Saving Seafood

Here’s how $1.4M in NOAA grants will be used to help Maine’s fishing industry

October 25, 2018 — Sea lice infestation costs the salmon aquaculture industry an estimated at $15 million annually in the United States and $740 million globally — and remains the greatest barrier to continuing and expanding salmon aquaculture in the oceans.

That’s the industry context underscoring the relevance of the $725,365 grant awarded to a University of Maine team to study potential new treatments for sea lice infestation.

The grant is one of two to UMaine that were announced recently by National Sea Grant College, a program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Both projects are expected to further advance the development of a sustainable marine and coastal aquaculture industry in the United States, according to a NOAA news release.

Heather Hamlin, Deborah Bouchard and Ian Bricknell of UMaine’s Aquaculture Research Institute will research an integrated approach to addressing sea lice control in the commercial culture of Atlantic salmon in sea pens. The project will address gaps in knowledge of sea lice biology and control methods, such as integrated pest management, and new, ecologically sensitive chemical compounds and their effects on nontarget species, such as lobsters.

Read the full story at MaineBiz

Tri Marine to sell California wetfish plant to Silver Bay

October 25, 2018 — Bellevue, Washington-based tuna supplier Tri Marine International will sell its California wetfish processing business to Alaska salmon processor Silver Bay Seafoods, the companies announced.

The deal, the terms of which were not disclosed, includes Tri Marine’s San Pedro processing plant but not an affiliated fleet of vessels. Those vessels, owned by the Tri Marine affiliate Cape Fisheries, will continue to deliver fish to the facility under Silver Bay’s ownership.

Tri Marine said in a press release that the move was made to focus on its core tuna business.

“I’m delighted that we’ve reached an agreement to sell to a highly regarded, strategic and successful company like Silver Bay,” ” Renato Curto, Tri Marine’s chief executive officer, said. “The sale of our California coastal pelagic assets and business will enable Tri Marine to concentrate our efforts and our resources on our core business – global tuna supply.”

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Omega 3 fatty acids found in seafood tied to healthy aging

October 24, 2018 — People may be more likely to age without health problems when they have more omega 3 fatty acids in their blood, a recent study suggests.

The study authors focused on so-called healthy aging, or the number of years people live without developing disabilities or physical or mental health problems. They examined data on 2,622 adults who were 74 years old on average, following them from 1992 to 2015. Only 11 percent of participants experienced healthy aging throughout the entire study period.

“We found that older adults who had higher levels of omega 3 from seafood were more likely to live longer and healthier lives,” said lead study author Heidi Lai of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University in Boston.

“These findings support current national dietary guidelines to consume more seafood,” Lai said by email.

Adults should get about eight ounces a week of seafood, ideally by eating it twice a week in place of meats, poultry or eggs, according to U.S. dietary guidelines. Some options that are high in omega 3s include salmon, anchovies, herring, shad, sardines, oysters, trout and Atlantic or Pacific mackerel.

Read the full story at Reuters

 

HEATHER HANSON: Fish-friendly development is cost effective for taxpayers

October 24, 2018 — As Alaskans are faced with the question of whether or not to support Proposition 1 in the upcoming election, I want to share my experience working as a civil engineer in the salmon habitat restoration field. I started my career working on projects in the 1990s to retrofit the dams on the Columbia River in Washington state. We poured hundreds of millions of dollars into floating fish passage structures, drilling tunnels and trucking fish around the dams with very little result. It is now widely accepted that dams have a pretty negative impact on salmon runs.

I now live in Alaska and work on stream restoration and fish passage here. The undersized culverts on many of our existing road stream crossings act like small dams that make it difficult for adult salmon to get upstream to spawn. They are an even bigger problem for juvenile salmon that spend up to four years in fresh water before heading out to the ocean. Juvenile salmon need to move between their summer and winter homes in the small streams and lakes that make up their habitat in order to find food in the summer and avoid ice packed streams in the winter. Culverts are such a problem that the Department of Fish and Game has been assessing culverts around the state since 2001 for their ability to pass fish. On the Fish and Game website, you can see if there are undersized culverts in your neighborhood that are blocking fish passage.

Another problem for salmon in Alaska has been the destruction of vegetation in the riparian areas, or the areas along the banks of rivers and streams. This vegetation provides shade, hiding places and food for fish and helps protect against bank erosion. Many landowners who live along Alaska’s rivers have also discovered that removing vegetation leads to accelerated bank erosion and are now investing in replanting these banks to protect their land with the help of state and federal tax dollars.

