Saving Seafood

News Release: Pacific Fishery Management Council Adopts 2022 West Coast Ocean Salmon Seasons

April 13, 2022 — The following was released by the Pacific Fishery Management Council:

The Pacific Fishery Management Council has adopted ocean salmon recommendations for 2022.  The seasons provide recreational and commercial opportunities for most of the Pacific coast and achieve conservation goals for the numerous salmon stocks on the West Coast.

The recommendations will be forwarded to the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) for approval by May 16, 2022.

The decision must be approved by NMFS.  Coastal states will adopt fishery regulations for state-managed waters that are compatible with the Council’s actions.

Download the full April 13, 2022 press release available from the Council’s website..

Contact:

•Robin Ehlke, Salmon Staff Officer, robin.ehlke@noaa.gov

•Mike Burner, Deputy Director, mike.burner@noaa.gov

•Council Office 503-820-2280 (toll free: 1-866-806-7204)

 

An ocean of noise: how sonic pollution is hurting marine life

April 12, 2022 — We were whaling with cameras, joining a flotilla of a dozen other tourist boats from harbours all around the Salish Sea. It was one of my first trips to the area, in August 2001. The fuzz and beep of ship radios stitched a net over the water, a blurry facsimile of the sonic connections of the whales themselves. Every skipper heard the voices of the others, relayed by electromagnetic waves. The quarry could not escape. “Whales guaranteed” shouted the billboards on shore.

We motored on, weaving around island headlands. A sighting off the south-west shore of San Juan Island. Through binoculars: a dorsal fin scythed the water, then dipped. Another, with a spray of mist as the animal exhaled. Then, no sign. But the whales’ location was easy to spot. A dozen boats clustered, most slowly motoring west, away from the shore. We powered closer, slowing the engine until we were travelling without raising a wake and took our place on the outer edge of the gaggle of yachts and cruisers.

A sheet of marble skated just under the water’s surface. Oily smooth. A spill of black ink sheeting under the hazed bottle glass of the water’s surface. Praaf! Surfacing 15 metres ahead of the boat, the exhalation was plosive and rough.

The pod of about 10 animals came to the surface. Part of the L pod of orcas, our captain said, one of three pods that form the “southern residents” in the waters of the Salish Sea between Seattle and Vancouver, often seen hunting salmon around the San Juan Islands. Others – “transients” that ply coastal waters and “offshores” that feed mostly in the Pacific – also visit regularly. The L pod continued west, heading toward the Haro Strait. Our engines purred as the U-shaped arc of boats tracked the pod, leaving open water ahead of the whales.

We dropped a hydrophone over the boat’s gunwale, its cord feeding a small speaker in a plastic casing. Whale sounds! And engine noise, lots of engine noise. Clicks, like taps on a metal can, came in squalls. These sounds are the whales’ echolocating search beams. The whales use the echoes not only to see through the murky water, but to understand how soft, taut, fast or tremulous matter is around them.

Mixed with the staccato of the whales’ clicks were whistles and high squeaks, sounds that undulate, dart, inflect up and spiral down. These whistles are the sounds of whale conviviality, given most often when the animals are socialising at close range. When the pod is more widely spaced during searches for food, the whales whistle less and communicate with bursts of shorter sound pulses. These sonic bonds not only connect the members of each pod, but distinguish the pod from others.

Today, ocean waters are a tumult of engine noise, sonar and seismic blasts. Sediments from human activities on land cloud the water. Industrial chemicals befuddle the sense of smell of aquatic animals. We are severing the sensory links that gave the world its animal diversity. Whales cannot hear the echolocating pulses that locate their prey, breeding fish cannot find one another amid the noise and turbidity, and the social connections among crustaceans are weakened as their chemical messages and sonic thrums are lost in a haze of human pollution.

Read the full story at The Guardian

WASHINGTON: $3M will help tribes study salmon reintroduction in the Upper Columbia Basin

April 12, 2022 — Bringing salmon back to the Upper Columbia River will take a lot of time and a lot of money, according to the Upper Columbia United Tribes.

The tribes recently received $3 million from Washington’s supplemental budget — a big chunk of change that tribes said will help kick off the second phase of a decades-long study.

