Saving Seafood

Sens. Cantwell, Murray, WA Democratic Reps. Urge Immediate Action from Feds to Protect Native Salmon from Fish Farm Fiasco

Members: Agencies must also immediately halt permitting of new and expanding net pens

August 31, 2017 — WASHINGTON — The following was released by the office of Senator Maria Cantwell:

Today, U.S. Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Patty Murray (D-WA), joined by Reps. Adam Smith (WA-09), Pramila Jayapal (WA-07), Rick Larsen (WA-02), Derek Kilmer (WA-06), Denny Heck (WA-10), and Suzan DelBene (WA-01), wrote an urgent letter to the heads of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to press the two agencies to take quick and decisive action to address the impacts of hundreds of thousands of escaped farmed Atlantic salmon in Washington state waters.

Citing the importance of wild salmon fisheries to Tribes, fishermen, and ecosystems in the state, the members of Congress are calling on NOAA and the Army Corps to direct federal resources to mitigate the risks of this incident, including the capture of the escaped farmed salmon. The letter also calls on the Army Corps to work to stop all permitting for new net pens or expansions to existing pens, as well as prioritize requests to update or maintain existing pens.

“Pacific salmon are central to our economy, our culture, and our environment in the Pacific Northwest, and are a critical part of marine and estuarine ecosystems in Washington state,” the members wrote. “The released Atlantic salmon pose a threat to wild Pacific salmon, including multiple endangered and threatened stocks in the region. Tribes, fishermen, and state agencies are working to respond to the escapement but the scale of the release calls for immediate and direct federal response…”

The farmed salmon escaped from a damaged facility owned by Cooke Aquaculture on August 19th and 20th. Since the breach, farmed Atlantic salmon have been found as far afield as Canadian waters on the West side of Vancouver Island, as well as the Skagit and Nooksack Rivers. The released Atlantic salmon pose a threat to wild Pacific salmon, including multiple endangered and threatened stocks in the region. Farmed salmon tend to be larger and could outcompete wild salmon for critical resources such as prey and preferred habitat, which is important for spawning.

Tribes and federal and state agencies have worked tirelessly towards restoration of wild salmon populations in Puget Sound. At a time when stocks of many types of wild Pacific salmon are at historic lows, the escape of thousands of farmed salmon could be a devastating setback.

The members also asked the agency heads to conduct a review of the integrity and operation of all currently operating net pen structures to address concerns of further accidents at existing facilities.

Text of the letter can be found below.

Dear Acting Administrator Friedman and Mr. Lamont,

We write to request the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Army Corps) immediately act to minimize the impact of the Atlantic salmon net pen failure near Cypress Island in Skagit County, Washington. The released Atlantic salmon pose a threat to wild Pacific salmon, including multiple endangered and threatened stocks in the region. Tribes, along with federal and state agencies have worked tirelessly to restore wild salmon in Puget Sound and the escapement of thousands of farmed salmon could be a devastating setback.

Pacific salmon are central to our economy, our culture, and our environment in the Pacific Northwest, and are a critical part of marine and estuarine ecosystems in Washington state. Pacific salmon support treaty rights for Tribes throughout the region, commercial and recreational fishers, as well as predators like the endangered Southern resident orcas. On August 19th, potentially hundreds of thousands of farmed Atlantic salmon were released into the Puget Sound ecosystem due to the structural failure of a net pen. While the fish farm facility was permitted under Washington state law, the escapement may negatively impact resources under the jurisdiction of NOAA, the Army Corps, and other federal agencies. Most concerning is the threat farmed Atlantic salmon pose to the wild Pacific salmon populations stocks in Puget Sound. Farmed salmon tend to be larger and could outcompete wild salmon for critical resources such as prey and preferred habitat, which is important for spawning.

Tribes, fishermen, and state agencies are working to respond to the escapement but the scale of the release calls for immediate and direct federal response including mitigation, scientific support, and funding to improve response and capture of the released Atlantic salmon. Further, as other net pens remain in our waters, we request the Army Corps halt all permitting for new net pens or expansions to existing net pens, while prioritizing permit requests to upgrade and maintain existing net pens. In addition, we ask NOAA and the Army Corps to review the integrity and operation of all existing net pen structures to determine any additional threats to wild salmon in the area and prevent any further escapement of farmed salmon into our waters.

We appreciate your ongoing work to restore Pacific salmon in Puget Sound and throughout the Pacific Northwest.

