July 28, 2021 — Chicken of the Sea is encouraging vaccinated Americans to gather together for family occasions with a new promotion.
Consumers can enter to win one of twenty USD 500 (EUR 423) “Reunion Grants” – a total of USD 10,000 (EUR 8,500) – to ensure their outdoor gatherings “are the most memorable yet for family and friends,” Chicken of the Sea said in a press release.
July 28, 2021 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:
Many species, such as salmon, rely on cool waters to survive during the hot summer months. But with temperatures rising due to climate change, these cold-water habitats are being threatened. In California’s Shasta River, a NOAA-supported habitat restoration project is helping to keep waters cool for salmon.
The Shasta River is an important tributary of the Klamath River, which was once the third largest salmon-producing river on the West Coast. Historically, the Shasta River supported more than 80,000 salmon each year. Today, however, only up to a few thousand adult salmon return to the river each year.
One of the issues facing Chinook salmon, steelhead trout, and threatened coho salmon in the Shasta River is a lack of healthy habitat. In particular, high water temperatures and poor water quality during the hot summer months can lead to lethal conditions for salmon.
Juvenile salmon need access to cool water to survive warm summer temperatures. In healthy habitats, trees and other vegetation growing along the banks of rivers and streams provide shade that keeps the water cool. Deep, fast-moving waterways also stay cooler than shallow, slower-moving ones. As water temperatures continue to rise due to climate change, maintaining these cold-water habitats for salmon becomes more crucial.
On Big Springs Creek, a tributary to the Shasta River, water temperatures were heating up as high as 77 degrees Fahrenheit—too warm for salmon to tolerate. These high temperatures were caused in part by uncontrolled livestock grazing. Cows were eating the vegetation that otherwise would have provided shade and kept the water cool. They were also trampling the streambed, creating a shallower, wider river channel that was more easily heated by the sun’s rays.
July 27, 2021 — Baby salmon are dying by the thousands in one California river, and an entire run of endangered salmon could be wiped out in another. Fishermen who make their living off adult salmon, once they enter the Pacific Ocean, are sounding the alarm as blistering heat waves and extended drought in the U.S. West raise water temperatures and imperil fish from Idaho to California.
Hundreds of thousands of young salmon are dying in Northern California’s Klamath River as low water levels brought about by drought allow a parasite to thrive, devastating a Native American tribe whose diet and traditions are tied to the fish. And wildlife officials said the Sacramento River is facing a “near-complete loss” of young Chinook salmon due to abnormally warm water.
A crash in one year’s class of young salmon can have lasting effects on the total population and shorten or stop the fishing season, a growing concern as climate change continues to make the West hotter and drier. That could be devastating to the commercial salmon fishing industry, which in California alone is worth $1.4 billion.
The plummeting catch already has led to skyrocketing retail prices for salmon, hurting customers who say they can no longer afford the $35 per pound of fish, said Mike Hudson, who has spent the last 25 years catching and selling salmon at farmers markets in Berkeley.
July 26, 2021 — Maine is home to the last wild Atlantic salmon populations in the U.S., but a new push to protect the fish at the state level is unlikely to land them on the endangered list.
Atlantic salmon once teemed in U.S. rivers, but now return from the sea to only a handful of rivers in eastern and central Maine. The fish are protected at the federal level under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, but a coalition of environmental groups and scientists said the fish could be afforded more protections if they were added to Maine’s own list of endangered and threatened species.
State law allows Maine Department of Marine Resources Commissioner Patrick Keliher to make that recommendation, but his office told The Associated Press he does not intend to do it. The department has done extensive work to conserve and restore the fish, and the commissioner “does not believe a listing at the state level would afford additional conservation benefits or protections,” said Jeff Nichols, a department spokesperson.
The environmentalists who want to see the fish on the state list said they’re going to keep pushing for it and other protections. Adding the fish to the state endangered list would mean conservation of salmon would be treated as a bigger concern in state permitting processes, said John Burrows, executive director for U.S. operations for the Atlantic Salmon Federation.
“The state of Maine and a handful of our rivers are the only places in the country that still have wild Atlantic salmon,” Burrows said. “It’s something that should happen, and should have happened.”
Atlantic salmon have disappeared from U.S. rivers because of damming, pollution and others environmental challenges, and they also face the looming threat of climate change. Nevertheless, there have been some positive signs in Maine rivers in recent years.
July 26, 2021 — In late June, summer chum salmon numbers in the Yukon River were the lowest on record. The Chinook run is also extremely low, resulting in ongoing closures of salmon fishing on much of the Yukon River.
The loss is causing anxiety for more than 30 riverside communities that depend on chinook and chum as a main source of protein for the winter.
Ben Stevens is the Tanana Chiefs Conference tribal resources manager. Stevens is from Stevens Village on the upper Yukon and said he has never before seen such a total shut down.
Below is a transcript of an interview with Lori Townsend on Alaska News Nightly with minor edits for clarity
Ben Stevens: We’ve seen chinook crashes before in recent history. We were still okay with the idea because we had something else to fall back on. And that was the fall chum.
