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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
March 20, 2018 — At Seafood Expo North America on Monday, 18 March, companies representing about 80 percent of the total production of salmon in Chile vowed to reduce their use of antibiotics and seek a “Good Alternative” rating from the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program by 2025.
Members of the Chilean Salmon Marketing Council, which include Cermaq Chile, MultiExport Foods, Australis, Salmones Camachaca, Blumar, Ventisqueros, Salmones Austral, Marine Farm, Salmones Magallanes, and AgroSuper (which owns Aquachile, Los Fiordos, and Verlasso), have all pledged to pursue a 50 percent reduction in their use of antibiotics by 2025.
The partnership between SalmonChile, the Chilean Salmon Marketing Council, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium will formally be known as the Chilean Salmon Antibiotic Reduction Program (CSARP). Norway-based Mowi’s Chilean operations will also participate in the initiative, SalmonChile CEO Arturo Clement told SeafoodSource at the event.
Griffin said the issue of antibiotic use has been a major one for the Chilean salmon industry for years, and that when he took over as head of the marketing council in December 2017, curbing antibiotic use was a top priority for him, as a means to achieve higher recognition in Seafood Watch’s seafood ranking system, which rates seafood as either a “Best Choice,” a “Good Alternative,” or as food to “Avoid.”
Read the full story at Seafood Source
March 19, 2019 — A Maine-based smokehouse that produces cold-smoked Atlantic salmon is back in business after overcoming the loss of its license to the FDA three years ago, and being stuck in limbo during the U.S. government shutdown as it tried to restart operations.
Sullivan Harbor Farm Smokehouse, located in Hancock Village, Maine, reopened on 12 March after regaining FDA approval and documentation. The smokehouse lost its license roughly three years ago, and was then purchased by the company’s current president and owner, Leslie Harlow, who was one of the original founding partners.
Harlow had parted ways with the business back in 2005, but when the business was shut down in 2016 she bought out the former partner and begin the process of reopening. The final hurdle was the government shutdown, which further delayed the reopening as FDA officials were unavailable to give final approvals.
“Three years ago, when I took this project on, the goal was to make the facility and products compliant and safe, while still preserving the artisanal methods that made Sullivan Harbor Farm smoked salmon a stand-out from the rest,” Harlow said. “The experience was bewildering at times, but we persisted. Grit, hard work, and a belief in small entrepreneurship brought us to where we are today.”
March 18, 2019 — If all goes as planned, a Massachusetts biotechnology company will soon begin importing salmon eggs from a Canadian hatchery to its plant in Indiana, where they’ll grow into the first genetically modified salmon ever produced in the United States.
AquaBounty Technologies Inc. won approval for its long-delayed plan last week when federal regulators lifted an importation ban that had prohibited the eggs from entering the country.
But opponents, who deride the new salmon as “Frankenfish,” say the fight will go on and that they’ll ultimately block the company, either in the courts or Congress.
Critics fear the fish might escape and damage wild salmon, and they’re particularly angry that the federal government plans to allow the genetically engineered salmon to be made and sold in the United States without clearly marked labels. The fish’s proponents have said those critics are just being protective of the existing industry’s market share.
March 15, 2019 — Land-based aquaculture can sound like a mirage — shrimp farms in the desert, salmon swimming “upstream” in an alpine village tank, tilapia swishing over the plains. And for a long time, ample production of sea delicacies in recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) has been more dream than reality. Yet the technology and its innovators steadily have gained momentum and finally may be hitting their tipping point.
The allure of fish grown on land is easy to understand: Like all aquaculture, it reduces demand for wild fish, but unlike with sea-based pens, closed-loop RAS farms (PDF) run no risk of fish escaping to dilute the native gene pool, spread diseases or discharge waste and antibiotics into the wild. RAS farmers have near-full control over growing conditions, so they can optimize for growth and quality. And with its amenability to unlikely locations, RAS can sit near major consumer markets, providing fresh local seafood even when the shore is hundreds of miles away.
So why aren’t we eating it already? RAS entrepreneurs face three big challenges: energy; contamination risks; and money. Mimicking a natural system within strictly regulated parameters is an energy-intensive endeavor, and sustainability (not to mention costs) demands locating RAS facilities next to cheap, abundant energy sources. A pathogen let loose in a closed system can be a disaster, so RAS farmers have to be extra scrupulous about avoiding contamination.
Money may be the biggest hurdle: RAS operations need high volumes and relatively long ramp-ups to reach profitability, and the pile of patient capital needed to build and grow large, high-tech facilities can be as elusive as Moby Dick.
March 14, 2019 –The respiratory systems of Atlantic salmon function normally even when carrying large loads of piscine orthoreovirus (PRV), new UBC research has found.
“We didn’t find significant harm to the fish’s respiratory physiology despite the virus replicating to a load equal to, if not higher, than those seen naturally in wild or farmed fish” said Yangfan Zhang, a Ph.D. student in UBC’s faculty of land and food systems and lead author of the study published today in Frontiers in Physiology.
PRV is present in nearly all farmed Atlantic salmon on Canada’s west coast, and various strains of PRV have been detected in many salmonid species around the world. Consequently, the results are a positive step in reducing the uncertainty about the potential of infected farmed Atlantic salmon in marine pens to negatively impact migrating wild Pacific salmon.