Saving Seafood

ALASKA: The ‘blob’ impacts salmon numbers, stopping fishing on Copper River

June 15, 2018 — The Alaska Department of Fish and Game issued an emergency order Wednesday closing the personal-use and sport fishing for Copper River sockeye around Chitina until further notice.

The closure goes into effect on Monday, June 18th. Commercial fishing stopped on May 28th, and next week the department will determine how the low numbers will effect subsistence fishing.

Area management biologist, Mark Somerville calls the move “unprecedented.”

“It’s the second lowest on record basically in the last 50 years, pretty much since statehood,” Somerville said. “And there’s lots of different reason for it.”

Somerville says a mass of warm temperatures in the Gulf of Alaska and need for more food by the fish are to blame. “That’s the ‘blob’ thing,” Somerville said.

As of June 10, the Copper River weir shows that 154,866 reds have passed the counter since May 18. In the same period last year, 320,484 sockeye had swum up the river.

Alaska is famous for it’s Copper River salmon exports. Mega PR blitz signal the start of the season including Alaska Airlines flying the first fish to Seattle where eager chefs await it with outstretched arms.

The fish glistens with hard-earned fat, after swimming and eating across thousands of miles, from birth in the snow-fed waters of Alaskan rivers to the chilly sea.

Read the full story at KTUU

Study: Alaska salmon gillnet fishermen face high rate of health issues

June 15, 2018 — Commercial salmon fishermen in Alaska have much higher rates of some health problems than the general population, a recent study has found.

The study, from the University of Washington School of Public Health and Alaska Sea Grant, surveyed and assessed gillnet permit holders in the Alaska Copper River salmon fishery in 2015.

“The prevalence of hearing loss, upper extremity disorders, and sleep apnea risk factors were higher than in the general population both before and during the fishing season,” the study found.

Exposure to noise, the demands of gillnetting on the body, and long working hours while fishing exacerbate those chronic health conditions, the study said.

About 80 percent of participants who had a physical exam for the study had hearing loss, compared with 15 percent for Americans between 20 and 69. About 40 percent of participants had rotator cuff problems, compared with 8 to 14 percent in the general population.

The health problems also included other types of upper extremity disorders and fatigue that could be associated with sleep apnea.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

ALASKA: Cook Inlet salmon task force off to bumpy start

June 14, 2018 — The fisheries group established to try to defuse some of Cook Inlet’s salmon wars is off to an uncertain start.

Gov. Bill Walker issued Administrative Order 291 forming a Cook Inlet Salmon Task Force on June 4, meant to address some of the notoriously fraught salmon allocation political issues in the Cook Inlet region, the most densely populated area and heavily used fisheries in the state. However, the group had already met twice before the administrative order was issued, and at the last meeting, the group suspended meetings for the summer because of the busy fishing activities of the summer in Alaska.

A variety of people attended the initial May 9 meeting, noted as “work group members” in the notes published on Fish and Game’s website. Among them were multiple United Cook Inlet Drift Association members, commercial set gillnet fishermen, sportfishermen and representatives of the Mat-Su Borough Fish and Wildlife Commission. The 18 attendees were split up into three working groups to discuss fishery issues, according to the notes made by consulting firm Professional Growth Systems, which facilitated the meeting.

The mission statement and the membership aren’t pinned down yet, though, said Walker’s Press Secretary Austin Baird in an email.

“Formation of the task force has been postponed until after the fishing season to enable broad stakeholder participation. Exact dates have not yet been determined for meetings, and membership has not been finalized,” he said. “The task force itself will determine what observations or recommendations to make, and any suggestions will then go through more formal boards and advisory committee processes.”

Read the full story at the Peninsula Clarion

ALASKA: Dismal Copper River salmon run prompts ‘unprecedented’ shutdown of dipnetting at Chitina

June 14, 2018 — The state is taking the historic action of shutting down Copper River dipnetting at the popular, physically demanding sites around Chitina.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game issued an emergency order Wednesday closing the personal-use fishery until further notice as of Monday.

The state decision comes amid dismal returns of the river’s famed sockeye salmon, usually plentiful enough to fuel not only personal-use and subsistence fisheries but also commercial catches to supply markets and restaurants around the Lower 48.

Biologists blame the “Blob”: a large mass of unusually warm water that lurked in the Gulf of Alaska from 2014 through 2016 when young sockeye returning now swam out to feed.

