Saving Seafood

US proposes tariffs on European Union goods, seafood products considered

April 9, 2019 — The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Monday, 8 April, it will consider adding new tariffs on products from the European Union, and seafood imports are on the list for potential duties.

The action stems from a World Trade Organization ruling that stated E.U. illegally subsidized airplane-maker Airbus, creating an unfair trade advantage. As a result of that ruling, the U.S. is contemplating tariffs on USD 11 billion (EUR 9.76 billion) in goods from the 28 member nations in the union.

“The E.U. has taken advantage of the U.S. on trade for many years,” President Trump tweeted on Tuesday morning. “It will soon stop!”

The announcement from Office of the U.S. Trade Representative gives a list of nine products from four E.U. members. The products include helicopters, aircraft, fuselages, and associated parts originating from France, Germany, Spain, and Great Britain.

However, a second list of products the Trade Representative is considering includes products from all member nations. The products include salmon fillets, swordfish steaks, crabmeat, clams, scallops, and other seafood items.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Biologists: Killing hungry sea lions saving imperiled fish

April 5, 2019 — A plan to kill California sea lions to save an endangered run of fish on a river that cuts through Portland, Oregon, appears to be working just months after wildlife officials began euthanizing the giant marine mammals, biologists said Thursday.

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife began killing the sea lions in January after getting permission from federal authorities late last year. They have killed 16 so far, including three on Wednesday, said department spokeswoman Michelle Dennehy.

In the same period, 2,400 steelhead fish have reached the upper Willamette River and its tributaries to spawn this spring — the most in three years and double last year’s tally, the agency said.

Less than 30 years ago, the number of steelhead making that journey was at least 15,000 a year but pollution and the construction of dams on key rivers reduced that number dramatically.

Sea lions have been eating an additional 25% of all returning steelhead at that spot in the Willamette River south of Portland, said Shaun Clements, ODFW’s senior policy analyst.

“We’ve definitely been able to reduce predation this year and provide some relief to the fish,” he said. “We’re saving considerable numbers of them.”

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The Washington Post

Groups sue to restrict salmon fishing, help Northwest orcas

April 4, 2019 — Federal officials say they may restrict salmon fishing off the West Coast to help the Pacific Northwest’s critically endangered killer whales, but two environmental groups are suing anyway to ensure it happens.

The Center for Biological Diversity, which filed a lawsuit nearly two decades ago to force the U.S. government to list the orcas as endangered, and the Wild Fish Conservancy asked the U.S. District Court in Seattle on Wednesday to order officials to reconsider a 2009 finding that commercial and recreational fisheries did not jeopardize the orcas’ survival.

The National Marine Fisheries Service issued a letter early last month indicating that it intends to do so. Julie Teel Simmonds, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, said the point of the lawsuit is to ensure they finish the job with urgency, given the plight of the whales, and to take short-term steps in the meantime to help provide more of the orcas’ favored prey, Chinook salmon.

“We have got to figure out how to get them more salmon,” she said. “Since 2009 it’s become much more crystallized just how critical prey availability is to their reproductive success and survival.”

The Endangered Species Act requires the government to certify that any actions it approves won’t jeopardize the survival of a listed species. In the 2009 review, experts found that it wasn’t clear how a lack of prey affected orcas, but that the fisheries were not likely to contribute to their extinction.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

Alaska’s Salmon Forecasts for 2019 are Up By 85% Over Last Year as Pinks, Chums Rebound

April 3, 2019 — SEAFOOD NEWS — The Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s salmon harvest forecast for the season is 213.2 million fish, some 97.5 million more than last year’s landings of 116 million salmon. The forecast was released late last week.

The increase is mostly due to larger harvests of pink and chum salmon compared to 2018. Harvest levels include:

112,000 Chinook salmon outside Southeast Alaska, 41.7 million sockeye, 4.6 million coho, 137.8 million pink, and 29.0 million chum salmon.

Odd-year returns of pink salmon have traditionally been higher than even-year returns, and this year is no exception. What is different, though, is the high uncertainty attached to this pink forecast, which is almost 100 million more pinks than 2018.

“We note that—except for Southeast Alaska—pink salmon forecasts are generally based on average returns from previous brood years,” notes management biologists who produced the report released last week. “The pink salmon run forecast for 2019 is partly an artifact of this method; there is a great deal of uncertainty in predicting pink salmon returns,” they wrote.

