Saving Seafood

ALASKA: St. Paul’s new research vessel marks a milestone in effort to rebuild local economy

August 28, 2026 — The Pribilof Islands community of St. Paul is now the homeport for a research vessel. The 50-foot Eventide arrived in St. Paul late last month, marking a major milestone for the community.

John Wayne Melovidov is president of the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island Tribal Government. He said St. Paul is working to build a research economy after declines in the local fishing industry. The island’s Trident Seafood plant closed after the Bering Sea crab fishery crashed in 2022. Melovidov said monitoring the area’s crab, halibut and fur seal populations will be especially important.

“If anybody should be doing the research on what’s going on with our species out in our backyard, it should be us,” he said. “So we set up a lab to do that research ourselves, but also to invite other scientists to do whatever research they want to do.”

Read the full article at KUCB

Ice all but disappeared from this Alaskan island. It changed everything.

April 28, 2025 — This tiny island in the middle of the Bering Sea had recently completed its longest winter stretch in recorded history with above-freezing temperatures — 343 consecutive hours, or 14 days — when Aaron Lestenkof drove out to look at Sea Lion Neck.

It was another warm February day. He saw no sea ice; scant snow on the ground.

Lestenkof is one of the sentinels on the island, a small team with the Aleut tribe who monitors changes to the environment across these 43 square miles of windswept hills and tundra. He is also one of 338 residents who still manage to live on St. Paul, something that has become significantly more complicated as the Bering Sea warms around them.

Over the past decade, steadily warming waters have thrown the North Pacific into turmoil, wiping out populations of fish, birds and crabs, and exposing coastlines to ever more battering from winter storms. The upheaval in the waters has brought so much change to this remote island, where residents still fill their freezers with reindeer and seals, that it has forced many to consider how long they can last.

The warm waters killed off about 4 million common murres — the largest die-off of any bird species ever recorded in the modern era — including almost 80 percent of those that nested on St. Paul. They wiped out about 10 billion snow crabs; caused the collapse of the main Alaskan fishery that relied on them; and prompted the closing, three years ago, of St. Paul’s largest source of tax revenue, a Trident Seafoods crab processing plant.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

Prime Time: Alaska native community proposes co-managed marine sanctuary

December 21, 2021 — Citing observable and worrisome marine ecosystem changes, the Unangax̂ (Aleut) community of St. Paul Island has proposed co-management with the federal government and the community of St. George Island of a new marine sanctuary around the Pribilof Islands of Alaska, “encompassing 100 nm centroid boundaries around the two inhabited islands of St. Paul and St. George,” according to an official nomination proposal that was released Monday, Dec. 20.

For now, the sanctuary would be named Alaĝum Kanuux̂* (pronounced ahl-ah-GOOM ka-NOH), meaning Heart of the Ocean, and encompass nearly 53,000 square miles of waters, excluding a quarter-mile buffer zone around the St. George and St. Paul Harbors and all shoreside and submerged industrial facilities on both islands. The shoreward boundary would be the mean high tide line.

Read the full story at National Fisherman