For the commercial fishery at the Copper River’s mouth, this year’s sockeye catch is the second lowest it’s been in 50 years, after Fish and Game shut down that fishery in late May.

State fish biologists say otherwise there might not be enough sockeye swimming back up the Copper River to spawn and keep the run going strong.

Read the full story at Anchorage Daily News

Groups sue Oregon over fish

June 14, 2018 — A coalition of environmental and fishing groups filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday against the state of Oregon, alleging logging in the state’s two largest forests is threatening the survival of coho salmon that breed in streams flowing through the coastal region.

The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Eugene challenges the state’s logging policies in the Clatsop State Forest and the Tillamook State Forest.

It alleges the Oregon Department of Forestry is in violation of the U.S. Endangered Species Act because of the logging, and is illegally engaging in activities that result in the death of a threatened species.

The agency has not followed through on implementing a species management plan required under federal law that would help preserve salmon habitats despite logging and mitigate damage, court papers allege.

Ken Armstong, a spokesman for the Oregon Department of Forestry, said his department could not comment on pending litigation.

“Poor logging practices by the Oregon Department of Forestry is causing real harm to the Oregon coast coho and commercial fishing families who depend on these magnificent fish for their livelihoods,” Glen Spain said, the northwest regional director for the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations and the Institute of Fisheries Resources, both plaintiffs in the case.

“Stronger protections for streams to protect the coho … is decades overdue.”

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The Columbian

Restrictions could tighten as data reveals salmon inflation

June 12, 2018 — The number of king salmon returning to an Alaska river has been inflated for decades, according to recent state data.

The state now is recommending that the body governing the Bering Sea pollock fishery adopt this new information about the Kuskokwim River, KYUK-AM reported .

If it does, restrictions on the fleet’s bycatch of king salmon could tighten.

Returns have been below this threshold since at least 2010, according to new data from the Alaska Fish and Game Department. Meanwhile, the Bering Sea pollock fleet has hauled in tens of thousands of king salmon each year, caught incidentally. Less than 3 percent of those kings are estimated to have been bound for western Alaska rivers.

With fewer kings swimming up the Kuskokwim River, fishermen have been told by state, federal, and tribal managers to fish less along the river. But fishermen have pointed downstream and said the problem is further away — in the Bering Sea.

“To me, I think more should be done out in the ocean,” said Darren Deacon, Tribal Chief of the Native Village of Kalskag, during a recent teleconference hosted by the Kuskokwim River Intertribal Fish Commission. “If we’re going to suffer in these rivers — every person, every village, every tribe is suffering — the trawling fleets should feel the same pain.”

Read the full story at the Associated Press

‘This Ruling Gives Us Hope’: Supreme Court Sides With Tribe in Salmon Case

June 12, 2018 — There was a time when the murky waters of the Skagit River offered bountiful salmon harvests to the Swinomish Indians of Washington State. They could fill an entire boat with one cast of the net back then, and even on a slow day, they could count on hauling in dozens of fish.

But on a cloudy morning last month, the tribal community chairman, Brian Cladoosby, was having no luck. Drifting in his 21-foot Boston Whaler, he spotted his 84-year-old father, Michael, standing in yellow overalls in another boat, pulling an empty net from the water.

“Where’s the fish, Dad?” the son asked.

That has been the dominant question for years among the Swinomish and other Native Americans, who have seen their salmon harvests dip by about 75 percent over the past three decades.

But on Monday, they got reason to hope that their salmon harvests would tick back up.

The Supreme Court, in a 4-to-4 deadlock, let stand a lower court’s order that the state make billions of dollars worth of repairs to roads that had damaged the state’s salmon habitats and contributed to population loss.

It was a momentous outcome in a decades-long legal battle that drew attention because of its implications for Native American treaty rights and state sovereignty.

“This ruling gives us hope that the treaty we signed was not meaningless, and the state does have a duty to protect this most beautiful resource,” Mr. Cladoosby, 59, said on Monday.

Read the full story at the New York Times

CALIFORNIA: Short salmon season is tough on fishermen

June 11, 2018 — This year’s commercial salmon season is putting local fishermen in a squeeze.

The two separate openings in the first week of May and the last 12 days of June are meant to protect a scarce group of king, or chinook, salmon. But the openings increase the pressure on fishermen, who might not be able to pay off expensive permits and equipment with such restrained fishing opportunity.

