Saving Seafood

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.

 

ALASKA: Organizations in Unalaska seek $250,000 for salmon surveys

June 4, 2018 — Local organizations are seeking $250,000 to count salmon runs and harvests in Unalaska Bay, including drone surveys for the sport and subsistence fisheries.

“If we get that, we’re going to be in the chips,” said Mayor Frank Kelty at Sunday’s meeting of the Unalaska Native Fisherman’s Association. In addition to two years of aerial counts in 2019 and 2020 at Unalaska Lake, Iliuliuk River drainage and McLees Lake, the survey has been expanded to include Summer Bay Lake and Morris Cove, he said.

The proposed project goes beyond counting fish in the water. A household survey in the next two years would estimate salmon harvests and use in Unalaska.

UNFA and the Unalaska City Council are seeking the money from the state’s Sustainable Salmon Fund for the proposed project, “Estimation of sockeye salmon escapement and subsistence salmon harvest surveys for Unalaska.”

According to the city council’s letter of support, “Data gaps of of escapement values for various road-system accessed streams inhibit best practice management for salmon stock assessment. Furthermore, understanding the subsistence harvest by residents will improve subsistence management of those fisheries.”

Read the full story at The Bristol Bay Times

ALASKA: Salmon runs lackluster so far across Gulf of Alaska

June 4, 2018 — It’s not a great summer to be a salmon fisherman in Southcentral Alaska so far.

Several major river systems are seeing paltry salmon returns. The poor numbers have led to closures and cutbacks to sport and commercial fisheries.

After a few weeks of nearly nonexistent king salmon returns to the Anchor River, Alaska Department of Fish and Game managers closed the river to sportfishing for kings for the rest of the season. Under normal conditions, it would have been open for several more weekends in June and on Wednesdays. As of Friday, only 122 kings had passed the sonar and weir on the two forks of the Anchor River, compared to 1,049 on the same date last year.

“We’re evaluating it on a daily basis,” said Carol Kerkvliet, the area management biologist for the Division of Sportfish in Homer. “We’ve looked at our run timing, which was a week late in 2009. In 2009, it was about five days later than the runs from 2009 to 2014. Using that as a benchmark, we still would not meet our escapement goal.”

It’s more than just the Anchor, though. All king fishing on the Ninilchik River and Deep Creek, two neighboring streams to the north, is also closed until July 15. That’s in part to prevent all the angling effort from the Anchor River shifting there.

Read the full story at the Peninsula Clarion

THE COLUMBIAN: Time to Act on Sea Lions

June 4, 2018 — The tally doesn’t look good for steelhead and salmon on the Columbia River. Last year, sea lions devoured an estimated 9 percent of steelhead and 5 percent of spring chinook trying to make their way upstream past Bonneville Dam. Even more disconcerting, an estimated 24 percent of chinook disappeared between the mouth of the Columbia and the dam.

In other words, there is a battle going on in the Columbia, and the sea lions are winning. That points out the need for Congress to pass a bill sponsored by Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Battle Ground.

The Endangered Salmon and Fisheries Predation Protection Act (H.R. 2083) would clear the way for tribal and government fish mangers to kill sea lions along the Columbia to help protect runs of native fish. “We’re not talking about wiping a species off the map,” Herrera Beutler said during a recent meeting with anglers and fishing guides in Kalama. “We’re talking about trying to protect a species. It’s a wacko imbalance.” The legislation would allow for the shooting of up to 100 sea lions per permit and would streamline the permitting process.

Protection of steelhead and salmon is not a partisan issue. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent trying to bolster species that have helped define the economy and the culture of the Northwest for millennia, and Herrera Beutler’s bill is co-sponsored by Oregon Democratic Rep. Kurt Schrader. Notably, according to The (Longview) Daily News, the legislation has support from Carolyn Long and Dorothy Gasque, Democrats who are challenging Herrera Beutler in this year’s election.

Ideally, other members of Congress also will recognize the need for quick measures to ease the toll of sea lions upon Northwest fisheries. An identical bill has been introduced in the Senate (S. 1702) and referred to the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, which includes Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.

The need is urgent. Sea lions have made their way up the Columbia and Willamette rivers in recent years for an unencumbered feast, and attempts at hazing the animals have been ineffective. Oregon officials warn that if the banquet continues, there is a 90 percent chance at least one of the Willamette’s wild steelhead runs will go extinct. Only 512 steelhead crossed Willamette Falls last year, down from about 20,000 in 2000.

Read the full op-ed at The Columbian