Saving Seafood

This Is Why You Don’t See People-Size Salmon Anymore

March 13, 2018 — While the orcas of Puget Sound are sliding toward extinction, orcas farther north have been expanding their numbers. Their burgeoning hunger for big fish may be causing the killer whales’ main prey, Chinook salmon, to shrink up and down the West Coast.

Chinook salmon are also known as kings: the biggest of all salmon. They used to grow so enormous that it’s hard to believe the old photos now. Fishermen stand next to Chinooks almost as tall as they are, sometimes weighing 100 pounds or more.

“This has been a season of unusually large fish, and many weighing from 60 to 70 pounds have been taken,” The Oregonian reported in 1895.

Now, more than a century later, “it’s not impossible that we see individuals of that size today, but it’s much, much rarer,” University of Washington research scientist Jan Ohlberger says.

Ohlberger has been tracking the downsizing of salmon in recent decades, but salmon have been shrinking in numbers and in size for a long time. A century’s worth of dam-building, overfishing, habitat loss and replacement by hatchery fish cut the size of the average Chinook in half, studies in the 1980s and 1990s found.

Dam-building and fishing have tailed off, but Chinooks have been shrinking even faster in the past 15 years, according to a new paper by Ohlberger and colleagues in the journal Fish and Fisheries. Older and bigger fish are mostly gone.

Read the full story at KUOW

 

Ray Hilborn: New study provides no new information on global fishing footprint

March 7, 2018 — University of Washington fisheries researcher Ray Hilborn said that a new study using satellite data from industrial fishing vessels to map global fishing effort fails to provide any new insight, despite media reports indicating otherwise.

The study, published in Science in February, used messages transmitted between 2012 and 2016 from the automatic identification systems (AIS) of more than 70,000 industrial fishing vessels to create a global footprint, concluding that “industrial fishing occurs in over 55 percent of ocean area,” according to the abstract.

But Hilborn said the vessels monitored for the study were in large part tuna boats over 100 feet, which have been monitored for decades.

“Most of the footprint data they have is from high-seas tuna fishing, because that’s really the only thing that goes on on the high seas. Maps of the tuna long-lining and seining distribution have been distributed as part of the standard operating procedure by the tuna RFMOs [regional fisheries management organizations] for decades. I remember looking at them 30 or 40 years ago. There’s nothing new about this – that tuna fishing goes on across much of tropical oceans and some of the temperate oceans,” Hilborn told SeafoodSource.

Not only is this not new information, Hilborn said, but it does little to measure the impact of trawling on certain ecosystems, which Hilborn said can be much more severe than high-seas fishing.

“A place that has had one long-line for albacore or big-eye tuna in five years is obviously not very heavily fished, he said. “But if you go to Southeast Asia, we can calculate how often the average piece of bottom is trawled a year. In the U.S., depending on where, it’s about once every three years. In Southeast Asia or India, they are trawled 10 to 20 times a year. That means the impact of fishing there is probably 1,000 times higher than it is on the high seas where someone once visited with a long-line boat.”

Furthermore, the trawling data provided in the new study, Hilborn said, overestimates the proportion of the sea-bed that is affected by 10 times. Hilborn and his team have just completed a five-year study that attempts to provide a finer-grained look at the impact of trawling by aggregating data from vessel-monitoring systems, logbooks, and on-board observations.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

 

No more ‘Kings of the Columbia’: Chinook salmon much smaller, younger these days, study finds

March 1, 2018 — They used to tip the scales at 80 pounds: June Hogs they were called. The kings of the Columbia River.

But the big chinook that used to lumber up and down the Columbia and cruise the northeastern Pacific from California to western Alaska have dwindled away over the past 40 years, researchers have learned.

Published in the journal Fish and Fisheries, researchers have documented a trend in decreasing body size in chinook over the past 40 years. The trend was remarkably widespread, affecting both wild and hatchery fish in the northern Pacific from California to western Alaska.

