Saving Seafood

Alaska Fish and Game forecasts a 2019 salmon catch of 213.2 million fish

April 10, 2019 — Alaska fishermen could catch 85 percent more salmon this year (nearly a hundred million more) if state forecasts hold true.

That’s good news for fishermen in many Gulf of Alaska regions who in 2018 suffered some of the worst catches in 50 years.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game is predicting a total salmon catch of 213.2 million fish for 2019, compared to about 116 million salmon last year. The increase comes from expectations of another big haul of sockeyes, increases in pinks and a possible record catch of chum salmon.

The harvest breakdown calls for 112,000 chinook salmon in areas outside of Southeast Alaska. The catch for the Southeast troll fleet, which is determined by a treaty with Canada, will be 101,300 kings, a 5,600-fish increase.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

 

Fight renewed over Pebble Mine in Bristol Bay, Alaska

April 5, 2019 — Opposition is growing to a renewed effort to launch a massive mining project near Bristol Bay, Alaska, home to the world’s largest sockeye salmon run.

Mining conglomerate Pebble Limited Partnership applied for a permit in December 2017 for an open pit copper, gold, and molybdenum mine that would sit near critical headwaters that feed the Bristol Bay fishery. Opponents say the Pebble Mine would undermine the area’s pristine habitat – a calling card of the Bristol Bay brand – and that a tailings dam failure could prove catastrophic to the fishery. The most recent public opinion poll by the BBNC shows 58 percent of Alaskans oppose the mine, with 33 percent supporting it.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released a Draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on 20 February, 2019, but the wide-ranging opposition in Alaska and beyond has lambasted the document.

“People around here understand on a very visceral level the importance of fisheries in general and Bristol Bay in particular. Commercial fishermen, sport fishermen, tribal entities that are interested in subsistence, biologists; we’re not always aligned, but we’re certainly aligned on this particular issue,” said Daniel Cheyenne, the vice president of lands and natural resources for the Bristol Bay Native Corporation (BBNC).

Norm Van Vactor, the CEO of the Bristol Bay Economic Development Corporation, said the EIS is incomplete.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

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

 

ALASKA: Bristol Bay: Back to the Pebble grind

February 28, 2019 — Alaska’s Bristol Bay salmon fishermen are once again rallying the troops to help check a juggernaut that threatens the world’s single-most productive salmon fishery.

Mining the copper and gold deposit at the headwaters of Bristol Bay’s natal sockeye streams might not be an inherently risky proposition were it not for the toxic byproduct. Based on our current best technology, toxic runoff from the mining process would be diverted to tailings ponds, which are essentially pools with dams built around them. Historically, these containment fields leak eventually.

The geography and topography of Bristol Bay complicates this plan. Any Anchorage area resident will tell you that Southwest Alaska is part of the ring of fire. After the 7.0 earthquake on Nov. 30, Anchorage area residents felt more than 6,000 aftershocks in just 30 days. That’s an average of 200 per day, or about 8 aftershocks per hour. And now, three months later, the aftershocks have not stopped.

What might the outcome be if a similar scenario hit Bristol Bay, about 250 miles from Anchorage, and thousands of aftershocks rippled through the water-laden soil containing manmade ponds of toxic sludge? Would they remain intact? Or would they twist and crumble like so many of the paved roads around Anchorage?

As long as Pebble Mine’s tailings ponds are to be built into Bristol Bay’s permeable soil in an earthquake zone, the plan may as well include a ticking clock on the health of the region’s renewable salmon resource.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Early signs show strong wild Alaska salmon market for 2019

February 19, 2019 — A lot can change in a few months, fisheries economists are quick to say, but early indications point to very favorable conditions for wild Alaska salmon prices in 2019, especially for sockeye, the state’s top-dollar species.

Andy Wink, a fisheries economist who also heads the Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association (BBRSDA), is happy with how the market is looking for the upcoming season.

“I think we’re at a pretty good place, and have been for the last few years in salmon markets. We’ve seen growing demand and the farmed salmon supply hasn’t grown as fast as it did in different points in the past,” Wink said. “It’s left producers in a good position.”

Leading farmed fish producers Norway and Chile, regulated by their respective governments, are bumping up against a threshold for the maximum number of salmon they can produce, and both are fighting blight. Norway, the world’s top farmed salmon producer, has had persistent problems with sea lice, while second-place producer Chile has been struggling with disease, primarily piscirickettsiosis, prompting environmental groups and health organizations to raise concerns over Chile’s overuse of antibiotics.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Brighter 2019 seen for Alaska’s Copper River sockeye, but ‘blob’ effect unknown

January 28, 2019 — On the heels of the second-worst salmon season in the history of Alaska’s Copper River district, 2019 is estimated to see healthier returns.

