July 9, 2021 — Dealing with hungry, predatory seals has become a big deal for inshore fishermen, fish farmers, and authorities responsible for safe passage for migratory salmon.
Losses caused through broken nets and half-eaten fish have risen sharply in the past few decades as protected seal populations have expanded globally.
July 9, 2021 — The drought is making the Sacramento River so hot that “nearly all” of an endangered salmon species’ juveniles could be cooked to death this fall, California officials warned this week.
In a brief update on the perilous state of the river issued this week, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife made a dire prediction about the endangered winter-run Chinook salmon and its struggles against consistently hot weather in the Sacramento Valley.
“This persistent heat dome over the West Coast will likely result in earlier loss of ability to provide cool water and subsequently it is possible that nearly all in-river juveniles will not survive this season,” the department said.
Given that the salmon generally have a three-year life cycle, a near-total wipeout of one year’s run of juveniles “greatly increases the risk of extinction for the species,” said Doug Obegi, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The winter-run salmon endured two years of severe mortality during the last drought as well.
July 7, 2021 — Alaska’s Bristol Bay salmon season is off to a strong start in what is expected to be another harvest hovering around all-time highs for both catch and value in the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery.
Fish were already pouring in to at least two of Bristol Bay’s four major river systems. As of July 1, the bay had produced 9.02 million commercial sockeye landings — 46 percent above the five-year average — on a preseason prediction of more than 36 million sockeye, according to area biologist Tim Sands with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
By Tuesday, July 6, that total was above 14 million sockeye.
While early returns look good, test fishing indicates the run should sustain for a relatively long period of time, which should help the fishery avoid bottlenecks in fishing and processing.
Last season’s compressed run, coupled with covid-19 complications, strained Bristol Bay’s fishermen and processors. The Bristol Bay fishery also slogged through the pandemic last season with a disappointing base price of just $0.75, but got early, unexpected news that Peter Pan Seafoods will pay a base price of $1.10.
July 2, 2021 — Hundreds of thousands of salmon swim against the current in southeast Norway—in massive indoor tanks away from the nearest river as the controversial industry increasingly embraces greener land-based facilities.
The fish live in two gigantic pools inside an inconspicuous industrial building in Fredrikstad owned by a company that plans to raise salmon in similar settings even further afield, in the United States.
By raising the salmon on land, the industry is attempting to move away from the river or sea cages that have invited criticism over a slew of issues.
The problems run from costly mass escapes to fish infected with sea lice treated with chemicals to mounds of faeces and feed piling up on the seabed below the farms.
“At sea, you depend on the almighty for many things. In a land-based farm, we are suddenly the all-powerful one,” Fredrikstad Seafoods general manager Roger Fredriksen told AFP.
July 1, 2021 — American Aquafarms last week once again made a case for its $330 million project to raise Atlantic salmon off Bald Rock and Long Porcupine Island and process the fish at the now dormant Maine Fair Trade Lobster Co. facility in Prospect Harbor. But the Norwegian-backed company’s June 23 presentation did little to quell citizens’ fears that the proposed operation will harm the area’s robust lobster fishery and scenic values that draw millions of visitors to the region annually.
At the Maine Department of Marine Resources’ 3.5-hour scoping session, held via Zoom, American Aquafarms heard comments and answered questions about its proposal and draft applications to lease the two Frenchman Bay sites for up to 20 years. The intent, too, was for the company to inform the public about its proposed plan to harvest as much as 66 million pounds of salmon annually from the two 15-pen sites and process the fish at the Prospect Harbor facility. Sardines, lobster and other seafood have been processed almost continuously at that facility and transported to market from there for at least 115 years.
Attending the Zoom session, Acadia National Park Superintendent Kevin Schneider had a prepared statement to read aloud, but he was not among the 13 people who got to speak during the allotted time. In his statement, made public June 24, Schneider called for the DMR’s July deadline for submitting written comments on the long-term leases to be extended to Aug. 6. In his remarks, he noted that Acadia National Park is just 2,000 feet at the closest point from the two lease sites each comprising 60.32 acres. At both sites, two rows of eight and seven closed pens would be arranged in grids and anchored to the ocean floor in mooring systems encompassing 10 acres each.
June 30, 2021 — Canada is slashing and closing commercial coastal fishing on more than 100 salmon stocks and permanently downsizing the fleet through voluntary license buybacks in an urgent effort to protect wild salmon from extinction.
Stating Pacific salmon are in long-term decline with many runs on the verge of collapse, Bernadette Jordan, minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard, announced Tuesday that bold action is needed now to stabilize and rebuild stocks before it is too late.
Salmon managers on the U.S. side of the border also are taking steps in an effort to respond to dwindling salmon stocks upon which endangered southern resident orcas rely, including increasing funding to certain hatcheries to increase production.
Some of the Canadian reductions announced in a video news conference Tuesday went into effect immediately. The cutbacks are part of a broader $647 million initiative to save wild salmon, including habitat improvements and a reconsideration of Canada’s aquaculture industry in B.C. waters.