“It is a quite grand phenomenon, not just observations here and there, it is the signature we see along the coast,” said Jan Ohlberger of the University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, lead author on the paper.

Chinook are the biggest and most prized species of salmon in North America — and the most sought-after, whether by killer whales, eagles or bears. And certainly by every fisherman, whether commercial, recreational or ceremonial.

But big isn’t what it used to be.

Both wild and hatchery chinook are smaller and younger today, researchers have found, examining 85 chinook populations along the West Coast of North America.

The big chinook that stay out in the ocean four and five years before returning home to spawn have decreased both in numbers and in size — as much as 10 percent in length, and substantially more in weight.

Read the full story at the Seattle Times

 

Media Fails Again on Fisheries Data; New Maps Don’t Show Intensification of Fishing – Hilborn

February 26, 2018 — SEAFOOD NEWS — The lead article in Science this week, picked up in numerous publications, highlighted data from the AIS vessel tracking system to show the global impact of industrial fishing.

The authors state that vessels are now fishing in 55% of the world’s oceans, which is an area four times larger than occupied by onshore agriculture.

The immediate popular conclusion was that this shows immense overfishing, and Oceana was quoted saying “That means we’re putting more pressure on fish populations.”

But that is not what the data show.  As pointed out consistently by Professor Ray Hilborn of the University of Washington, the comparison with agriculture is simply wrong.

Hilborn says “The comparison to agriculture fails to note that the 50 million square kilometers under agriculture have destroyed the natural ecosystem as the plow or new pasture eliminates the native plants.   The areas fished, particularly for tunas, have changed very little.”

Furthermore,  “Fishing does not impact the primary production (plants), and in very few cases does it impact the species that graze on the primary producers.  So the 50 million square kilometers of the earths’ surface that is used for agriculture is totally transformed,  most of the oceans that are being fished (high seas tuna)  have some changes in top predators abundance. “

Hilborn points out that “High seas fishing for tuna, which constitutes the majority of the “footprint” shown in the Science paper has been mapped for 40 years, and the widespread nature of high seas tuna fishing is well known.  The footprint of bottom trawlers has been mapped in much finer scale already in many places, and the Science paper overestimates the proportion of the seabed impacted by trawls by 10 fold.”

The AIS data is interesting, and allows for specific types of research that was not possible before.  However, the dataset does not give as accurate a picture of global fishing as does the comprehensive database on fish stock surveys and catch records.

Hilborn says “For most of the areas where there are data in this study,  fish stocks are actually increasing and tuna populations are well documented and globally stable.”

Hilborn is a longtime collaborator with Dr. Boris Worm, one of the authors of the paper.  Together they did a groundbreaking study of global fisheries databases, and helped create a standard dataset to measure fisheries catches and stock health.  Neither Worm nor the other authors are claiming that the AIS study shows increased fishing pressure on stocks, they are simply reporting that the tracking data provides a new visualization tool for global fisheries.

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

 

Dr. Ray Hilborn: New Study on Fishing Effort ‘Does Not Provide Any New Insight’ on How Fishing Impacts Oceans

WASHINGTON — February 23, 2018 — A new study published in Science Magazine found that large-scale commercial fishing covers more than 55 percent of the world’s oceans. Today, Dr. Ray Hilborn, a respected fisheries expert and professor at the University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, responded to the study in a statement, saying in part that it “does not provide any new insight on the impact of fishing on the oceans.”

“The media claims that this paper shows that fishing has a wider impact than previously known is simply wrong,” Dr. Hilborn said. “For most of the areas where there are data in this study, fish stocks are actually increasing and tuna populations are well documented and globally stable.”

Dr. Hilborn’s full statement is reproduced below:

This new study in Science using the AIS data does provide detailed information on fishing effort of specific vessels, but it does not provide anything new about the global pattern of fishing.  High seas fishing for tuna, which constitutes the majority of the “footprint” shown in the Science paper has been mapped for 40 years, and the widespread nature  of high seas tuna fishing is well known.  The footprint of bottom trawlers has been mapped in much finer scale already in many places, and the Science paper overestimates the proportion of the seabed impacted by trawls by 10 fold.

