Saving Seafood

Fish farming in WA goes back millennia — how will it survive?

November 29, 2022 — A seed-grading machine whirred obnoxiously as tiny oyster shells shimmied through three levels of screens and were shot out into empty buckets last week.

The contraption separates baby oysters by size, helping seafood workers determine which are ready to be “planted” off Littleneck Beach in Sequim Bay, sold to other shellfish farmers or plunged back into metal buckets full of cool harbor water to grow.

The Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe relies on shellfish for sustenance, said Chair Ron Allen. And they have for millennia — it just didn’t always look like this.

Across the Salish Sea, the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community’s clam garden was tucked within a grayish high tide. Raindrops sent ripples across the water off the shore of Kiket Island.

Traditional cultural ecosystems in the Pacific Northwest have long included forms of aquaculture, like clam gardens, where people create optimal habitat for the mollusks in hopes of boosting productivity. Today, it’s one piece of the complex, ever-evolving picture of fish farming in Washington state. But the commercial finfish farming of today shares little in common with the traditional Indigenous methods that long preceded it.

Read the full article at The Seattle Times

Alaska, Washington senators team up to seek disaster declaration for closed crab harvests

November 18, 2022 — Alaska’s two Republican U.S. senators joined with Washington state’s two Democratic U.S. senators on Thursday to request an immediate disaster declaration to help fishers and fishing-dependent businesses and communities cope with an unprecedented shutdown of Bering Sea crab fishing.

Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan of Alaska and Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell of Washington sent the request to U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. The senators asked the secretary to act “as quickly as possible” to invoke the disaster declaration provision of the primary law governing marine fisheries, the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act.

“Many of these fishermen and businesses hail from both Alaska and Washington, and the impacts of these fishery disasters extend far beyond our states to consumers across the United States and the world,” the senators’ letter said.

Read the full article at Anchorage Daily News 

WASHINGTON: NFI, aquaculture groups demand independent review of Washington’s decision to cancel Cooke leases

November 16, 2022 — The National Fisheries Institute, the National Aquaculture Association, and the Northwest Aquaculture Alliance are calling for an independent review of a decision by the U.S. state of Washington to cancel two net-pen leases for steelhead farms operated by Cooke Aquaculture.

Washington’s Department of Natural Resources made the lease-cancelation announcement on 14 November, 2022, citing a determination the leases “continued operations posed risks of environmental harm to state-owned aquatic lands resulting from lack of adherence to lease provisions and increased costs to DNR associated with contract compliance, monitoring, and enforcement.”

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

WASHINGTON: Leading US Seafood Industry Trade Groups Call for Independent Review of Washington DNR Decision

November 16, 2022 — The following was released by National Fisheries Institute:

In response to the November 14 announcement that the State of Washington’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) will not renew the leases for Cooke Aquaculture Pacific’s steelhead farms in Washington waters, three leading US trade groups–the Northwest Aquaculture Alliance (NWAA), National Fisheries Institute (NFI), and the National Aquaculture Association (NAA) are calling for an independent review of DNR’s decision by one or more third parties such as the University of Washington School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences.

“This was not a decision based on science,” said NWAA President and CEO of tribally owned Jamestown Seafood, Jim Parsons. “If that were the case, we would be seeing a very different decision. In terminating Cooke’s marine net pen leases, the DNR has ignored the best available science from NOAA, a state Supreme Court ruling, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, and the Washington Department of Ecology, to name just a few of the countless scientific studies from other regions demonstrating that marine aquaculture does not harm endangered species or wild fish stocks.”

Parsons added, “The DNR decision will have devastating consequences for our rural communities where living-wage jobs are scarce, while at the same time taking healthy protein off American plates. This will result in a great loss to local economies and public health.”

NOAA recently issued a five-year strategic plan to develop a strong US aquaculture sector. The United States currently ranks 18th in the world in aquaculture production, according to NOAA.

“Washington state has apparently decided to ignore the enormous body of science that shows marine aquaculture, as it is practiced today, has a negligible impact on other fish species or on the environment,” Parsons said.

“We fail to understand why, at a time when we are beginning to see massive layoffs in the tech sector, a government agency would willingly and knowingly destroy a job-creating industry, one that in other regions has brought living-wage employment and economic development to hard-hit rural areas. Additionally, we find it puzzling that an agency whose mission is to protect our natural resources would target one of the most climate-friendly and environmentally beneficial food sectors. We are also at a loss to understand why DNR would choose to ignore the science that shows marine aquaculture to have a negligible impact on the water—particularly compared with other marine water users,” Parsons said.

“Aquaculture has the ability to sustainably and affordably increase the availability of the healthiest animal protein on the planet, while also producing jobs—an impressive combination,” said Gavin Gibbons, Vice President for Communications at the National Fisheries Institute. “At a time when important efforts to grow the US aquaculture sector are underway, this decision is disappointing,” he said.

“The US aquaculture farming community recognizes the value and benefits of regulations to protect the public, environment and farming operations,” commented Sebastian Belle, President of the National Aquaculture Association.  “In this instance where science is ignored, which is so very critical to achieving excellence in governance and finding a balance between man and nature, no one benefits. We strongly support an independent review by objective scientists and hope the citizens of Puget Sound will agree.”

WASHINGTON: Multiple tribal fishery disasters declared in Washington, West Coast tribes awarded $17 million

September 13, 2022 — U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo announced nearly $17.5 million will be used to address fishery disasters that occurred in multiple tribal salmon fisheries on the West Coast from 2014 to 2019, including Washington.

“Sustainable and resilient fisheries play a vital role in helping tribal communities put food on the table and in supporting economic well-being,” said Raimondo. “It’s our hope that this disaster declaration will help the affected tribes recover from these disasters and increase their ability to combat future challenges.”

Read the full article at MyNorthwest

How marine predators find food hot spots in open ocean “deserts”

September 8, 2022 — A new study led by scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and University of Washington Applied Physics Laboratory (UW APL) finds that marine predators, such as tunas, billfishes and sharks, aggregate in anticyclonic, clockwise-rotating ocean eddies (mobile, coherent bodies of water). As these anticyclonic eddies move throughout the open ocean, the study suggests that the predators are also moving with them, foraging on the high deep-ocean biomass contained within.

The findings were published today in Nature.

“We discovered that anticyclonic eddies – rotating clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere – were associated with increased pelagic predator catch compared with eddies rotating counter-clockwise and regions outside eddies,” said Dr. Martin Arostegui, WHOI postdoctoral scholar and paper lead-author. “Increased predator abundance in these eddies is probably driven by predator selection for habitats hosting better feeding opportunities.”

Read the full article at the Woods Hole, Oceanographic Institution

Chinook lawsuit still looms over Alaska trollers

September 7, 2022 –A lawsuit filed against National Marine Fisheries Service in 2020 reared its head in a Washington district court on Aug. 8, and it could spell changes in fisheries management for Southeast Alaska trollers.

The case stems from a suit brought by the Wild Fish Conservancy that challenges the biological rationale in setting allocations of Pacific Salmon Treaty chinooks that Southeast trollers catch.

The premise of the case is that NMFS, in its biological opinion, did not consider a portion of the commingling stocks as forage fish for a pod of 74 killer whales in Puget Sound, rendering the agency out of compliance with the Endangered Species Act.

Like other legal battles between the fishing industry and environmental groups, this case stems from differing interpretations of the data.

The Wild Fish Conservancy contends that 97 percent of the troll-caught chinooks originate in drainages outside of Alaska. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game, meanwhile, estimates those numbers between 30 and 80 percent, and that the percentages vary each year.

Though some feared that a subsequent injunction filed by the conservancy could stop the fishery after the initial case was filed in 2020, that didn’t happen.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Green crabs have already invaded Washington’s shorelines. Now they’re heading to Alaska.

September 7, 2022 — The first signs of the Alaskan invasion were discovered by an intern.

In July, a young woman walking the shoreline of the Metlakatla Indian Community during an internship with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found a shell of a known menace in the U.S. — the European green crab.

Two more were soon discovered. It was a day many had been dreading for years.

“We always knew we were eventually going to see evidence of green crab,” said Dustin Winter, a member of the Metlakatla Indian Community and the program director of its fish and wildlife department. “I didn’t think it was going to happen so quickly.”