However, the tribes still will need to find significant funding sources, especially from federal agencies, to cover the entire study phase, which adds up to an estimated $176 million spread over 21 years, said Laura Robinson, a policy analyst with Upper Columbia United Tribes.

Recently, momentum has built to help along the Upper Columbia reintroduction studies, Robinson said.

“To get this large investment of funds from the Washington state Legislature and governor is really helping increase this momentum,” Robinson said.

Read the full story at OPB News

 

Farms, fish on dry California-Oregon border see scant water

April 12, 2022 — Farms that rely on irrigation from a depleted, federally managed lake on the California-Oregon border, along with a Native American tribe fighting to protect fragile salmon, will both receive extremely limited amounts of water this summer as a historic drought and record-low reservoir levels drag on in the U.S. West.

More than 1,000 farmers and ranchers who draw water from a 257-mile-long (407-kilometer) river that flows from the Upper Klamath Lake to the Pacific Ocean will have access to roughly one-seventh the amount they could get in a wetter year, a federal agency announced Monday. Downstream salmon will receive about half the water they’d get if the reservoir was full.

It’s the third year in a row that severe drought has impacted farmers, fish and tribes in a region where there’s not enough water to satisfy competing demands. Last year, no water at all flowed through the Klamath Reclamation Project’s main irrigation canal, and thousands of downstream juvenile salmon died without reservoir releases to support the Klamath River’s health.

Read the full story from the Associated Press

 

As drought puts growing strains on fish, hatcheries serve as lifelines for California salmon

April 11, 2022 — When Shasta Dam was built on the Sacramento River in the 1940s, the government also established Coleman National Fish Hatchery about 30 miles away on the tributary Battle Creek, aiming to make up for the loss of upstream habitat by raising fish for release.

The hatchery’s staff runs an elaborate spawning operation that this year is raising 12 million fall-run Chinook salmon, supporting California’s commercial and recreational fisheries. The hatchery also raises other types of salmon and steelhead.

The adult salmon swim up the Sacramento River and into Battle Creek, then up a fish ladder to the hatchery’s holding ponds. Mechanical screens in the water are used to move the fish to the spawning building.

The fish are placed into a bath with carbon-dioxide in the water, which enables the staff to handle them. Workers lift the salmon from the water in nets, check to see that they’re ready for spawning, and separate females from males.

They club the fish and send them sliding down a metal chute. One worker hangs each female salmon from a hook, inserts a needle in its abdomen and sends air flowing to push out the eggs, which land in a colander. Another worker grabs each male fish and twists the tail, squeezing out milt that will fertilize the eggs.

Read the full story at the Los Angeles Times

California salmon are at risk of extinction. A plan to save them stirs hope and controversy

April 8, 2022 — Shasta Dam stands more than 600 feet tall, the height of a 55-story building, with a colossal spillway that towers over the Sacramento River in a curved face of concrete.

Since its completion in 1945, the dam has created California’s largest reservoir, which provides water for farms and cities across the state. But it has also blocked Chinook salmon from returning upstream to the cold, spring-fed streams near Mt. Shasta where they once spawned.

Cut off from that chilly egg-laying habitat, endangered winter-run Chinook have struggled to survive. They’ve had help from an elaborate spawning operation at a government-run fish hatchery, which is intended to function like a life-support system for the salmon.

But that support system is no longer enough. As global warming fuels worsening drought conditions and extreme heat, experts say winter-run Chinook are being pushed to the brink of extinction.

Last year, the water flowing from Shasta Dam got so warm that it was lethal for winter-run salmon eggs. Most of the eggs and young fish died. State biologists estimated that only 2.56% of the eggs hatched and survived to swim downriver, one of the lowest estimates of “egg-to-fry” survival yet.

Read the full story at the Los Angeles Times

Pacific salmon can now reproduce in Alaska’s Arctic, researchers find

April 7, 2022 — Waist-deep in the waters of Jago Lagoon off Alaska’s North Slope, biologist Vanessa von Biela and her research partners got a big surprise in the summer of 2017 when they were sorting through Arctic fish that had been captured in a test net.  Among the hundreds of Arctic cisco in the net was a juvenile chum salmon — the first direct proof of successful salmon reproduction that far north in North America.

