March 3, 2021 — Gorton’s Seafood is stepping up production and is embarking on a new marketing campaign to cement the significant sales growth it garnered through the COVID-19 pandemic.
Over the past year, Gorton’s retail sales surged 34 percent, with its breaded and battered wild Alaska pollock entrees snaring the highest sales increases, Kurt Hogan, the president and CEO of the Gloucester, Massachusetts, U.S.A.-based processor, told SeafoodSource.
March 1, 2021 — A meteoric global rise of frozen Alaska pollock consumption during the course of 2020 could not make up for an overall decrease in pollock consumption by US consumers compared to the previous year.
That’s largely due to reduced imports as well as a smaller catch for domestic product during the year. Alaska pollock producers ended B season last year leaving nearly 65,000 fish in the water due to several challenging factors, including less-valuable fish sizes and a biomass widely dispersed across the grounds
While consumption declined by 11 percent in 2020 to 0.873 pounds per person from 2019 levels of 0.983 pounds per person, the overall US per capita consumption of pollock was still well above 2018’s level of 0.717 pounds per person, according to the Association of Genuine Alaska Pollock Producers’ (GAPP).
“Despite this slight decline in 2020, the jump in the percentage of domestically-caught fish makes it clear that US consumers are trying, loving and gravitating towards our Wild Alaska Pollock like never before,” said GAPP CEO Craig Morris.
February 25, 2021 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:
Many marine fish and crab species spend their critical early development stages of life in shallow, coastal waters. Scientists at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center’s Auke Bay Laboratories conducted a pilot study using environmental DNA (eDNA) techniques in 2020. They identified more than 40 species in nine sites around Juneau, Alaska.
Every marine organism sheds small amounts of tissue and waste into the water. This material potentially contains eDNA from the source organism. Genetic analysis of the eDNA can help us to identify species and detect the diversity of species. It can also possibly determine the abundance of each species that have been present in the water sample even days after the organism has left the area. Environmental DNA can complement traditional surveys that are able to identify the age or size of a species.
The major objective of this study was to demonstrate that eDNA metabarcoding represents a feasible and cost-effective alternative to traditional sampling for collecting species diversity data and identifying Essential Fish Habitat (EFH). While eDNA has been used to assess biodiversity in many environments, it is important to verify the technique and compare it to data collected from traditional surveys to ensure that results are robust. This is especially important in dynamic environments such as those found in Alaska, where variables such as large tidal swings and severe weather can influence eDNA transport and detection.
“There are so many ways eDNA research can help us do our jobs better,” said Wes Larson, program manager, Genetics Laboratory. “We are able to detect a fish after it has left an area. It is also a less invasive means for sampling habitats that enables us to detect cryptic fish. Cryptic fish are fish that may not typically be sampled in traditional survey gear or may be a rare or low-density organism that surveys miss. Additionally, eDNA can help us detect important pelagic fish like cod and pollock that may be offshore and could avoid smaller nets. ”
February 25, 2021 — U.S. quick-service restaurants are banking heavily on Lent for a lift as the foodservice sector continues to battle through the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fish sandwiches have been popular additions to many menus in advance of the Lenten season, and Dairy Queen has become the latest chain to add a pollock fish sandwich, the Wild Alaskan Fish Sandwich, which includes a fried wild pollock fillet, lettuce, and tangy tartar sauce on a toasted bun. In addition, Jack in the Box’s new Deluxe Fish Sandwich features two fillets of wild Alaska pollock covered in crispy panko bread crumbs, along with cheese, tomato and tartar sauce, per Chew Boom. And Bojangles recently brought back its Bojangler fish sandwich, made with wild Alaskan pollock, while Wienerschnitzel’s reprised its Fish ’N Chips dish, which includes panko-crusted Alaskan pollock with french fries and tartar sauce.
February 19, 2021 — Not unlike its effect on humans, the pandemic’s impact on the seafood industry has been variable, erratic, often devastating. The first symptoms appeared long before Covid-19 gained a stronghold on U.S. shores, as China went into its first lockdown and a critical export market disappeared overnight—seafood processors and dealers in Maine saw international demand for lobsters temporarily vanish. Then as social distancing rules kicked in here, another major organ of the U.S. supply chain—restaurants, where most seafood purchases are made—fell limp. Then Covid outbreaks at processing plants caused the system to further buckle, leaving many fishermen with nowhere to sell their catch. Prices for many species plummeted. Some fishers gave up for the season, leaving boats tied up at the docks.
“It wasn’t worth it,” recalled Brian Pearce, a commercial fisherman based in Portland, Maine, who catches pollock, hake, and cod, and has barely fished since the pandemic started. “The price was to the point where you’re not going to make enough money.”