Within a month and half, more than 80 live green crabs had been trapped along the Metlakatla shoreline, Winter said, making the community ground zero in the fight against the species in Alaska, though it’s possible other areas of Alaska have been colonized already.

The green crab is a notorious invasive species that has reshaped U.S. ecosystems and hammered East Coast commercial fisheries for decades. The discovery of the species in Alaska represents a profound risk in a state that accounts for about 60% of the nation’s seafood harvest.

They’re also almost impossible to remove. Nowhere in the world have green crabs been eradicated after they’ve established a population, scientists say. The discovery, which experts say is likely tied to warming waters due to climate change, threatens Alaskan economies, ecosystems and longstanding ways of life.

Read the full article at NBC News

WASHINGTON: Breaching Dams ‘Must Be an Option’ to Save Salmon, Washington Democrats Say

September 1, 2022 — Two top Democrats in Washington State have come out in favor of eventually breaching four hydroelectric dams in the lower Snake River to try to save endangered salmon runs, a contentious option that environmentalists, tribes and business groups in the region have argued over for decades.

In recommendations issued on Thursday, Senator Patty Murray and Gov. Jay Inslee provided their most definitive stance in the fight to save salmon in the Columbia River basin and honor longstanding treaties with tribal nations in the Pacific Northwest.

A draft version of a study that Ms. Murray and Mr. Inslee commissioned found this summer that removing the four dams was the most promising approach to salmon recovery. The report said it would cost $10.3 billion to $27.2 billion to replace the electricity generated by the dams, find other ways to ship grain from the region and provide irrigation water. But the draft stopped short of taking a position on removing the dams.

In the recommendations, the governor and the senator said that breaching the dams “must be an option we strive to make viable.”

Ms. Murray said in a statement that salmon runs were clearly struggling, and that extinction of the region’s salmon was not an option. But because breaching the dams would need congressional authorization and bipartisan support, she said, there had to be credible possibilities for replacing renewable energy sources, keeping shipping costs down and countering the effects of climate change.

Read the full article at The New York Times

Plaintiffs in Long Fight Over Endangered Salmon Hope a Resolution Is Near

August 16, 2022 — After decades of legal fighting over hydroelectric dams that have contributed to the depletion of salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest, the Biden administration is extending settlement talks with plaintiffs who hope the resolution they are seeking — removal of the dams — is near.

The federal government has been sued five times over its failed attempts to save salmon in the Columbia River basin, and for violating longstanding treaties with the Nez Perce, Yakama and Umatilla tribes. But now the Biden administration and others say that restoring the salmon population is an issue of tribal justice, as well as the only real solution.

Last month, the administration released a report on the feasibility of removing four dams on the lower Snake River to aid salmon recovery, and another on how the energy they produce could be replaced. The first report, conducted by scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and released in draft form, found that sweeping changes are needed to restore salmon to fishable levels, including removing at least one and potentially all four dams on the lower Snake and reintroducing salmon to areas entirely blocked by the dams.

The Biden administration stopped short of endorsing the findings but said it was reviewing all of the information to determine long-term goals for the Columbia River basin. And earlier this month, the administration and plaintiffs in a related court case agreed to pause the litigation for a second year to continue working on “durable solutions” for restoring salmon runs while also tending to economic, energy and tribal needs.

Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, who long resisted any salmon recovery plan that included removing the four dams, joined Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, a fellow Democrat, in commissioning a separate study released this summer. That study found removing the four dams was the most promising approach to salmon recovery.

Ms. Murray and Mr. Inslee have not yet taken a position on whether the hydropower dams should be removed, but the report concluded that it would require spending between $10.3 billion and $27.2 billion to replace the electricity generated by the dams, and to find other ways to ship grain from the region and provide irrigation water.

Ms. Murray is the most powerful Northwestern senator in Congress. But she will need the rest of the Democratic delegation to join her in support of salmon recovery efforts to turn the tide. The report states that removing dams would require congressional authorization, a funding strategy and a concrete timeline.

“What’s clear is that we need to support salmon recovery from every angle possible,” Ms. Murray said in a statement.

Read the full article at The New York Times