Saving Seafood

CATHERINE CASSIDY: Is Alaska open for business? Not from where I stand.

December 18, 2020 — A freak storm descended on Cook Inlet this month. The fallout threatens my family business and hundreds of thousands of dollars in capital investment. Over a thousand other similar businesses around Cook Inlet face the same peril. The disaster? Earlier this month, Gov. Mike Dunleavy made the bizarre decision to effectively shut down the commercial salmon fishing industry here.

At the very end of a four-year process intended to bring the Cook Inlet salmon fishery into compliance with the Magnuson-Stevens Act, the state announced that it would refuse to cooperate with the program and basically forced the closure of federal waters in Cook Inlet to commercial fishing.

Before you conclude that this action was some kind of noble defiance to federal overreach, you should know that the state of Alaska already has multiple collaborative agreements with the federal government on managing numerous other fisheries in Alaska, including crab, cod, rockfish and salmon.

Read the full opinion piece at the Anchorage Daily News

Maryland Rockfish Spawn Sinks to Lowest in Four Years

October 21, 2020 — The results of Maryland’s most recent rockfish spawning survey are in, and they aren’t good. Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR) announced that the 2020 juvenile striped bass index is 2.5, well below the average of 11.5, and even worse than last year’s 3.4.

The “young-of-year” survey tracks the reproductive success of rockfish in a given year. These juvenile fish are an important indicator because they are the fish that will grow to fishable sizes in three to four years. The surveys provide a glimpse of long-term trends in the striped bass population.

DNR, who has been collecting young of year data since 1954, collect fish with 100-foot beach seine net in 22 sites along major spawning areas in the Choptank, Nanticoke, and Potomac rivers and the Upper Chesapeake Bay.

Read the full story at the Chesapeake Bay Magazine

The David And Goliath Story Playing Out In Alaska’s Fisheries

September 14, 2020 — One day in April 1991, a large fishing boat sliced through the cobalt waters of the North Pacific, not far from Sitka, Alaska, on its way to the Bering Sea. For some reason, perhaps to make sure its gear was in order, the boat dropped its weighted trawling net, dragging it across the ocean floor. As the boat drifted by, thousands of pounds of rockfish got scooped up in the mesh. Just like that, the local rockfish season was over.

“Outraged.” That is how Linda Behnken, a Sitka-based fisherman and director of the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association, described her reaction to news of the trawler’s nets rising from the ocean full of strangled or struggling fish, leaving the area’s fishing territory depleted. “It was a major catalyzing event.”

Facing the loss of a resource that had supported generations of fishing families, Behnken and the local community set out to protect the pristine waters of Southeast Alaska from the ravages of industrial fishing and banish trawling boats that drag wide nets to indiscriminately collect fish. A David to industrial fishing’s Goliath, Behnken was told to give up, that the cards were stacked against her. It took years of lobbying and rallying local support, but with the passage of the Southeast Alaska Trawl Closure in 1998, she had helped enact what at that time was the world’s largest ban on trawling, protecting 70,000 square miles of ocean habitat.

“The trawling ban is the reason we still have healthy small-scale fisheries in Southeast Alaska,” she said.

In the decades since, as the global fishing industry has consolidated into fewer, larger corporate fleets and environmental changes have threatened the ocean’s resources, Alaska’s Southeastern panhandle has emerged as a bastion for sustainable, small-scale fishing.

Read the full story at the Huffington Post

Fishermen and Scientists Pioneer Cooperative Rockfish Survey

July 15, 2020 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

When Gulf of Alaska rockfish fishermen approached NOAA Fisheries biologist Mark Zimmermann with an innovative proposal, he saw a potential solution to a rocky problem.

“They offered to collect scientific data in ‘untrawlable’ areas where standard NOAA Fisheries survey trawls can’t sample fish populations. I was impressed with the advanced technology that they use to fish in these rocky, steep habitats, like a live-feed video camera that helps them target their catch while minimizing gear and habitat damage,” Zimmermann said. “I was also impressed that they wanted to use these capabilities to improve rockfish assessments. This fishery is really important to them, and they want to invest in the resource by providing us scientific data to manage it. They want to help ensure that annual catch limits are sustainable.”

That conversation spawned a cooperative pilot study to explore the possibility of using industry catch and effort data to inform Gulf of Alaska rockfish assessments. The new project is called the Science-Industry Rockfish Research Collaboration in Alaska.

“Rockfish fishermen are taking a long-term stake in conservation,” said  John Gauvin, science projects director at Alaska Seafood Cooperative (offshore harvest cooperative). “The industry has made large investments to improve fishing practices. We hope some of those innovative fishing practices will provide data for this cooperative effort to improve rockfish stock assessments in the Gulf of Alaska. We expect this will take a strong partnership between industry and scientists, and we are fully on board with that. We are ready to make the necessary investment in time and resources to make it successful.”

Read the full release here

Study: Bay Rockfish Die at Twice the Rate of Those in Atlantic

May 18, 2020 — Striped bass that stay year-round in the Chesapeake Bay are dying at nearly twice the rate of those that migrate each year to the Atlantic Ocean, a new study has found. The cause or causes aren’t clear, but the lead researcher said that it needs to be addressed to right a troubling decline in the prized finfish.