Compared to last year, there will be 8.9 million fewer sockeye or red salmon; 900,000 more coho salmon, and 8.7 million more chum salmon.

If realized, the projected commercial chum salmon harvest would be the largest on record for Alaska.

The phenomenal success in recent years of chum salmon returns in Southeast, Prince William Sound, Norton Sound, and Southcentral Alaska appears now to be a trend.

Very low expected harvests of pink salmon in Southeast Alaska may be offset by higher projected harvests in Prince William Sound. The point estimate for landings of pink salmon in SE Alaska is 18 million. In Prince William Sound nearly 11 million wild pinks and 22 million hatchery pinks are expected to be harvested with another several million coming from the Valdez Fisheries Development Assn.

Sockeye harvest in the Copper River, scheduled to begin in May, are expected to be just under 1 million fish, at 955,000 sockeye. Those red salmon will be augmented by a bumper year at the Coghill River weir of nearly half a million sockeyes, much larger than historical averages.

A modest 3 million sockeyes are expected to be harvested this year in the Upper Cook Inlet.

Kitoi Bay pink harvest is projected at 6.6 million fish.

A total of 40.18 million sockeye salmon are expected to return to Bristol Bay in 2019. This is 10% smaller than the most recent 10-year average of Bristol Bay total runs (44.4 million), and 16% greater than the long-term (1963–2018) average of 34.2 million.

The run forecast for each district and landings prediction is as follows:

Run: 16.12 million to Naknek-Kvichak District (6.95 million to the Kvichak river, 3.97 million to the Alagnak river, and 5.21 million to the Naknek river) for a projected harvest of 7.84 million sockeyes;
9.07 million to the Egegik District with harvest projections up to 7.04 million reds;
3.46 million to the Ugashik District or harvest prediction of 2.38 million;
10.38 million to the Nushagak District (4.62 million to the Wood river, 4.18 million to the Nushagak river, and 1.58 million to the Igushik river) and a total harvest prediction of 7.97 million reds; and
1.15 million to the Togiak District which translates to 870,000 reds.

This story originally appeared on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

ALASKA: Pushing back on Pebble: Scientific community and Bristol Bay leaders offer testimony

April 3, 2019 — Nobody was fooling at the Alaska State House Resources Committee hearing on Monday, April 1, to address concerns about the proposed plan for Pebble Mine in Bristol Bay.

“If Pebble goes in, the Bristol Bay Sockeye brand and the entire Alaska Seafood brand will be tarnished,” said Norm Van Vactor, CEO of the Bristol Bay Economic Development Corporation. “The state of Alaska has invested millions into building these brands and establishing Alaska as a premium brand in the marketplace. That brand is based on pristine habitat, sustainability, and high quality, not open-pit mining districts and acid mine drainage.”

Bristol Bay residents, fisheries leaders and scientific experts offered testimony about a range of inadequacies in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers draft Environmental Impact Statement, as well as the economic, social and environmental value of Bristol Bay’s salmon watersheds that would be at risk under the proposed plan.

“They did not assess the risk appropriately. The draft Environmental Impact Statement is misleading about the probability of a [catastrophic tailings dam]failure,” said Dr. Cameron Wobus, a senior scientist at Lynker Technologies who authored a report on tailings dam failure scenarios.

The draft’s 20-year time line, scientists say, is too short to evaluate the long-term risks. A 100-year analysis would have been more transparent, because the tailings dam has a 1 in 5 chance of failing over a century.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

 

CALIFORNIA: Nearly 400,000 Chinook salmon die in hatchery blunder

April 2, 2019 — Nearly 400,000 fall Chinook salmon died due to a mistake at the Coleman National Fish Hatchery in Anderson, California, U.S.A., last week, according to a source at the hatchery.

Water to one of the raceways was accidentally turned off overnight and the mistake was not discovered until the morning. The salmon were less than half-a-year old and died due to a lack of oxygen, according to hatchery project leader Brett Galyean, speaking to KRCR News.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

International study to shed light on the mysterious lives of salmon at sea

March 29, 2019 — Scientists know surprisingly little about a salmon’s life outside of their freshwater and nearshore habitats, but an ambitious study is attempting to change that. The International Year of the Salmon put together an expedition with 21 international scientists in the Gulf of Alaska, all in the hopes of understanding more about the mysterious lives salmon lead in the open ocean.