This year, it’s unprecedented because we don’t have the chinook or the fall chum and that has disturbed our folks to a level I haven’t seen before.
Lori Townsend: Are there other river or tributary opportunities close enough that could help people get fish in other places? Or is it just not possible?
July 23, 2021 — Late last week, Peter Pan Seafood raised its base price for sockeye salmon in Bristol Bay from $1.10 to $1.25 “after gauging the strength of the run and the market,” said the company in a press release.
“We felt it was only responsible to push the base price up to $1.25, once again demonstrating our commitment and our partnership with the harvesters,” said Jon Hickman, Peter Pan’s vice president of Operations.
Peter Pan is also now offering a late season incentive of $0.10 for harvesters to stay in the water and keep fishing. This is only for fish harvested after July 18.
Peter Pan was the first out of the gate this season to announce its initial base price of $1.10 early in the season “to put fishermen at ease that they would receive a fair price and to help them plan their finances for the year,” the company reported.
July 23, 2021 — On a chilly Sunday in June, Sarah Redmond steers her pickup outside of an old sardine cannery here in Gouldsboro, Maine, leaps out, and pulls from the truck bed what looks like lobster traps oozing with slimy, withered vegetable matter. “I’m doing research on dulse,” she says, about the tough, purplish seaweed that is higher in protein and lower in iodine than other varieties. Seaweed is popular in Japan, she says, but Americans find it too intense. “We sell it mostly as an ingredient and as seasoning,” she says. “It’s a flavor enhancer, in chips, bread, cereal — you can sprinkle it on as a barbecue rub. It’s got vitamins, minerals, fiber.”
Wearing thick rubber muck boots, jeans, and a camouflage baseball cap pulled low over a loose ponytail, Redmond looks every inch the farmer she is. But unlike most farmers, her crop is seeded on ropes strung through 55 acres of saltwater. Redmond, 40, owns Springtide Seaweed, the nation’s largest organic seaweed farm, based in this onetime cannery on the shores of Frenchman Bay. In addition to dulse, she grows sugar kelp, skinny kelp, and alaria kelp.
Redmond’s farm is part of a state-supported effort to build an edible-seaweed farming industry. Maine is home to the bulk of the country’s kelp farms; the state’s seaweed harvest is expected to grow from 54,000 pounds in 2018 to 3 million pounds in 2035. It’s an audacious experiment in a country that does not traditionally eat much seaweed, but it is seen as essential to bolstering Maine’s fragile economy.
Driving this investment is fear: Last summer, the Gulf of Maine recorded its all-time hottest temperature — 69.85 degrees. The Gulf is one of the fastest-warming bodies of saltwater on the planet, and the locals know full well that as water temperatures continue to rise, lobsters — by far the state’s most lucrative fishery — will abandon Maine for cooler Canadian waters. Lobster brings over $400 million dollars in direct revenue to Maine each year, and lures visitors from all over the world to restaurants, seafood shacks, and festivals. But perhaps not for long: In 2018, the Gulf of Maine Research Institute and several research partners estimated that by mid-century Maine’s lobster population will plummet by as much as 62 percent.
To fend off economic disaster, Maine is striving to wean itself from its dependence on lobster, and on all wild fisheries. It has little choice. Wild Atlantic salmon all but disappeared from the state decades ago, as have cod and northern shrimp. Sea urchins have been harvested to near extinction, and wild clams and mussels are increasingly scarce. As one wild fishery after another falters, a growing number of ambitious, far-sighted people like Redmond see the future of Maine — and in some sense the future of food — in the cultivation of water-dwelling plants and animals.
July 22, 2021 — Bristol Bay’s 2021 sockeye run is the largest on record: 63.2 million fish have returned to the bay this year, breaking the 2018 record of 62.9 million.
This is the fourth time since 1952 that the bay’s run has exceeded the 60-million-fish mark.
The latest record shows Bristol Bay’s sockeye management is working, said Tim Sands, an area management biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
“I think it’s a shining beacon of sustainable management,” he said. “We’ve been prosecuting the commercial salmon fishery management since 1884 and we are still able to set records on total runs, and I think that speaks to the escapement-based management that we use, and it’s great.”
July 21, 2021 — The total numbers since July 19 for catch and escapement have not yet been summed, but when they are it’s all but certain that Bristol Bay’s 2018 all-time record of 62.95 million sockeyes will be shattered—the second time in four years. Catch and escapement numbers in the Bay have been kept since 1893.
As of July 19, and poised to be updated later today, Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s total run number is 62.8 million sockeye.
July 21, 2021 — Alaska’s salmon harvest has continued to pick up steam, including the season’s largest weekly harvest.
A bump in pink salmon landings was driven by the Prince William Sound region, where pink hauls are up 21 percent over the pace set in 2019. In other regions of the state, harvests are currently well behind the 2019 pace for pinks, which typically produce big returns in alternating years. The harvest also tends to peak later in the summer.