An electronic tagging study led by scientists from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science found that large mature striped bass leave the Bay every year to roam coastal waters until the next spring. Those smaller, younger fish that remain in the Chesapeake died off at the rate of 70% a year.

“The mortality rate is alarming,” said Dave Secor, a professor at the UMCES Chesapeake Biological Laboratory in Solomons. “If fish are dying at greater than 50% or 60% a year, that’s a problem.”

The study, published Thursday in the journal PLOS One, appears likely to draw further attention to disease and overfishing, two suspects in the decline of striped bass, also known as rockfish, which are among the most sought-after fish in the Chesapeake and along the Atlantic coast.

UMCES scientists implanted acoustic transmitters in 100 striped bass from the Potomac River and tracked their movements over four years. Signals emitted by their tags were picked up as they swam by receivers stationed in the Bay and along the coast — a kind of E-Z Pass network for fish, as Secor described it.

Read the full story at the Chesapeake Bay Magazine

Large rockfish leave Chesapeake Bay to become ocean migrators

May 15, 2020 — A new electronic tagging study of 100 Potomac River striped bass sheds light on rockfish migration in Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Coast. University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science researchers found that when rockfish reach 32 inches in length they leave Chesapeake Bay and become ocean migrators. Small fish stayed in the Bay had higher mortality rates than those that undertook ocean migrations.

“Knowing the size at which they leave, we can do improved management that is tailored better to commercial and  sectors those related to catch and size limits,” said study author and Professor Dave Secor of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. “It allows us to bring different parts of the fishery into an assessment model to evaluate stock health and test how effective regulations will be.”

Chesapeake Bay striped , also known as rockfish, (Morone saxatilis) were implanted with two-inch acoustic transmitters and their coastal shelf migrations recorded over a four-year period by telemetry receivers throughout the Mid-Atlantic shelf waters and southern New England. Researchers found that only large striped bass from the Chesapeake Bay migrate to ocean waters when they reach 32 inches in length, and smaller fish remain resident to the Chesapeake Bay, regardless of sex.

Read the full story at PHYS.org

California’s offshore oil platforms, now marine hotspots, face removal

April 7, 2020 — Tens of thousands – hundreds of thousands, even – of rockfish, boccaccio, and lingcod congregate around the pillars of Southern California’s 27 offshore oil platforms, while shellfish cling to them in thick mats.

The platforms near the Channel Islands are among the world’s most productive hotspots for marine life, producing 27 times more total fish biomass than nearby natural rocky reefs, according to scientists, with rockfish making up 90 percent. From the surface, the platforms descend between 100 to 1,200 feet to the ocean floor; the height of the tallest is comparable to the Empire State Building.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Fisheries of the U.S. 2018 Report: West Coast, Hawaii Generally Stable with a Few Exceptions

February 26, 2020 — Rockfish landings and values are up, squid landings are down on the West Coast. Sablefish prices have dropped, following an increase in landings on the West Coast and Alaska. Hawaii’s total value for seafood products is up, even though lower volumes of fish are being harvested.

Such are just some of the data included for the Pacific Coast in NMFS’ Fisheries of the United States, 2018, report that was released Friday. The report combines data from Alaska and the West Coast—and sometimes Hawaii, too—into the larger Pacific Coast, but a few of the tables and information reveal clues that tell their own stories or trends specific to smaller areas or individual fisheries.

Read the full story at Seafood News

West Coast fishery rebounds in rare conservation ‘home run’

December 26, 2019 — A rare environmental success story is unfolding in waters off the U.S. West Coast.

After years of fear and uncertainty, bottom trawler fishermen ” those who use nets to catch rockfish, bocaccio, sole, Pacific Ocean perch and other deep-dwelling fish ” are making a comeback here, reinventing themselves as a sustainable industry less than two decades after authorities closed huge stretches of the Pacific Ocean because of the species’ depletion.

The ban devastated fishermen, but on Jan. 1, regulators will reopen an area roughly three times the size of Rhode Island off Oregon and California to groundfish bottom trawling ” all with the approval of environmental groups that were once the industry’s biggest foes.

The rapid turnaround is made even more unique by the collaboration between the fishermen and environmentalists who spent years refining a long-term fishing plan that will continue to resuscitate the groundfish industry while permanently protecting thousands of square miles of reefs and coral beds that benefit the overfished species.

Now, the fishermen who see their livelihood returning must solve another piece of the puzzle: drumming up consumer demand for fish that haven’t been in grocery stores or on menus for a generation.

‘It’s really a conservation home run,’ said Shems Jud, regional director for the Environmental Defense Fund’s ocean program. ’The recovery is decades ahead of schedule. It’s the biggest environmental story that no one knows about.”

The process also netted a win for conservationists concerned about the future of extreme deepwater habitats where bottom trawlers currently don’t go. A tract of ocean the size of New Mexico with waters up to 2.1 miles (3.4 kilometers) deep will be off-limits to bottom-trawling to protect deep-sea corals and sponges just now being discovered.

‘Not all fishermen are rapers of the environment. When you hear the word ‘trawler,’ very often that’s associated with destruction of the sea and pillaging,” said Kevin Dunn, whose trawler Iron Lady was featured in a Whole Foods television commercial about sustainable fishing.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at News Chief