The commercial sockeye salmon fishery in the central region of the US’ northernmost state is closely watched by US retailers and consumers as it is the first Alaska season annually to open and is accompanied by significant media coverage. Last year though, it quickly became apparent that there wasn’t much to see.

Despite an initial Alaska Department of Fish & Game (ADF&G) that 942,000 sockeye would be caught in 2018– the range estimated between 536,000 to 1.4 million  — only 44,318 sockeye were.

In 2019, ADF&G predicts a total Copper River sockeye harvest of 955,000, an estimate made within the range of 351,000 to 1.16m. The 10-year average harvest for the district is 1.25m sockeye, will includes 1.04m wild-caught fish.

“It’s a pretty decent forecast,” Stormy Haught, an ADF&G biologist based in Cordova, Alaska, told Undercurrent News. “But it definitely deserves some caution. For the Copper River last year we used this same method and over-forecast by over a million fish.”

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

ALASKA: Cook Inlet sockeye forecast improves; kings closed in North

January 10, 2019 — After two disappointing sockeye seasons in a row, the 2019 season may look up for Upper Cook Inlet commercial fishermen.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s sockeye salmon forecast, published Jan. 4, predicts a total run of 6 million sockeye to Upper Cook Inlet stream systems, with an expected commercial harvest of 3 million and 1 million for sportfishing and subsistence harvest.

If the forecast proves true, the run will be nearly double the 2018 run of 3.1 million.

The Kenai River, the largest sockeye-producing river in the region, is projected to receive a run of about 3.8 million sockeye, the majority of which are the 1.3 age class (one year in freshwater, three years in saltwater).

The Kasilof River, the second-largest producer, is projected to see about 873,000 sockeye come back, with a slight majority in the 1.3 age class.

The Kenai’s forecast is greater than its 20-year average of 3.5 million, while the Kasilof’s is behind its 20-year average of 979,000 fish.

Read the full story at the Alaska Journal of Commerce

JACK PAYNE: Endangered species science is itself endangered

December 19, 2018 — Catching chinook salmon today requires gear, technique, experience and luck. Catching salmon a year or a decade from now requires science.

That means local science. The recent National Climate Assessment notes that Alaska’s temperature has been warming at twice the global rate. To get at what this means for Alaskans, we need University of Alaska scientists.

Alaskans are getting a better handle on what a warming world does to salmon runs through the work of a federally funded corps of local fisheries researchers based at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Known as the Alaska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, its researchers address climate questions from an Alaska perspective.

For example, they research how melting glaciers can increase or diminish salmon numbers and for how many years. They consider how the increasing frequency of wildfires plays out on salmon streams. They compare how the same conditions can have different effects on sockeye, coho and chinook salmon.

It’s not the gloom and doom of a planet in peril. In some ways, climate change appears to have boosted some salmon counts, at least temporarily.

An accurate salmon count depends in part on a good scientist count. Here, the news is not good. Until I hired Alaska assistant unit leader Abby Powell to come run the University of Florida Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit three years ago, the Alaska unit had five faculty members. It’s down to two.

Slowly starving for lack of federal funding, Alaska’s fish and wildlife species science is itself becoming an endangered species.

The national Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit (CRU) program was established in 1935 on the premise that science, not politics, should guide management of national treasures such as eagles, bison, and moose. An administration proposal to de-fund it does away with that premise.

Read the full opinion piece at Anchorage Daily News

Alaska’s commercial salmon harvest came in below forecast in 2018, largely due to pink salmon

November 14, 2018 — Bristol Bay’s commercial sockeye salmon fishery boomed in 2018, but on the other side of the Alaska Peninsula it was a terrible year for Chignik.

The statewide value of Alaska’s commercial salmon harvest this year was down 13 percent compared to the 2017 season, according to preliminary numbers released this month by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Fishermen caught fewer salmon compared to last year, as expected, but the harvest also fell short of the state’s forecast.

About 115 million salmon were harvested this year. That total is probably in the lower quarter of commercial harvests dating back to 1975, said Forrest Bowers, acting director at Fish and Game in the division of commercial fisheries.

“That’s offset somewhat by the relatively high proportion of the harvest that’s comprised of sockeye salmon and the strength of the sockeye salmon market,” he said.

The preliminary ex-vessel value for all Alaska commercial salmon harvested this season was $595.2 million. (Ex-vessel is the price paid to fishermen from processors.) In 2017, that value was $685 million.

Read the full story at Anchorage Daily News