Habitat restoration is a slow, expensive process that is largely funded by federal and local taxpayer dollars. We have learned a lot about how to build fish friendly infrastructure during the past 30 years, and this infrastructure has also greatly reduced maintenance and flood damage costs. For these reasons, the municipality of Anchorage, the Mat-Su Borough and the Kenai Borough have passed ordinances to protect salmon habitat. In areas of the state without adequate protections, there are still undersized culverts being installed that prevent salmon from getting to their habitat and changes to riparian areas that reduce habitat quality. A recently published article in the Alaska Business Magazine has some good information on the long-term cost benefits of doing it right the first time when it comes to building roads over streams.

Read the full opinion piece at Anchorage Daily News

Growing pains as companies try to move fish farms from ocean to land

October 23, 2018 — They are Ocean Wise recommended and a Seafood Watch green light best choice — a conservationist’s dream. The flesh is invitingly red, delicious and rich in omega-3s.

Land-based tanks are dimly lit to simulate winter light levels in order to trick the fish into growing faster, while delaying sexual maturity. It is one of many tricks needed to grow salmon outside the ocean, its natural environment.

Consider the difficulties of raising cattle underwater while keeping their living space and air pristine and you get a sense of the challenges faced by land-based fish farms growing coho, tilapia and especially Atlantic salmon.

Most Atlantic salmon are grown in net pens in the ocean, drawing criticism from First Nations and environmentalists. Washington state’s decision to end net-pen farming gave some hope that a breakthrough in B.C. could be at hand.

But fish farmers say a large-scale move is not commercially feasible.

“It’s a life-support system and it’s really hard to do,” said Don Read, president and owner of Willowfield Enterprises, which markets the Golden Eagle Aquaculture fish as West Creek Coho.

Because biological setbacks come often, you need deep pockets just to try. The Aquilini Investment Group bought the farm in Agassiz about six years ago.

“Last year, we grew out a cohort of fish and they all performed like you’d hope and the fish were a certain size,” said Read. “We did everything the same this year and 30 per cent of them didn’t mature.”

Read the full story at the Vancouver Sun

UMaine team gets help in battle with salmon-ruining lice

October 19, 2018 — The University of Maine is getting a boost from the federal government for a pair of aquaculture projects, one of which addresses a pest problem in worldwide salmon farming.

The money is coming from NOAA Sea Grant, which supports fishery and coastal projects. The university says three researchers at its Aquaculture Research Institute will receive more than $700,000 to work on new approaches to address sea lice in salmon operations.

The lice are a major problem for salmon farms in Maine, Canada and around the world as they render the fish impossible to sell. The industry is struggling with resistance to pesticides used to control the lice.

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

ALASKA: Salmon stakeholders split over ballot initiative

October 18, 2018 — Opinions on the salmon habitat initiative officially dubbed Ballot Measure 1 are about as diverse as Alaska’s fisheries.

About the only thing uniform in the environmental policy debate is the resource development industry’s collective opposition to it.

Nearly, but not all, of the 12 Alaska Native regional corporations oppose it; Bristol Bay Native Corp. has maintained a neutral position on the voter initiative for most of 2018 after CEO Jason Metrokin originally said the company was against it.

Commonly known as the Stand for Salmon initiative, Ballot Measure 1 is seen by many as a way to stop the controversial Pebble mine in Western Alaska, which BBNC has long and vigorously opposed.

The initiative seeks to overhaul Title 16, the Department of Fish and Game’s statutory directive on how to evaluate development projects in salmon habitat.

Current law directs the Fish and Game commissioner to issue a development permit as long as a project provides “proper protection of fish and game.”

The sponsors contend that is far too vague and an update is needed to just define what “proper protection” means.

The initiative would, among other things, establish two tiers of development permits that could be issued by the Department of Fish and Game.

“Minor” habitat permits could be issued quickly and generally for projects deemed to have an insignificant impact on salmon waters.

“Major” permits would be required for larger projects such as mines, dams and anything determined to potentially have a significant impact on salmon-bearing water.

Read the full story at the Alaska Journal of Commerce

RAMONA DENIES: Should Oregon Kill Sea Lions to Save the Salmon?