The closures and reductions affect commercial salmon fisheries and First Nations communal commercial fisheries.
June 30, 2021 — Early indicators are pointing to yet another strong year in the massive Bristol Bay sockeye fishery, which is contrasted against the continued struggles in many of the state’s other large salmon fisheries.
Just more than 3.2 million sockeye had been harvested through June 27, according to Alaska Department of Fish and Game figures, with the Nushagak District accounting for more than half of the catch so far at nearly 1.7 million fish. The 3.2 million-fish harvest to-date this year is between the comparable totals for recent years; 1.2 million sockeye were harvested through June 27 last year, while more than 4.4 million were caught by the same day in 2019.
With sockeye harvests of more than 40 million fish and total runs greater than 56 million sockeye, both of the last two years have been among the most productive in the history of the Bristol Bay fishery.
Dillingham Area Management Biologist Tim Sands said early June 29 that he’s confident there are a lot of fish still making their way to the head of Bristol Bay based on catches in the Port Moller test fishery.
He noted that returns to the Egegik River down the Alaska Peninsula have been particularly strong, with a harvest of more than 1.2 million fish and a total return estimated at more than 1.7 million sockeye through June 27, several-fold more than last year in each category.
June 30, 2021 — This is shaping up to be a dire summer for fish and trees.
Temperatures in the Columbia and Snake rivers are already within two degrees of the slaughter zone of 2015, when half the sockeye salmon run was lost because of high water temperatures. An estimated 250,000 sockeye died that year long before reaching their spawning grounds.
The sockeye run is at its peak right now just as temperatures hit record highs across Washington state and in Idaho. Spring and summer chinook and steelhead migrating in the rivers also are at risk.
Salmon are cold-water animals. Temperatures above 62 degrees make them more vulnerable to disease, and as temperatures climb higher, they will stop migrating altogether.
The risk of heat stress is present in the mainstem rivers, but also in fish ladders, where salmon will turn around and head back down river if the temperature is higher at the top of the ladder than where they entered it. Cooling water released at the top of the ladders can only do so much as air temperatures reach unprecedented highs.
Water temperatures are already at dangerous levels despite an earlier start to cold-water releases from deep in the Dworshak Dam, on the Clearwater River, upstream of Lower Granite Dam on the Lower Snake River. Nonetheless, temperatures in the tailrace at Lower Granite are still edging above safe levels for salmon and are even hotter downriver.
June 30, 2021 — In mid-June, California’s State Water Resources Control Board wrote a tragic letter. The board, which has significant powers under California’s Constitution to manage water for the benefit of California’s people and ecosystems, wrote that it would approve a plan for water releases out of Lake Shasta that risk destroying the Sacramento River’s iconic winter-run Chinook salmon population forever.
The winter-run Chinook population has already declined by 99%, down to a few thousand fish that manage to run out of the San Francisco Bay and return to spawn below a dam near Redding. Baby salmon need cold water to hatch from their eggs and grow until they’re ready to migrate to the ocean. But in this drought year, the Federal Bureau of Reclamation has proposed drawing down the levels in Lake Shasta — California’s largest reservoir — to deliver water to irrigators in the Central Valley, allowing the diminished reservoir to heat up over the summer to temperatures that when released into the river “could increase the risk of extinction significantly,” as the board’s own letter put it.
The board, whose members are appointed by the governor, could have modified the plan. Even keeping a small fraction of the water sent for irrigation to be released later could have a dramatic impact on the survival rates of young salmon hatching later in the summer. But holding back water to save fish would have set up a conflict with powerful business interests in the Central Valley.
The board seems to have been more willing to risk the extinction of a salmon run than they were to risk angering landowners and lobbyists. To save even some of the Sacramento River’s salmon population, in a year where pumping water to farms has resulted in dangerously low water flows, California has had to resort to hauling millions of young fish raised in state-run hatcheries via tanker trucks to the Golden Gate. But trucking fish is a desperate measure, one that conceals a larger crisis that is likely to make the fate of fish into one of the key political issues of California’s drought-stricken future.
June 29, 2021 — I am writing on behalf of the Maine chapter of Native Fish Coalition regarding the recent proposal by the state to allocate $20 million from the American Rescue Plan to update and modernize Maine’s fish hatcheries.
Native Fish Coalition (NFC) is a nonpartisan, grassroots, donor-funded, all volunteer, 501(c)(3) non-profit dedicated to the conservation, preservation, and restoration of wild native fish. Founded in Maine, we also have chapters in Alabama, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and West Virginia with members, partners, volunteers, supporters and followers.
When it was announced that Maine’s hatchery system will receive $20 million from the American Rescue Plan, it was stated: “At the core of Maine’s fisheries is Maine’s state hatchery system.” This is a gross misrepresentation of what Maine’s fisheries are, what makes Maine unique, and why people come to Maine to fish.