer.

“This is the worst salmon year in nearly 40 years, and that’s huge,” she said. “It doesn’t just affect the fishermen; it’s a trickle-down effect on the cannery workers, the processors, and nearly all businesses in the community. It’s a disaster, there’s no other way to describe it.”

Stutes, who chairs the House fisheries committee and is known as a straight talker, said she has gotten very positive response from the state Department of Commerce, Community and Economic Development.

“They are on it and already moving forward,” Stutes said.

Read the full story at the Alaska Journal of Commerce

ALASKA: Sockeyes are silver lining in an otherwise miserable year for Alaska salmon

August 22, 2016 — Alaska’s 2016 pink salmon fishery is set to rank as the worst in 20 years by a long shot, and the outlook is bleak for other salmon except sockeyes, too.

“Boy, sockeye is really going to have to carry the load in terms of the fishery’s value because there’s a lot of misses elsewhere,” said Andy Wink, a fisheries economist with the Juneau-based McDowell Group.

The peaks of the various salmon runs have passed. The pink salmon catch so far has yet to break 35 million during a year when the forecast called for 90 million fish. Last year, 190 million were harvested.

Weekly tracking through Aug. 15 shows:

— The king salmon harvest (341,000) down 42 percent from last year in net fisheries (though the troll-caught catch is strong);

— Silvers (fewer than 2 million) down 20 percent;

— Chums (12 million) down 25 percent. “We’re probably looking at the second-worst harvest in the past 10 years,” Wink said.

Read the full story at the Alaska Dispatch News

NOAA recommends millions in grants to study salmon, cod, shrimp, lobster

June 14, 2016 — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced its support for more than USD 11 million (EUR 9.8 million) in recommended grants to study or improve the nation’s fisheries as part of its Saltonstall-Kennedy grant competition.

The grants, which still must be approved by the NOAA Grants Management Division and the Department of Commerce’s Financial Assistance Law Division, and are contingent upon adequate funding availability, include projects in seven categories: aquaculture, fishery data collection, bycatch reduction, climate change adaptation, marketing, socio-economic research and territorial science.

All areas of the United States, including overseas territories, have projects that have been recommended.

In Alaska, they include a proposed University of Alaska, Fairbanks study of halibut bycatch management (USD 297,995, EUR 264,877) and an Alaska Department of Fish and Game analysis of pink salmon productivity (USD 249,998, EUR 222,222).

Read the full story at SeafoodSource.com