Sincerely,

CALIFORNIA: State Sen. McGuire resolution urges federal aid for fisheries

August 29, 2017 — North Coast state Sen. Mike McGuire has introduced a Senate resolution that addresses the ongoing salmon fisheries crisis and urges the federal government to act.

McGuire notes it’s an “unprecedented collapse” in a recent news release as the salmon population is at an all-time low. Local tribes are receiving the lowest allocations of salmon in decades and salmon fishing has been closed in some areas.

McGuire’s proposal, SJR 7, urges Congress to approve a formal disaster declaration and funding package to help the thousands who depend on the salmon industry either for their livelihood or subsistence. North Coast Rep. Jared Huffman has been working at the federal level to make that possible.

“We’re grateful to Congressman Huffman for his leadership on this important issue,” McGuire said in a statement. “He’s pushing hard, and we want to throw the full weight of the California Legislature behind the recovery and funding efforts.”

Read the full story at the Times-Standard

Climate Change May Shrink the World’s Fish

A new study suggests warming sea temperatures could result in smaller fish sizes.

August 22, 2017 — Warming temperatures and loss of oxygen in the sea will shrink hundreds of fish species—from tunas and groupers to salmon, thresher sharks, haddock and cod—even more than previously thought, a new study concludes.

Because warmer seas speed up their metabolisms, fish, squid and other water-breathing creatures will need to draw more oxygen from the ocean. At the same time, warming seas are already reducing the availability of oxygen in many parts of the sea.

A pair of University of British Columbia scientists argue that since the bodies of fish grow faster than their gills, these animals eventually will reach a point where they can’t get enough oxygen to sustain normal growth.

“What we found was that the body size of fish decreases by 20 to 30 percent for every 1 degree Celsius increase in water temperature,” says author William Cheung, director of science for the university’s Nippon Foundation—Nereus Program.

These changes, the scientists say, will have a profound impact on many marine food webs, upending predator-prey relationships in ways that are hard to predict.

“Lab experiments have shown that it’s always the large species that will become stressed first,” says lead author Daniel Pauly, a professor at the university’s Institute for the Ocean and Fisheries, and principal investigator for the Sea Around Us. “Small species have an advantage, respiration-wise.”

Still, while many scientists applaud the discovery, not all agree that Pauly’s and Cheung’s work supports their dramatic findings. The study was published today in the journal Global Change Biology.

Read the full story at National Geographic

Sitka Tribe of Alaska’s Traditional Foods Program nourishes families

August 18, 2017 — It’s a cloudy Tuesday in July. At 4 a.m., it’s already light out, and Jeff Feldpausch and Mike Smith are preparing for a trip up to Sitkoh Bay to harvest sockeye salmon and halibut. It’s just another day in the office for them: a boat trip to a remote area of Southeast Alaska to harvest food for the Sitka Tribe of Alaska’s (STA) Traditional Foods Program.

Every year, about 300 households receive food provided by their work, with food being distributed first to elders and then the rest of the community. In order to be eligible to receive food, one must be a resident of Sitka, Alaska, and a citizen of the Sitka Tribe of Alaska.

The program

Feldpausch, the Resource Protection Department Director, and Smith, the Traditional Foods Specialist, work together throughout the year to ensure that tribal members who may not have the resources to gather, hunt, or fish themselves have freezers and pantries stocked. While it varies per year, Feldpausch said that, on average, STA distributes between 12,000 and 20,000 pounds of food per year to the community.

The season starts off with a big herring egg harvest and then moves to salmon, with sockeye being the primary goal. There are sockeye salmon runs in several places on Baranof and Chichagof islands and STA makes it a priority to harvest sockeye sustainably by harvesting in multiple locations.

“You name it, we go there,” Feldpausch said. “We go as far north as Klag [Bay] for sockeye, as far south as Redfish for sockeye…if we’re out and about, we always try to throw a skate into the water to make the program as efficient as possible. We try to harvest away from town. A lot of folks who are private citizens who have boats may not have as big of boats so they harvest closer to town, so we try to harvest away from town. We try to stay further away from town so that we don’t impact those subsistence users.”

Read the full story at the Juneau Empire

ALASKA: The F/V Akutan’s sad, failed season in Bristol Bay

August 17, 2017 — Fiasco. Disaster. Nightmare. These are words used by those involved with the floating processor Akutan to describe a fishing season gone terribly wrong. The Akutan, owned by Klawock Oceanside, Inc., was supposed to custom process up to 100,000 pounds of Bristol Bay salmon a day for a small fleet of fishermen under the banner Bristol Bay Seafoods, LLC. After July 25, it was bound for the Kuskokwim to give local fishermen their only salmon market.