The International Year of the Salmon is a quasi-international organization aimed at bringing attention to all five species of Pacific salmon as warming ocean temperatures affect their survival at sea.

“We will set the conditions that we need for salmon and people to be resilient as we’re dealing with this change in climate,” Mark Saunders explained.

Saunders works for the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission and he helped establish the International Year of the Salmon initiative. The project is brining scientists, fishery managers and policy makers together from Japan, Russia, the U.S. and Canada in the hopes of making salmon management in the Pacific Ocean an international effort.

“We’re looking for those projects that we believe are transformational and then going after the funding to do it,” Saunders added.

One of the projects was a five-week expedition that acted as a first-of-its-kind stock survey for salmon in the Gulf of Alaska.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

Research expedition reports surprising findings on coho, sockeye salmon in Pacific Ocean

March 28, 2019 — After five weeks at sea, a team of 21 scientists from five countries returned Monday with some surprising findings about the mysterious lives of salmon in the Pacific Ocean, according to Laurie Weitkamp, a salmon biologist with NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Newport, Oregon.

“It was quite an experience,” said Weitkamp, one of three chief scientists aboard the Russian research vessel Professor Kaganovsky.

The expedition was part of activities associated with the International Year of the Salmon and was meant to look at how salmon fare in the open ocean. Among the surprises that emerged from the cruise was the relatively small number of pink salmon. Pinks, the most abundant salmon in the Pacific Ocean, normally make up about half of all the salmon in the region. Yet during the expedition — which covered some 345,000 square miles — pink salmon made up only about 10 percent of the salmon caught in the researchers’ nets.

“We kept asking, ‘Where are the pinks? Why aren’t you here?’” Weitkamp recalled.

Read the full story at the Statesman Journal

Idaho Plan Safeguards Wild Steelehead, Per NOAA

March 22, 2019 — NOAA Fisheries has determined that Idaho’s Fishery Management and Evaluation Plan for their recreational steelhead fishery provides necessary protections for salmon and steelhead listed under the ESA.

NOAA Fisheries has determined that Idaho’s Fishery Management and Evaluation Plan (FMEP) for their recreational steelhead fishery provides necessary protections for salmon and steelhead listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). NOAA fisheries has approved Idaho’s plan under section 4(d) Rule.

Under section 4(d), NOAA Fisheries can specify how an activity can be exempt from additional ESA regulations. This applies particularly to “take,” which can include any act that kills or injures fish, and may include habitat modification. The ESA prohibits any take of species listed as endangered, but some take of threatened species that does not interfere with survival and recovery may be allowed.

“Idaho has developed a plan that provides continuing recreational fishing opportunities while ensuring that ESA-listed salmon and steelhead have the protection they need to recover,” said Allyson Purcell, Branch Chief in NOAA Fisheries’ West Coast Region.

Idaho’s plan came together through collaboration with fishery managers across the Snake River Basin and includes a new basin-wide framework designed to limit total impacts on steelhead from all fisheries in the Snake River Basin. Under Idaho’s plan, fishermen will continue to be required to release any wild steelhead they encounter.

Read the full story at the Fishing Wire

What happens when wild salmon interbreed with hatchery fish?

March 21, 2019 — A research project by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game looking at chum and pink salmon runs in Southeast Alaska and Prince William Sound is expanding to help biologists understand the interplay between wild runs and hatchery strays. There is concern that hatchery fish could alter the genetics of wild populations, posing a threat to their survival.

Homer-based Fish and Game biologists Glenn Hollowell and Ted Otis started tracking hatchery fish found in wild streams around Kachemak Bay in 2014. That was around the time when Cook Inlet Aquaculture Association’s Tutka Bay Lagoon Hatchery reopened after several years.

They wanted to examine how well the hatchery pink salmon homed back to the Kachemak Bay facility, but they found something strange: salmon from other hatcheries.

“When we initially started doing this, we were not anticipating finding any Prince William Sound fish in our samples whatsoever. It was just not something we even considered,” Hollowell explained. “We were very surprised to find that a number of our streams had very significant, double-digit numbers (of Prince William Sound hatchery fish) in 2014.”

The Prince William Sound pinks keep showing up each year, and just the idea that hatchery pinks could stray so far has heated up a dispute over the potential harm on wild runs — namely, whether they could alter the genetics of wild populations in a way that would threaten their survival rate.

Read the full story at KTOO