“This year they almost shut us down,” said local fisherman Lorenzo Sanchez, 42. Recreational salmon season will run a bit longer, from April 7 until July 2, but is still shorter than a traditional season.

At local fish markets, scarce salmon might be available during the season opening, but consumers should expect high prices. During the May opening, said Phil DiGirolamo, owner of Phil’s Fish Market and Eatery in Moss Landing, “it was the highest-priced salmon I’ve ever seen.” Fillets sold in his market for $20-25 per pound, and may well be more expensive this June.

And yet, he said, because of the high quality of the fish, discerning customers keep the salmon in high demand. “We got a few fish at a time and they were sold as soon as we got them,” he said. He expects to sell all the salmon he can get his hands on.

Read the full story at the Monterey Herald

Alaska seafood industry hopes to triple exports to China after trade mission

June 7, 2018 — Seafood is Alaska’s largest commodity, and China is the state’s largest trading partner. In 2017, the Alaska Office of International Trade reports Alaska exported about a billion dollars worth of seafood to China, a figure Governor Bill Walker would like to triple.

“Nothing happens quick,” said Walker. “But I think as a goal, as we grow our seafood market opportunity, that’s something we sit down with the seafood processor and say ‘How do we grow this opportunity for increased exports out of Alaska?’ ”

Although increasing seafood exports to $3 billion might seem ambitious, Jeff Welbourn, Sr. Dir of China Business for Trident Seafood Corp., says an evolving Chinese economy could make it possible.

“China has been a manufacturing, reprocessing sector,” said Welbourn. “We’re kind of excited because we see opportunity for higher value products coming into this market.”

Those higher value products include black cod, halibut and sockeye salmon. In the past, byproduct and headed and gutted fish sold to China included items like wild Alaskan pollock and pink salmon.

“All these products here for reprocessing to a consumer market has been the real prize,” said Welbourn. “And it could triple in size pretty easily.”

In recent years, Welbourn says the Chinese consumer has moved away from lesser products. Today, they’re demanding more transparency and higher quality– a value added, premium market, which the Alaska seafood industry is poised to serve.

Read the full story at KTUU

‘Extracting Value from the Right Amount of Fish’: Saving Seafood Looks at Aquaculture Efficiency

June 6, 2018 — WASHINGTON — Through new techniques and technologies, farming fish is becoming increasingly efficient, leading aquaculture experts tell Saving Seafood in a new video.

“With a whole range of factors – improved nutritional knowledge, better management techniques of feeding on the farm, and all of that – [the fish in–fish out] ratio has gone down,” says Andrew Jackson, Chairman of IFFO RS.

“For every 0.7 kilos of fish in, you get a kilo of fish out,” says Dan Lee, Standards Coordinator for the Global Aquaculture Alliance’s Best Aquaculture Practices Program. “So that’s becoming very favorable towards aquaculture productivity.”

In the case of salmon farming, nutritionists are using alternative ingredients, including plant proteins like soy, and mixing canola and other vegetable oils in with pure fish oil. This has helped lowered the percentage of marine ingredients in fish feed to about 25 percent of farmed salmon diets, and projections are that this will drop below 10 percent by 2025.

“They’ve figured out that the key to being successful and profitable and sustainable is not necessarily to catch more fish, it’s to extract as much value as possible out of the right amount of fish,” says Tim Fitzgerald, Director of the Environmental Defense Fund’s Impact Division.

These improvements have made farming fish one of the most sustainable forms of protein production, experts tell Saving Seafood.

“When you’re growing chickens or pigs or cattle, the transformation between the feed and the [farmed product] is much more inefficient than with fish,” says Manuel Barange, Director of Fisheries and Aquaculture at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. “So if we have to feed any animal for us to eat, it makes sense to do that with fish. It’s more efficient.”

The video is the second in a series, Aquaculture Today, in which Saving Seafood interviews leading aquaculture experts on the latest advances in farmed fish, and its role in the world. Saving Seafood released a video yesterday on aquaculture’s role in feeding the world’s growing population.

In addition to Mr. Jackson, Mr. Lee, Mr. Fitzgerald, and Mr. Barange, the video also features Julien Stevens, Researcher at Kampachi Farms, and Neil Auchterlonie, Technical Director at IFFO.

Interviews for Aquaculture Today were conducted by Saving Seafood at the 2017 SeaWeb Seafood Summit in Seattle, Washington.