Nothing went right. The owners, the fishing fleet, the lender, and the crew have gone unpaid or lost big sums of money. Onboard the vessel sits 130,000 pounds of headed-and-gutted sockeye salmon, the only bounty other than the vessel itself that may eventually compensate the parties involved. The owners, fishermen, and other parties filed liens against that fish as the 180-foot floating processor Akutan and a skeleton crew limped out of the silty, shallow Nushagak Bay Sunday to seek repairs at a blue water port.

“We’re in peril,” Captain Steve Lecklitner said Saturday. “We know we cannot stay in this river. It’s breaking down our systems. The owners have basically abandoned the vessel. The mortgage holders and the lenders have not established contact. I’m trying to get parts for our generator, and as soon as that’s done, it’s our intention to move the vessel to Dutch Harbor.”

Best laid plans

After last season a group of about 15 Bristol Bay drift boat fishermen decided to again pursue their own market. These fishing families are members of an Old Believer community in Homer and are commonly, and not pejoratively, referred to as the “Russians” in Bristol Bay’s fleet.

Skipper Kiril Basargin, a leader of this group, has been vocal about his frustration with the “mega corporate seafood buyers” that process 99 percent of Bristol Bay’s catch, faulting them for catch limits and low prices. In 2015 he brought his concerns to the state’s board of fisheries, telling them that Bristol Bay’s seafood companies promise “every year that they are going to keep up, and not holding there [sic] promises. Holding on, the commercial fisherman loses money every minute while they sit. We finally got tired of sitting and losing our seasons. The huge corporations control the markets and commercial fisherman. Finally in Bristol Bay in 2014 Wild Legacy Seafoods was born,” he wrote.

What happened to Wild Legacy Seafoods is unclear. But ahead of the 2017 season, Basargin and others formed a new company, Bristol Bay Seafoods LLC, to be their own “buyer”. They hired Klawock Oceanside to be their processor.

“And really they’ve lost their whole season to mismanagement and mis-operation of the F/V Akutan,” said William Earnhart, an attorney for the Bristol Bay Seafoods fishermen.

Read and listen to the full story at KDLG

What are the benefits of eating more fish?

August 14, 2017 — Jane DeWitt and Sabrina Lombardi are clinical nutrition coordinators of Food and Nutrition Services for Hackettstown Medical Center and Newton Medical Center at Atlantic Health System, respectively.

Q. What are the benefits of eating more fish?

A. Fish: Some people love eating it, and some people do not. But its health benefits are something that everyone can agree on.

“Studies show that increasing your fish intake is good for you, especially for your heart,” said Jane DeWitt, clinical nutrition coordinator of Food and Nutrition Services for Hackettstown Medical Center. “It’s leaner than red meat and some, like salmon, arctic char and sardines, are full of omega-3 fatty acids, which are great for your heart.”

Omega-3 fatty acids, which are essential fatty acids for human health, can help reduce inflammation as well as the risk for heart disease, notes DeWitt. The American Heart Association recommends up to two servings of fish per week, up to 8 ounces total. Omega 3 fatty acids are also beneficial for brain health as well help with memory, performance, and cognition.

Read the full story at the New Jersey Herald

Congress considers millions in West Coast fishery disaster relief funds

August 3, 2017 — Congressional appropriation committees are considering whether to provide millions of dollars in disaster relief funds to West Coast fishing fleets as part of the 2018 federal budget.

The amount of funding being considered has ranged from $20 million recommended by the House Appropriations Committee to a failed proposal to allocate $150 million to fishermen, according to officials following the proceedings.

California 2nd District Rep. Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael) said last week that the $20 million proposed won’t make up for the financial losses experienced by the nine declared West Coast fishery disasters in Alaska, California and Washington. The disaster declaration made in January by then-U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker includes California’s Dungeness and rock crab fishery as well as the Yurok Tribe’s Klamath River Chinook salmon fishery.

“But it’s better than nothing and we’ll keep working on it,” Huffman said of the $20 million proposal. “… We’ll have to take a look at just how inadequate whatever comes out of Congress is. If it’s woefully inadequate to meet the needs, we may need to work on supplemental disaster relief. The Senate will have a say in this, too. I think you can look at it as good news that there is some money in the House bill.”