The media claims that this paper shows that fishing has a wider impact than previously known is simply wrong.   For most of the areas where there are data in this study,  fish stocks are actually increasing and tuna populations are well documented and globally stable.

The comparison to agriculture fails to note that the 50 million square kilometers under agriculture have destroyed the natural ecosystem as the plow or new pasture eliminates the native plants.   The areas fished, particularly for tunas, have changed very little.  Fishing does not impact the primary production (plants), and in very few cases does it impact the species that graze on the primary producers.  So the 50 million square kilometers of the earths’ surface that is used for agriculture is totally transformed,  most of the oceans that are being fished (high seas tuna)  have some changes in top predators abundance.

Certainly AIS data is very interesting and can let us look at specific things we could not do before, but it does not provide any new insight on the impact of fishing on the oceans.

 

Environmental impact of salmon decline: This isn’t just about fish

January 29, 2018 — A geologist might not be the first person that comes to mind when you think about salmon experts, but David Montgomery wrote the book on the decline of salmon: “King of Fish” in 2004.

Montgomery, a geomorphologist and professor at the University of Washington, has a unique perspective on why salmon are so important to our region. Of course, there’s the importance to the indigenous people in our area and the delicious food they provide, but they also have a serious impact on our whole ecosystem.

“Juvenile salmon are hatched in their natal home river streams and they’re tiny suckers, so they go out to the ocean and they get big,” Montgomery explains. “They spend most of their life out at sea in a more resource-rich marine environment then they bring their bodies back to the rivers and streams in Washington, and Puget Sound along the way, with these bodies full of nutrients.”

After the salmon return home, spawn and die, those nutrients don’t just go away. “They get recycled,” Montgomery says. Decaying salmon feed tiny organisms in streambeds, which are eaten the next year by juvenile salmon. Salmon also get dragged onto the forest floor by bears and eagles and distribute their nutrients there. “Fully one-third of the nitrogen in those big old-growth trees in our forests swam up river as a fish,” Montgomery says. “When you lose those big runs of salmon, you lose those nutrients and it cascades through the whole system.”

It’s no secret that those big runs are declining in a major way. Historically, adult salmon returns to the Columbia Basin were at least 10 to 16 million fish annually — today, across the Northwest, less than 5 percent of historic populations of wild salmon and steelhead return to our rivers and streams. Fifteen different salmon and steelhead stocks in Washington state are listed under the federal Endangered Species Act today.

As Montgomery notes, the loss of these salmon means a domino effect to the ecosystem. More than 135 other fish and wildlife populations benefit from the presence of wild salmon and steelhead, from southern resident orca whales, which are at a 30-year population low, to eagles, wolves, bear, otter, coyote, seals and sea lions.

Read the full story at the Seattle Times

 

Dr. Malin Pinsky: Changing ocean temps and what they mean for fish and people

WASHINGTON (Saving Seafood) — January 17, 2018 — Last Thursday, Dr. Malin Pinsky, a professor of ecology, evolution and natural resources at Rutgers University, gave a Bevan Series lecture on how fish have adapted to changing ocean temperatures, and the implications for fisheries and people. “Fish and Fisheries in Hot Water: (How) Do We Adapt?” was the second of ten planned lectures in the 2018 Bevan Series, which features experts discussing fishery and marine conservation issues. The series is hosted at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Read more about the Bevan Series here

Watch Dr. Pinsky’s lecture here

See more Saving Seafood coverage of the Bevan Series here

A description of Dr. Pinsky’s lecture is below:

The same ecological and evolutionary processes operate in marine and terrestrial environments, and yet ocean life thrives in a fluid environment that is dramatically different from what we experience in air. The ocean is, in effect, a 1.3 sextillion liter water bath with muted thermal variation through time and space and limited oxygen. In this talk, I will trace what I see as some of the important consequences for fish and fisheries, including a number of striking contrasts and similarities to patterns on land. Most marine animals have evolved narrow thermal tolerances and live close to their upper thermal limits, which makes them surprisingly sensitive to even small changes in temperature. I will show that fish and other marine animals have responded rapidly and often quite predictably to temperature change and temperature trends, across time-scales from seasons to decades. Finally, I will link these rapid ocean changes to their impacts on fisheries and on people. The tight feedbacks and lagged responses between fisheries and ocean dynamics create both immediate impacts and complex dynamics that can complicate management efforts. The magnitude and extent of climate impacts on fisheries imply the need for a new era of climate-ready management more fully informed by environmental dynamics and long-term trends.

Malin Pinsky, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow in Ocean Sciences at Rutgers University. There, he leads a research group studying the ecology and evolution of global change in the ocean, including conservation and management solutions. He developed and maintains the OceanAdapt website to document shifting ocean animals in North America, a resource used by governments and NGOs for climate adaptation planning. He has published articles in Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Current Biology, and other international journal, and his research has received extensive coverage in the press, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, BBC, CBC, and National Public Radio. He has received early career awards and fellowships from the National Academy of Sciences, American Society of Naturalists, and the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. Previously, he was a David H. Smith Conservation Research Fellow at Princeton University. He has a Ph.D. from Stanford University, an A.B. from Williams College, and roots along the coast of Maine.

 

Dr. Ray Hilborn talks U.S. fisheries policy at Bevan Series lecture

WASHINGTON (Saving Seafood) – January 8, 2018 – Last week, Dr. Ray Hilborn, a professor at the University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, presented on U.S. fisheries policy and how scientists can communicate with Congress to promote good decision-making. The lecture, “Is U.S. Fisheries Policy Working? Getting the Message to Congress,” was the first of the 2018 Bevan Series on fisheries management.

The Bevan Series features “internationally recognized experts” discussing current issues facing fisheries and marine conservation. This year’s series features 10 weekly seminars held at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Read more about the Bevan Series here

Watch Dr. Hilborn’s lecture here

A description of Dr. Hilborn’s lecture is below:

The Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Management and Conservation Act of 1976 is the primary piece of federal legislation governing fisheries whose objectives include: exploring, exploiting, conserving, and managing all fish within the exclusive economic zone; to promote domestic commercial and recreational fishing under sound conservation and management principles; to provide for the preparation and implementation, in accordance with national standards, of fishery management plans which will achieve and maintain, on a continuing basis, the optimum yield from each fishery; to encourage the development by the United States fishing industry of fisheries which are currently underutilized or not utilized by United States fishermen. Optimum yield is defined the yield from a fishery, means the amount of fish which will provide the greatest overall benefit to the Nation, particularly with respect to food production and recreational opportunities, and taking into account the protection of marine ecosystems.

This talk will focus on how the U.S. is doing with respect to these objectives, and my perspective on how scientists can let Congress know how well we are doing, and help Congress make good decisions. I will discuss the success at rebuilding fish stocks and protection of marine ecosystems, a mix of success and failure at producing benefits to food production, and recreational fishing opportunities.  I will discuss my limited experiences at communicating with Congress through invited testimony to House and Senate committee hearings over 25 years, and two separate briefings of Congressional staff.

Ray Hilborn is a Professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, University of Washington specializing in natural resource management and conservation.  He authored several books including Overfishing: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Ulrike Hilborn) in 2012, Quantitative Fisheries Stock Assessment with Carl Walters in 1992, and The Ecological Detective: Confronting Models With Data with Marc Mangel, in 1997. He has also published over 300 peer reviewed articles and served on the Editorial Boards of numerous journals, including seven years on the Board of Reviewing Editors of Science Magazine. He has received the Volvo Environmental Prize, the American Fisheries Societies Award of Excellence, The Ecological Society of America’s Sustainability Science Award, and the International Fisheries Science Prize. He is a Fellow of the American Fisheries Society, the Washington State Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of Canada and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

 

‘Rule of Thumb’ Management Approach Is Wrong For Forage Fish, Dr. Ray Hilborn Tells U.S. Senate Subcommittee

WASHINGTON (Saving Seafood) – October 31, 2017 – At a hearing of the U.S. Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries and Coast Guard last week, respected fisheries scientist Dr. Ray Hilborn testified that fisheries managers “can do better than a one-size-fits-all” approach to managing forage fish. He also said there was “no empirical evidence to support the idea that the abundance of forage fish affects their predators.”

Dr. Hilborn’s comments came in response to questioning from Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) about whether fisheries managers should manage forage fish according to a “rule of thumb” approach, where fisheries are managed according to a set of broad ecological and management principals, or a “case-by-case” approach, where management is guided by more species-specific information.

Dr. Hilborn, a professor at the University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, was part of a team of top fisheries scientists that recently examined these issues, as well as what effects fishing for forage fish species had on predator species. Their research indicated that previous studies, like a 2012 report from the Lenfest Forage Fish Task Force, may have overestimated the strength of the predator-prey relationship.

Before the hearing, Dr. Hilborn spoke with Saving Seafood about his research and his message for lawmakers.

“It’s very clear that there really are no applicable rules of thumb, that every system is independent [and] behaves differently, and we need to have the rules for each individual forage fish fishery determined by looking at the specifics of that case,” Dr. Hilborn told Saving Seafood.

He also discussed his team’s finding that forage fish abundance has little impact on their predators. They looked at nearly all U.S. forage fish fisheries, including the California Current system and Atlantic menhaden, and concluded that predator species generally pursue other food sources when the abundance of any one forage species is low.

“The predators seem to go up or down largely independent of the abundance of forage fish,” Dr. Hilborn said, adding, “For Atlantic menhaden, for their major predators, the fishery has reasonably little impact on the food that’s available to them.”

Another key message Dr. Hilborn had for the Subcommittee was that fisheries managers must determine what they want to accomplish so that scientists can advise them accordingly.

“The time has come to refocus our fisheries policy on what we actually want to achieve because rebuilding is only a means to an end,” Dr. Hilborn told Saving Seafood. “Do we want to maximize the economic value of our fisheries? Do we want to maximize jobs? Do we want to maximize food production?”

In his testimony, Dr. Hilborn praised U.S. fisheries policy that has “led to rebuilding of fish stocks and some of the most successful fisheries in the world.” He attributed this success to a variety of factors, including funding of NOAA, regionalizing fisheries management decisions, and requiring managers to follow science advice. As a result, overfishing should no longer be the top priority for fisheries managers, he testified.

“The major threats to U.S. fish stock and marine ecosystem biodiversity are now ocean acidification, warming temperatures, degraded coastal habitats, exotic species, land based run off, and pollution,” Dr. Hilborn testified. “Overfishing remains a concern for a limited number of stocks but should not continue to be the most important concern for U.S. federal fisheries policy.”

The hearing was the latest in a series examining reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, the nation’s supreme fisheries law. It was organized by subcommittee chairman Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK), and focused on fisheries science.

Watch the full hearing here

Ray Hilborn tells US Senate overfishing shouldn’t be most important concern

October 25, 2017 — WASHINGTON — A U.S. Senate subcommittee considering the reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Act heard additional testimony Tuesday, with a University of Washington researcher telling lawmakers the U.S. is leaving money in the ocean.

Ray Hilborn, a professor at the university’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, noted that in many cases fisheries aren’t even bringing in half of the total allowable catch in some seasons. For example, in 2015, mixed bottom commercial fishermen caught USD 65 million (EUR 55.1 million) worth of fish available in the West Coast. The total allowable catch had an estimated value around USD 168 million (EUR 142.5 million).

Read the full story at Seafood Source