Saving Seafood

Endangered Puget Sound orcas to get personal health records

April 1, 2016 — SEATTLE — The killer whales that spend time in the inland waters of Washington state already are tagged and tracked, photographed and measured.

Researchers follow them by drone and by sea, analyzing their waste and their exhaled breath.

Now, experts want to add another layer to the exhaustive studies: individual health records for each endangered whale.

The records would take existing research on the creatures and combine it in one place. The idea is to use them to monitor the orcas’ health trends individually and as a population. It’s similar to people having one medical record as they move from one doctor to the next or between specialists.

Eighty-four orcas typically appear in Puget Sound from spring to fall.

Read the full story at KRON 4

Pacific Fishery Management Council chooses options for 2016 salmon season

(March 24, 2016) — The Pacific Fishery Management Council yesterday adopted three public review alternatives for the 2016 salmon season off the West Coast of the U.S.

The council will select a final alternative at their next meeting in Vancouver, Washington, on April 9 through 14.

“The mix of salmon runs this year is unusual,” said outgoing executive director Donald McIsaac. “In the north, the return of fall Chinook to the Columbia River is forecast to be exceptionally high again, but expectations for wild Coho runs to the Washington Coast and Puget Sound areas can only be described as disastrous. In the south, the Sacramento River fall Chinook are healthy, but Klamath River fall Chinook are so poor that the council’s policy calls for a low ‘de minimis’ catch in ocean fisheries.”

Other officials agreed.

“This will be a challenging year for salmon fisheries,” said Council Vice-chair Herb Pollard. “Several key stocks are less abundant than usual, due to environmental conditions like the California drought and El Niño, which have affected ocean abundance for some stocks. However, there are alternatives that provide opportunities for both commercial and recreational salmon fishing coast wide.”

Read the full story at The Press

Finding Refuge for Salmon, Cold Water Preferred

December 11, 2015 — PORTLAND, Ore. — When Lewis and Clark first encountered the Columbia River in 1805, they wrote about nearby streams so thick with salmon that you could all but walk across on their backs.

Last summer, those streams looked very different. As a torrid heat wave settled over the Pacific Northwest, the salmon heading up the Columbia River from the ocean in their ancient reproduction ritual started dying en masse, cooked in place by freakishly hot water that killed them or made them vulnerable to predators. Sockeye died by the hundreds of thousands.

“It was a peek at the future,” said Jim Martin, a former chief of fisheries for Oregon, who now works on conservation issues for a fishing tackle company, Pure Fishing. “This is exactly what is predicted by climate-change models.”

Other salmon experts, though, said the future was not that clear. Even as the sockeye here were dying, they said, pink salmon were exploding in number, especially in the Puget Sound area around Seattle. Alaska, which actually supplies most of the wild-caught salmon eaten in Portland, Seattle and other coastal cities that have their identities tied to fish, had its own good-news story this year, with a near-record harvest.

Read the full story at the New York Times

Conservation group sues to stop commercial salmon farms

November, 5, 2015 — SEATTLE (AP) — The Wild Fish Conservancy filed a lawsuit Wednesday against federal environmental and fisheries managers for allowing commercial salmon farms in Puget Sound.

The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle says that infectious viruses in salmon farms are threatening wild fish in the region.

The National Marine Fisheries Service and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency concluded in 2011 that commercial salmon farms are not likely to have an adverse effect on wild salmon, the lawsuit said.

But the following year, it said, there was an outbreak of an infectious virus at a commercial salmon farm at the south end of Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound. The outbreak occurred while wild juvenile salmon were migrating through the area and likely had a significant impact on the wild fish, the group said.

The lawsuit seeks an injunction that would force federal officials to reconsider commercial salmon farms in Puget Sound in light of the outbreak.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Connecticut Post