Saving Seafood

WASHINGTON: Puget Sound tribe uses aquaculture to counter salmon shortages

October 18, 2021 — A new video from the Washington Policy Center (WPC) highlights the efforts of the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe in the Puget Sound area to develop an aquaculture program to provide economic opportunity and a food source for its community.

“As we work to restore the salmon population in Puget Sound, tribes are finding creative ways to feed their members and become more self-sufficient,” said Todd Myers, environmental director at the WPC. “Tribes have the local control and flexibility that allows them to follow good science to manage aquaculture that is sustainable and provides good food.”

The late Kurt Grinnell, who was a tribal council member and general manager of the aquaculture program, explains in the video that just a few generations ago the local rivers and tributaries were filled with an unending supply of salmon. It got to the point though, that he shut down his fishing business because he was catching so few fish that selling them did not bring in enough money to even pay for the gas for his boat.

Read the full story at The Center Square

 

Trawler bycatch debate heats up after Alaska records dismal 2021 chinook salmon returns

October 15, 2021 — Fishermen are calling for state and federal fisheries managers to make changes to salmon bycatch limits for trawlers as chinook salmon numbers plummet across Alaska.

Chinook salmon returns were dismal virtually everywhere in Alaska this year, from Southeast to the Bering Sea, with few exceptions. That follows a trend, as abundance has declined over roughly the last decade. Commercial fishermen have lost most of their opportunity to harvest kings, and sport fisheries have been restricted. Now subsistence fisheries are being reined in to help preserve the runs.

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council is debating changes in its meeting this month. Trawlers, which use weighted nets to drag either along the bottom or in midwater, are permitted a certain amount of bycatch as they fish for their target species, the largest of which is pollock. Bycatch is always a heated issue, but it is especially so now.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game informed the council in a letter dated Sept. 23 that three index species that it uses to track king salmon runs in the Bering Sea — the Unalakleet, Yukon, and Kuskokwim rivers — didn’t reach a threshold necessary to maintain the current bycatch allowances. That threshold is set at 250,000 fish between the three rivers; this year, there were 165,148.

The Kuskokwim’s run came within its forecasted range, but the other two fell short.

The shortfall in salmon this year hit fishing communities hard, particularly among subsistence fishermen. Amos T. Philemenoff Sr., president of the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island, wrote to the board that the salmon shortages in the Arctic-Yukon-Kuskokwim region this year have affected the island’s subsistence traditions. Donations of salmon from commercial harvesters to replace the lost food do not replace the traditions, he said.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

 

Report highlights how Bristol Bay locals are losing access to commercial fisheries

October 14, 2021 — Alaska’s limited-entry commercial fisheries system may be pulling access to fisheries away from the coastal communities where they take place.

A series of research projects in the past decade has increasingly shown that limited-entry systems like Alaska’s commercial fishing permitting system or the federal-state individual fishing quota system are systematically pulling permits away from the coastal communities that traditionally depend on those industries. The most recent installment in that line of projects focuses specifically on Bristol Bay — today, the state’s most successful salmon fishery.

The report, commissioned for The Nature Conservancy, found that in the 46 years since Alaska’s limited-entry system went into place, residents in Bristol Bay’s rural communities now own 50% fewer permits. The decline is similar among younger permit holders, contributing to the overall trend: commercial fishing permit holders in the state are increasingly older and from regions other than where they fish.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

 

Tribal, commercial fishing groups call for drastic reductions in trawl salmon bycatch

October 14, 2021 — Fisheries managers allow whitefish trawlers to inadvertently scoop up halibut, crab and salmon in their nets. The bycatch rate is relatively low, but because the trawlers catch so much of their target species, the unintended harvest adds up.

In rural western Alaska, where chum and king salmon runs have been performing poorly, the bycatch is raising alarms. While the bycaught salmon is often donated to food banks, it’s of little assurance to those living along the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers, where subsistence is a way of life.

“We eat dry fish like people from the Midwest eat bread, with every meal,” Mary Peltola told the North Pacific Fishery Management Council this month. She’s the executive director of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, and lives in the largely Yup’ik community of Bethel. “Our babies teethe on dry fish, it’s the first food most Yup’iks eat, and it’s something that we crave year-round.”

She testified that fishing on the Kuskokwim has been severely restricted to preserve wild salmon stocks. Meanwhile, trawlers haven’t faced new restrictions of their own as they scoop up lucrative whitefish like pollock, cod and halibut. She’s asked the council to work to put an end to bycatch in the industrial commercial trawl fleet.

Read the full story at KSTK

 

Alaska residents’ salmon permits down 50 percent since 1975

October 13, 2021 — The preliminary value to fishermen of the nearly 41 million salmon caught this summer at Alaska’s largest fishery at Bristol Bay is nearly $248 million, 64 percent above the 20-year average. That figure will be much higher when bonuses and other price adjustments are paid out.

But as with the fish bucks tallied from Alaska’s cod, pollock, flounders and other groundfish, the bulk of the Bay’s salmon money won’t be circulating through Alaska’s economy because most of the fishing participants live out of the state.

In 2017, for example, 62 percent of gross earnings from the Bristol Bay driftnet fishery and 40 percent from the setnet fishery left Alaska as nonresident earnings.

That’s due to the region experiencing an overall 50 percent decline in local permit holdings since Alaska began limiting entry into commercial salmon fisheries in 1975. Combined, residents of the Bristol Bay region now hold less than one-quarter of the region’s salmon permits.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

 

Feds OK plan to cut salmon fishing when needed for Northwest orcas

October 13, 2021 — Federal officials have approved a plan that calls for cutting nontribal salmon fishing along the West Coast when the fish are needed to help the Northwest’s endangered killer whales.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries adopted the plan Sept. 14 as recommended by the Pacific Fishery Management Council. It calls for restricting commercial and recreational salmon fishing when Chinook salmon numbers are especially low.

