Saving Seafood

Fall fishing: Alaska’s commercial fleets load up on pollock, Dungeness, king crabs and more

October 9, 2020 — As always, there is a lot of fishing action going on after summer salmon.

At Southeast Alaska, beam trawlers are back on the water targeting 650,000 pounds of pink and sidestripe shrimp in a third opener.

Southeast’s Dungeness season reopened on Oct. 1, and a few million pounds are likely to come out of that fishery. There will again be no opener for red or blue king crab because of low abundances.

On Oct. 5, a hundred or more divers also could be heading down for more than 1.7 million pounds of red sea cucumbers. A catch of just under 3 million pounds of sea urchins also is up for grabs, but there may be a lack of buyers. Southeast divers also are targeting giant geoduck clams.

At Prince William Sound, a 15,000-pound test fishery just wrapped up for golden king crabs; likewise, a nearly 7 million pound golden king crab fishery is ongoing along the Aleutian Islands.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

ALASKA: Lower supplies of wild Pacific salmon by major producers push up prices

October 7, 2020 — Now that the 2020 pack of Alaska salmon has been caught and put up, stakeholders will get a better picture of how global prices may rise or fall.

Nearly 75% of the value of Alaska’s salmon exports is driven by sales between July and October. And right now, lower supplies of wild Pacific salmon by the major producers are pushing up prices as the bulk of those sales are made.

For sockeye salmon, global supplier and market tracker Tradex reports that frozen fillets are in high demand and supplies are hard to source for all sizes. With a catch this year topping 45 million, Alaska is the leading producer of that popular commodity.

“Luckily, sockeye harvests were once again abundant in Bristol Bay as fishermen caught nearly 200 million pounds. Although that’s a bigger than average harvest for Bristol Bay, it’s still down 9% from last year. With lower sockeye harvests in Russia and closures in Canada, we estimate the global sockeye harvest declined by 26% in 2020,” said Andy Wink, executive director of the Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association speaking on the Tradex Three-Minute Market Report.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

ALASKA: Disaster Declaration for SE Fisheries Sought

October 6, 2020 — Five Southeast legislators are calling on Gov. Dunleavy to seek a federal fisheries disaster declaration for Southeast because of poor harvests and low prices.

“Reports from the Southeast commercial fishing fleets indicate a dismal year for salmon returns in the region. There has also been a significant drop in prices fishermen get from processors. This, paired with reduced economic opportunity caused by COVID-19, has led many of our communities to request declarations of economic disaster,” the legislators said in a letter to the governor.

Read the full story at Seafood News

ALASKA: State legislative leaders ask Dunleavy not to help Pebble

October 5, 2020 — Two Alaska legislative leaders have called on the state’s governor to stop assisting the development of a proposed copper and gold mine.

House Speaker Bryce Edgmon, an independent, and Republican Rep. Louise Stutes wrote to Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy Tuesday about the Pebble Mine project.

The legislators said the administration should not provide state land for a mitigation plan that developers hope will lead to a federal permit for the proposed open-pit mine about 200 miles (322 kilometers) southwest of Anchorage.

The mine would straddle salmon-producing headwaters of the Bristol Bay fishery.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

New Videos Put Restitution to Work for Imperiled Coho Salmon

October 2, 2020 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

Coho salmon once supported a wealth of tribal, commercial, and recreational fisheries along the West Coast. Today some populations of the swift silvery fish are nearing extinction. The good news? We can reverse that decline, as biologists and others demonstrate in a new video series that offers hope for California’s endangered fish and wildlife species.

The video series was produced in collaboration with state and federal fish and wildlife agencies with a community service payment made by a real estate development company. The company pleaded guilty in 2016 in a federal criminal case involving the endangered California tiger salamander. In a separate but related case, the owner of the development company agreed to protect a 107-acre ranch in Contra Costa County that provides habitat for endangered species.

The Saving Species Together video series and a supporting website highlight collaborative efforts to recover endangered species including:

  • California tiger salamander
  • San Joaquin kit fox
  • Western snowy plover
  • Southern Oregon/Northern California Coast coho salmon

“When we collaborate, we can make very real progress in protecting these species,” said Bob Pagliuco, a NOAA Fisheries habitat restoration specialist. He worked with Humboldt Redwood Company and Trout Unlimited to build an off-channel pond for juvenile coho in the Eel River Watershed. The coho salmon video tells how a supportive landowner helped return fish to their historic habitat. “The educational campaign launched by these videos is a way to help the public understand how habitat destruction affects species and how we can protect habitats to save these species.”