The young chum salmon, with its rounded nose, stood out among the masses of pointy-nosed Arctic cisco was quickly noticed by colleague Sean Burril, said von Biela, a research biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

“He happened to hold this one in his hand and he said, ‘Hey, this one feels different,’ and, ‘This one is a salmon,’” she said.

That one juvenile salmon found near the Inupiat village of Kaktovik during fieldwork to study Beaufort Sea fisheries represented a breakthrough — the product of an egg laid in the Arctic waters that survived the winter.

Read the full story at Arctic Today

 

MAINE: Mussel farm lease draws opposition

April 7, 2022 — Who has priority over the waters of Frenchman Bay — the public, lobstermen or aquaculture concerns? While the 120-acre salmon farm proposed by Norwegian-backed American Aquafarms has roused opposition, a separate proposed 48-acre lease site to grow mussel spat in the bay’s eastern region — aptly named Eastern Bay — is raising similar objections.

The Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR) held a public hearing on the proposal on March 28 and 29 both online and at Bar Harbor Town Hall.

Opponents say that if approved, the Acadia Aqua Farms proposal will unreasonably affect navigation, produce unreasonable noise and unreasonably affect existing flora and fauna, including a long occupied and beloved eagle’s nest on Leland Point. Acadia Aqua Farms holds that, as proposed, the project meets DMR requirements for aquaculture leases and would not cause unreasonable effects.

The word “unreasonable” is important because DMR criteria for granting aquaculture leases, codified in state law, is that the lease will not unreasonably interfere with ingress and egress of riparian owners, navigation, fishing or other uses, significant wildlife and marine habitats or public use or enjoyment within 1,000 feet of a public or conserved beach, park or docking facility. A project also must not result in unreasonable impact from noise or light.

Read the full story at The Ellsworth American 

ALASKA: An epic forecast for Bristol Bay salmon has industry leaders worried it will be too much to handle

April 7, 2022 — Alaska biologists are forecasting another massive run of sockeye salmon in Bristol Bay this summer, raising questions in commercial fishing circles about whether the industry in the Southwest Alaska region will be able to keep up.

The Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association, representing the area’s commercial driftnet fleet, is urging processors to boost their capacity to maximize the fishery’s value and prevent harm to future runs if too many salmon return.

“We’re in unprecedented territory as far as what is forecast, so we never had a test like this to see how it would go,” said Andy Wink, executive director of the association.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game predicts that a record 75 million fish will return to Bristol Bay rivers this summer, with 60 million available for harvest, according to the agency’s commercial fisheries division.

But the agency reported early this year that 15 main commercial processors said they expect to buy 52 million Bristol Bay salmon, according to a survey. That amount of purchased fish would also be a record.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

Russian salmon expert worried international sanctions could threaten ongoing sustainability efforts

April 5, 2022 — Natasha Novikova is the founder of ForSea Solutions, a sustainability and technical consultancy for the seafood industry based in the U.S. state of Oregon that was formed in 2016 to provide technical guidance to U.S. and Russian fisheries working to achieve Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification and implement fishery improvement projects (FIPs). It has provided technical guidance and leadership support to more than 30 Russian salmon and pollock fishing companies, helping them to achieve MSC certification, and an additional five that are currently in various stages of advancing toward MSC levels of sustainability. Novikova has also worked to connect Russian salmon firms with High Liner Foods, The Fishin’ Company, and Gorton’s.

SeafoodSource: What are the salmon companies you’ve worked with in Russia going through right now, following the international sanctions that have been placed on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine?

Novikova: Most of my clients were in shock and disbelief for the first week to 10 days due to this completely new reality for their potential markets. But now they are generally optimistic that the sanctions will pass and business will be back to normal. I think that for them, it’s just the way they’re dealing with the situation. I’m pretty certain that there’s a huge portion of the Russian population, and the Russian business community as well, who just want stability.

Russia’s salmon season starts in June or July [depending on the region]. The fishermen are actively planning for the fishing season. Right now, they’re still relying on the notion that this will pass and there will be a new opportunity, whatever emerges. I’m quite sure most of the companies are having conversations with buyers, especially in countries that haven’t issued sanctions, and trying to line up markets for the upcoming season. Russians are really good about adapting and figuring out ways to survive. They have a mindset of perseverance. Russian people have dealt with many other tragedies and catastrophes in their lives.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource