University of Washington Archives - Page 8 of 13

New study reveals cost of 2017 salmon fisheries closure

May 7, 2018 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

Last year’s closure of the commercial ocean salmon troll fishery off the West Coast is estimated to have cost $5.8 million to $8.9 million in lost income for fishermen, with the loss of 200 to 330 jobs, according to a new model that determines the cost of fisheries closures based on the choices fishermen make.

Scientists hope the model, described for the first time this week in Marine Policy, will help policy makers anticipate the economic toll of fisheries closures. Such foresight may be especially useful as conditions in the California Current off the West Coast grow increasingly variable, leading to more potential closures, said lead author Kate Richerson, a marine ecologist with NOAA Fisheries’ Northwest Fisheries Science Center and the University of Washington.

“We’re probably only going to see more of these closures in the future,” she said, “so being able to predict their effects and fallout for coastal communities puts us ahead of the curve in terms of considering those impacts in planning and management decisions.”

The new model estimates the future losses associated with fisheries closures based on the way fishermen reacted to previous closures. It anticipates, for instance, that many fishermen will simply quit fishing rather than shift their efforts to another fishery instead. In this way, the model accounts for the difficulty fishermen face in entering other fisheries with limited permits, Richerson said.

The research is the first attempt to predict the effect of fisheries closures before they happen, said Dan Holland, an economist at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center and coauthor of the study. The model, developed prior to the 2017 closure, also can help identify the most affected communities.

For example, Coos Bay and Brookings, Oregon, and Eureka, California, were among the hardest hit by the 2017 salmon closures because they are geographically located in the center of the closure that stretched from Northern California to Oregon. The closure led to the estimated loss of about 50 percent of fisheries-related employment in Coos Bay and about 35 percent declines in fishing-related income and sales. Predicted percentage declines in overall fishing-related income are lower than declines in salmon income, since many fishermen were predicted to continue to participate in other fisheries.

The study estimated that the closure led to a loss of $12.8 million to $19.6 million in sales. Richerson noted that the model estimates only the economic consequences of the closure to the commercial ocean salmon fishery and does not include the toll on recreational fisheries or in-river fisheries, which would make the total losses even higher.

The closure recommended by the Pacific Fishery Management Council and adopted by NOAA Fisheries was designed to protect low returns of salmon to the Klamath River in Northern California.

Learn more about NOAA Fisheries’ Northwest Fisheries Science Center here.

New model looks to predict economic impacts of fishing closures

April 12, 2018 — Getting ahead of the economic impacts that tend to accompany fisheries’ closures is the basis of a new predictive model put together by a team of scientists from NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center (NFSC) and the University of Washington.

When fisheries shut down, entire communities suffer, the scientific team recognized, and oftentimes, funds doled out to help fishermen weathering rough patches arrive months after they are needed. The new predictive model, which was published recently in the journal Marine Policy, is designed to help mitigate some of this damage, explained Kate Richerson, a marine ecologist at NFSC and the University of Washington, and the lead author of the model.

To develop their predictive standard, Richerson and her team focused on the 2017 closure of the U.S. West Coast’s salmon troll fishery, collating fish ticket data as a starting point.

“We looked at a pretty broad cohort of vessels and found that some of these vessels are almost entirely dependent on salmon, while others are almost entirely dependent on other fisheries,” Richerson said. “Then we looked at their predicted behavior and revenue under the conditions of a closure and under the conditions of an average year. And we used that in combination with this economic input-output model, which links fishing revenue to jobs and sales, to make a sort of back-of-the-envelope prediction of what the impacts of the 2017 closure might have been.”

They estimated the closure, leveled to protect struggling Chinook runs on the Klamath River, would cost trollers anywhere from USD 5.8 million (EUR 4.6 million) to USD 8.9 million (EUR 7.2 million), along with 200 to 330 jobs and USD 12.8 million (EUR 10.3 million) to USD 19.6 million (EUR 15.8 million) in sales. The numbers were confined to trollers, and would have likely been far higher with the inclusion of other fisheries, such as gillnetting and recreational fishing.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

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.

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.