October 18, 2018 — Used to be, they’d show up at Willamette Falls around late November—beefy males here to bulk up and loll on the docks. Call it sea lion winter break; time off from California’s Channel Islands rookeries, beaucoup steelhead to eat, zero problems. (No pups, no ladies, no predators.) When it was time to head back south, a 400-pound sea lion might have doubled in size, having chowed down on, at minimum, three 15-pound Pacific Northwest salmonids a day.

Nowadays, these party boys are arriving earlier and staying later. And they’re not just loitering in Oregon City. They also mob the Columbia River, particularly around January, for chinook on their way to spawning grounds—eating, by one report, as much as 45 percent of some salmon runs, a feast season that now draws out through June.

“They’ve learned that in April and May there’s a pretty good buffet,” says Robert Anderson, a fishery biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Particularly over the past four to five years, there’s been a good uptick in the California sea lions that go to Willamette Falls.”

The result, warned Oregon’s Department of Fish & Wildlife in a 2017 study, is a 90 percent chance some of the Columbia River’s already struggling salmon populations will soon go extinct. And that’s causing some Northwest legislators to take aim at sea lions.

The irony here? Both species are protected by federal law—salmon (steelhead, chinook) by the 1973 Endangered Species Act and sea lions (California and Steller’s) by the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act. That means state, federal, and tribal agencies’ hands are tied when it comes to lethally removing hungry sea lions from river systems—like the mid-Columbia—where historically they’ve never been. According to Charles Hudson of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, that’s the choice we have to make: do we kill one species to save another?

Read the full opinion piece at Portland Monthly

Russian seafood market faces challenge of generational taste shift

October 17, 2018 — A new survey on Russian seafood consumption has outlined the challenges facing suppliers of the domestic market.

The survey, conducted in late August by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VCIOM), the biggest opinion research center in the country, asked 1,600 respondents aged 18 or older about their seafood preferences and buying habits. VCIOM presented the results at the II Global Fishery Forum in St. Petersburg, Russia in September, revealing price, quality, and convenience as the three biggest impediments to greater seafood consumption in Russia.

The survey’s results were not all negative – 73 percent of the population said they eat seafood at least once per week. Of that total, 42 percent of respondents said they eat fish several times a week, and an additional two percent said they eat seafood at least once every day. Just six percent said they don’t consume fish at all.

However, hiding deeper in the survey was worse news for the seafood industry. Twenty-seven percent of respondents said they had reduced the amount of fish they had purchased recently, with just 11 percent increasing their seafood buying. Those who had reduced their spending cited higher prices (38 percent) and the absence of seafood of appropriate quality (36 percent) as the main reasons behind the decrease in their consumption.

The survey shows Russia’s seafood market is experiencing considerable headwinds as consumers’ purchasing habits due to ongoing economic hardships and a generational shift in eating preferences, according to Stanislav Naumov, the group director of the X5 Retail Group, the biggest retail company in Russia.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

ALASKA: Board of Fish agenda heavy with hatchery issues

October 16, 2018 — The Alaska Board of Fisheries will kick off its annual work session in Anchorage Monday and salmon hatcheries will once again be a prominent topic of discussion. The board will consider whether to add issues surrounding production levels to future agendas and it will kick off a broader discussion on the hatchery industry Tuesday.

Disagreements over salmon hatcheries have been roiling over the past few years, and those arguments have played out at Board of Fish meetings.

Hatchery opponents want the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to conduct more studies on the effects of hatchery fish spawning with wild populations and to start examining potential ocean carrying capacity issues. The department is currently in the midst of a large hatchery-wild spawning study.

Hatchery operators point to that as an example of due diligence by the department. Operators like Cook Inlet Aquaculture Executive Director Gary Fandrei say they’re ready for the board’s broad discussion on the state of hatcheries Tuesday afternoon, which may touch on some of those issues.

“We’re prepared for it. The hatchery programs are based on good sound science and we follow those principals,” Fandrei said. “They’re well regulated by the Department of Fish and Game, and we believe we are above board with everything we’re doing.”

An emergency petition back in March sparked the board’s discussion. The petition asked the board to look into Prince William Sound pinks that have been straying into lower Cook Inlet streams.

Valdez Fisheries Development Association Executive Director Mike Wells thinks the discussion will help the public better understand how hatcheries operate.

Read the full story at KBBI