To many in the food industry, the pandemic’s impact has exposed the fundamental vulnerabilities of a system that has long favored efficiency over resilience. Like supply chains that draw products from many sources but are ultimately contingent on single outlets (e.g., export markets or restaurants). Or the fact that the majority of U.S.-caught seafood is exported to other countries, but—paradoxically—most seafood Americans eat is imported.
February 10, 2021 — Freezing February weather doesn’t keep Alaskans off the fishing grounds from Southeast to Norton Sound.
In the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska, boats are pulling in pollock, cod, flounders and other groundfish.
More than 3 billion pounds of pollock will come out of the Bering Sea this year, and another 250 million pounds from the gulf.
Prince William Sound also has a winter pollock fishery that will produce nearly 5 million pounds.
Many Alaska crab fisheries are underway or soon to be.
January 29, 2021 — Trident Seafoods is reporting COVID-19 cases among more than a third of the roughly 705 workers at the company’s remote Akutan processing plant, which is North America’s largest.
The company on Thursday reported 266 workers tested positive for the virus this week with nearly all testing complete.
Trident also reported a separate, smaller outbreak aboard one of its three large catcher processor vessels, the 312-foot Island Enterprise.
That vessel arrived in Dutch Harbor on Thursday with two workers exhibiting COVID-19 symptoms, Trident said in a statement. Rapid testing through the night of all 125 people onboard revealed five confirmed cases and two non-positive workers reporting minor symptoms.
Trident officials say they don’t know how either of the outbreaks started. On Monday, Trident temporarily shut down the Akutan plant for at least three weeks. They plan to “re-quarantine” everyone on the Island Enterprise for at least 14 days.
This week, Trident officials said they took the unusual step of stockpiling medical supplies including ventilators in case weather grounds air ambulances. The nearest hospital is hundreds of miles away.
January 25, 2021 — One of North America’s largest fish processing plants is shutting down as a COVID-19 outbreak grows and owner Trident Seafoods struggles to test its 700-person workforce.
The plant, on the isolated island of Akutan, is the second in the Aleutians to shut down this year, just as the billion-dollar Bering Sea pollock fishery was set to kick off.
Now, fishermen and industry leaders are anxious that they might not have places to offload their catch and that their plants might be the next to close down, said Dan Martin, who manages a fleet of nine pollock trawlers for a company called Evening Star Fisheries.
“Any hiccups like this, you really have to reshuffle the deck and try to figure out, ‘Okay, what’s the next step?’” said Martin, a retired skipper. He called the shutdowns “everybody’s worst nightmare.”
The winter fishery for Bering Sea pollock, which goes into products like McDonald’s fish sandwiches, officially opened Wednesday. But two of the region’s largest processors are both shut down: the Trident plant in Akutan, and the UniSea plant located 35 miles to the southwest in the Aleutian port town of Unalaska.
January 22, 2021 — How much firewood does it take to build a new 52-foot salmon troller? Bob Dooley has the answer to that and just about any other question about West Coast and Alaska fisheries you can throw his way.
When Brian Hagenbuch profiled Dooley as a 2017 NF Highliner, the title of his feature was “Community champion,” and that’s been Dooley’s story through every decade of his nearly 60-year career.
Starting as a deckhand on a salmon troller out of his home town of Half Moon Bay, Calif., at the age of 11, Dooley ended his fishing career on Bering Sea and West Coast pollock and whiting trawlers. In his years on the water, he witnessed the inception of the Magnuson Act and the 200-mile limit, joint-venture fishing, observer coverage, Coast Guard safety regulations, and perhaps the biggest change in fishing in his lifetime — bycatch reduction.
“We went from the wild, wild west of joint ventures to overcapitalization of the fleet with the advent of factory trawlers, particularly in pollock and the West Coast in whiting. And we basically had 200 percent catching capacity with the same amount of fish,” Dooley says, describing technological advancements and government programs that changed the way people went fishing.
January 21, 2021 — COVID-19 outbreaks at two of Alaska’s largest seafood processing plants, both in the Aleutian Islands, are shutting down operations just as lucrative crab and pollock seasons get underway.
The remote Trident Seafoods plant in the tiny community of Akutan, 35 miles east of Unalaska, is reporting four coronavirus cases — three processing workers and a galley employee — prompting concerns about additional infections that could be hard to contain.
A separate outbreak at the UniSea plant in Unalaska has the facility on lockdown after 55 workers tested positive for the virus since January, about two-thirds of them during travel quarantine, which is intended to catch positive cases. Forty-five workers were still considered infectious as of Tuesday.
The Trident outbreak is the first for the company’s closed-campus plant there, officials say.
Industry observers expected the start of this winter fishing season to bring a whole new set of coronavirus challenges compared to this time last year.