It’s one of the the first times a federal agency has restricted hunting or fishing one species to benefit a predator that relies on it.

The southern resident killer whales — the endangered orcas that spend much of their time in the waters between Washington state and British Columbia — depend heavily on depleted runs of fatty Chinook. Recent research has affirmed how important Chinook are to the whales year round, as they cruise the outer coast, and not just when they forage in Washington’s inland waters in the summertime.

Read the full story from the Associated Press

Amid closures and stratifying salmon runs, Alaskans question fishery management process

October 11, 2021 — Lackluster salmon returns and some fishery closures have Alaskan fishermen wondering about their future.

Although overall salmon returns in the largest U.S. state have been strong this year, the results have been stratified. King salmon returns, specifically, have been in a long and steady decline. Statewide, king landings – by number of fish – have declined by more than 70 percent in the last 40 years, from a high of 875,630 fish in 1982 to 265,081 in 2020. The harvest so far for 2021 is about 212,000 fish. When accounting for landings by weight, the reduction is almost 85 percent over the same period, from almost 16.9 million pounds in 1982 to 2.9 million in 2020, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

Read the full story from National Fisherman at SeafoodSource

 

Trawl overhaul? Alaska fishermen go to bat for kings and crabs

October 8, 2021 — Animosity toward Alaska’s trawl fleet reached a fever pitch over the summer. In most parts of the state, where salmon fishing would have kept stakeholders busy, lackluster returns and some closures instead gave thousands of fishermen more time to mull over answers to where the fish may have gone.

Although Alaska’s overall salmon returns have been strong this year, the results are stratified. King salmon returns, specifically, have been in a long and steady decline. Statewide, king landings — by number of fish — have declined by more than 70 percent in the last 40 years, from a high of 875,630 fish in 1982 to 265,081 in 2020. The harvest so far for 2021 is about 212,000 fish.

When accounting for landings by weight, the reduction is almost 85 percent over the same period, from 16.9 million pounds in 1982 to 2.9 million in 2020, according to the Alaska Department of Fish & Game.

As council meetings went virtual during the pandemic-induced shutdowns, participation and feedback from local stakeholders increased significantly.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

 

In one place, for one fish, climate change may be a boon

October 7, 2021 — On a mid-July afternoon, when the tide was starting to come in on the Naknek River, the Bandle family’s commercial fishing nets lay stretched across the beach, waiting for the water to rise. With the fishing crew on break, Sharon Bandle emerged from a tar-paper-sided cabin that serves as kitchen and bunkhouse with a plate of tempura salmon and a bowl of cocktail sauce. Everyone dug in.

Here in southwestern Alaska’s Bristol Bay, the Bandle family has fished by setnet for nearly 40 years, anchoring nets hundreds of feet long on the beach, then stretching them perpendicularly into the river’s current. The webbing hangs like a curtain from a line of softball-size corks, intercepting sockeye salmon as they swim upstream to their spawning grounds. Crews of two or three in small aluminum skiffs pick the salmon from the nets; processing plants on the far side of the river head and gut the catch, then ship the bulk of it to China and elsewhere for additional processing.

Bristol Bay’s sockeye harvest has long made up about half of the global catch of this species, in a seasonal blitz as short as it is enormous: The fishery lasts a mere six weeks. Each summer, 15,000 seafood processors, boat-based fishermen, and setnetters—including families such as the Bandles—gather here to support an industry worth more than $2 billion in 2019. Some fishermen will net enough cash to live on until the fish come back the next year. And this year, Bristol Bay outdid itself, notching the largest sockeye run in the region’s recorded history with an astonishing 66 million returning fish. Even more astonishing, this season capped nearly a decade of extraordinarily high salmon returns in Bristol Bay, where sockeye harvests have reached more than 50 percent above the most recent 20-year average.

But such riches are localized. Outside of Bristol Bay, salmon fisheries are failing, including those on British Columbia’s famed Fraser River, on Alaska’s Chignik and Copper Rivers, and in Cook Inlet. Five hundred miles north of Bristol Bay, Yukon River salmon runs have totally collapsed.

Scientists believe that climate change is boosting salmon numbers here in Bristol Bay, even as warming temperatures and other factors seem to be driving the fish to extinction elsewhere. For salmon and humans across the North Pacific, rapidly warming temperatures are creating both winners and losers. As fish totes fill to bursting in Bristol Bay, people elsewhere are left holding empty nets.

But even as more salmon are returning to Bristol Bay, some fishermen here worry that it might be time for a bust.

Read the full story at The Atlantic

 

Governor seeks federal disaster relief for Oregon’s struggling commercial salmon industry

October 6, 2021 — Oregon Gov. Kate Brown is asking the federal government for disaster relief for the state’s struggling commercial salmon industry.

The governor submitted the formal aid request Monday to the U.S. Department of Commerce. In her letter Brown said the economic return from commercial salmon fishing along most of the coast since 2018 has been less than one-third of what it was in prior years. This continuing trend, she said in the letter, is having severe effects on already distressed rural communities and businesses that depend on salmon.

Brown said salmon are a vital component for the state’s natural resources and provide significant commercial, recreational, economic and aesthetic benefits. Salmon are also very important for Native American tribes in the region.

“While economic assistance will be essential to address the impacts of closures and restrictions on our salmon fisheries, it is vitally important that federal, state, tribal, and local governments continue to work together to recover and restore salmon populations and develop management strategies to ensure the long-term health and sustainability of our salmon fisheries,” she said in the letter.

Read the full story at Oregon Public Broadcasting