Huffman and other West Coast representatives had introduced a bill last year that called on Congress to appropriate $130 million to aid the West Coast fleets.

Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations Executive Director Noah Oppenheim said Wednesday that there were hopeful signs during the Senate Appropriations Committee budget review in July that the Senate would support disaster relief funds.

Oppenheim said Sens. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) in particular advocated for an amendment to the Senate committee’s 2018 budget recommendation that would have added $150 million in relief for the fleets. But Oppenheim said Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) did not support the amendment, and it did not make it into the final recommendations.

Read the full story at the Eureka Times-Standard

Alaska’s Salmon Harvest Nears 48 Million Fish

July 18, 2017 — Preliminary harvest data show the catch in Alaska’s wild salmon fisheries is nearing the 48 million fish mark. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s (ASF&G) count includes 31.6 million sockeyes, 8.4 million chums, 7.6 million pinks, 198,000 silvers and 193,000 Chinook salmon.

More than 25 million of those sockeyes were caught in the Bristol Bay fishery, including 9.6 million in the Nushagak district, 8 million in the Egegik district, in excess of 4 million in the Naknek-Kvichak district and 2.2 million in the Ugashik district.

State fisheries biologist Tim Sands, Dillingham, Alaska, described the sockeye fishery in the Nushagak district as “gangbusters,” as fishermen there brought in a record 1.2 million salmon on July 3. It was the second time this year, and in the history of the Nushagak district, that the daily sockeye salmon harvest exceeded one million reds, Sands said.

Processors on the Lower Yukon have taken deliver of some 331,000 oil rich keta salmon, and another 66,000 keta salmon were caught on the Upper Yukon.

Processors in Prince William Sound have received 7.9 million fish, including 482,000 Copper River reds and another 417,000 sockeyes from the Eshamy District, 51,000 from the Coghill District, 33,000 from the PWS general seine fishery, 2,000 from the Bering River drift and 1,000 from the Unakwik District drift fisheries.

Read the full story at Alaska Native News

Feds reviewing status of New England’s endangered salmon

July 2, 2017 — The federal government is starting a five-year review of the Gulf of Maine’s population of Atlantic salmon, which are listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act.

Atlantic salmon were once plentiful off New England, but dams, loss of habitat, pollution and overfishing dramatically reduced the population. The National Marine Fisheries Service says it is reviewing the health of the stock to get more updated information on its current status.

The fisheries service says the review will be based on scientific and commercial data. One group, the New Brunswick, Canada-based Atlantic Salmon Federation, says recent data are troubling. The group says total estimated returns of the fish to North America in 2016 showed a 27 percent decrease from the previous year.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The Daily Progress

Jellied sea creatures confound scientists, fishermen on U.S. Pacific Coast

June 28, 2017 — Drifting throngs of jelly-like, glowing organisms native to tropical seas far from shore have invaded Pacific coastal waters from Southern California to the Gulf of Alaska this year, baffling researchers and frustrating fishing crews.

Known as pyrosomes, they are tubular colonies of hundreds or thousands of tiny individual creatures called zooids, enmeshed together in a gelatinous tunic roughly the consistency of gummy bear candy.

No relation to jellyfish, they resemble bumpy, opaque pickles in the water, typically a few centimeters or inches long, though some grow 1 or 2 feet (30cm or 60cm) in length.

They feed by filtering microscopic algae, or phytoplankton, as they float with the current, and are known to glow in the dark – a bioluminescent characteristic that gives the organism its scientific name — Pyrosoma, Greek for “fire body.”

Pyrosomes have rarely if ever been seen along the U.S. West Coast until 2012, when first spotted in California waters. Since then, they have gradually multiplied and spread north, before exploding in numbers this spring, according to scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Although harmless to humans, they have been especially troublesome to the commercial salmon catch in Oregon, with large globs of the rubbery critters clogging fishing gear by the thousands in recent months. Some have even washed ashore.

“It gets to a point where they’re so abundant, you can’t even fish out there, so you have to pick up your gear and move elsewhere,” Nancy Fitzpatrick, executive director of the Oregon Salmon Commission, said on Monday.

A single five-minute trawl with a research net by scientists off the Columbia River in late May scooped up roughly 60,000 pyrosomes, NOAA reported.

Fishermen were also hit in southeastern Alaska, where some crews suspended operations earlier this year when pyrosome densities were at their height, said Aaron Baldwin, a fishery biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

Read the full story at Reuters