Read the full release here

US Forest Service may open salmon shelter to clearcutting

September 30, 2020 — A final environmental impact statement released Friday, 25 September, indicates the Forest Service plans to remove Roadless Rule protections from Alaska’s Tongass National Forest.

If finalized, the rule change would repeal conservation measures for more than nine million acres of the forest, making protected lands available for expanded industrial clear-cut logging of old growth trees and construction of expensive and highly subsidized logging roads.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Atlantic Sapphire completes first commercial harvest of land-based farmed salmon at US facility, marking a major milestone

September 29, 2020 — Atlantic Sapphire completed the first commercial harvest of salmon from its land-based facility in Miami on Monday, marking a major milestone for the company and the large land-based salmon industry.

Atlantic Sapphire Interim CFO Karl-Oystein Oyehauge told IntraFish the harvest “is a proud moment for the Sapphire team.”

The company said it will now be supplying weekly volumes to customers such as Giant Eagle, H-E-B, New Seasons Market, Publix, Safeway, Sobey’s, Sprouts Farmers Market and Wegmans.

The Chef’s Warehouse, a Connecticut-based gourmet food and restaurant supplier, will be among the first buyers to receive the product, Atlantic Sapphire said.

Read the full story at IntraFish

“More negatives than positives” as Alaska salmon season wraps up

September 25, 2020 — As Alaska’s salmon fishing season starts to wrap up, numbers are indicating a relatively poor showing overall.

While landings and fish tickets continued to trickle in, preliminary numbers from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game showed Alaskan salmon fishermen harvested around 113 million fish on the 2020 season, falling well short of the pre-season projection of nearly 133 million fish. It makes the season the fifth-worst even-year harvest since 1975, according to Garrett Evridge, chief economist for the McDowell Group.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

The Top 25: Seafood Sustainability & Conservation

September 25, 2020 — There’s no way around it – 2020 so far has been a year wrought with difficult news and stark changes. A global pandemic has kept most of us apart. It’s made the future harder to imagine. Nevertheless, much of the seafood industry persists in its efforts to stay the course, feeding communities in a time of great need. We hope this year’s Top 25 list similarly nourishes your news feed with something good.

From 1999 to 2018, the editorial team of SeafoodSource and its previous incarnation, SeaFood Business magazine, worked tirelessly to produce a list of the leading North American seafood suppliers based on reported sales figures. Last year, we revamped our process, bringing you a new type of compilation celebrating the Top 25 seafood product innovations that have transformed the North American industry. In 2020, we have once again reshuffled the deck.

Cooke Inc.

It all began in 1985 with one family, one farm, and 5,000 salmon. Thirty-five years later, vertically-integrated corporation Cooke Aquaculture, headquartered in Blacks Harbour, New Brunswick, Canada, and a collective of other Cooke family companies together comprise one of the world’s largest seafood enterprises.

A business of such magnitude approaches sustainable development in a variety of ways. For instance, when it comes to certifying its True North Seafood products, Cooke has earned vetting from an array of third-party providers of some of the industry’s most stringent standards, including: the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC), Best Aquaculture Practices (BAP), BRCGS Global Standards, the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), Alaska Responsible Fisheries Management (RFM), the International Featured Standards (IFS), Soil Association Organic, Kosher, GLOBAL G.A.P. Aquaculture Standard, Label Rouge, Friend of the Sea, Crianza de Nuestros Mares (“Breeding from our seas”), ISO 14001 and ISO 45001, Halal, and Ocean Wise.

Read the full list and descriptions at Seafood Source

Warming conditions are making northern Bering Sea more friendly for pink salmon

September 22, 2020 — Pink salmon, the most plentiful and cheapest of Alaska’s five salmon species, are finding more hospitable habitat in the warming northern Bering Sea, a new study finds.

There is a clear link between warming temperatures at Nome and better juvenile salmon productivity in rivers that flow into the northern Bering Sea, said the study, published in the journal Deep Sea Research Part II: Topical Studies in Oceanography.

Pink salmon, a species more associated with waters off Alaska’s southern coast, appear to be among those boreal species working their way into more northern waters in response to climate change.

Pink salmon’s short life cycle makes their population more adaptable to these changes in environmental conditions, according to the study. Other salmon species spend up to seven years at sea before returning to freshwater to spawn, but pink salmon have a total life cycle of only two years — counting their time in both saltwater and freshwater — and that relatively quick turnaround gives more chances for succeeding generations to shift their migration patterns.

“Pink salmon are definitely good at straying,” said lead author Ed Farley of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “They definitely want to go seek out other habitat.”

Read the full story at Arctic Today