Saving Seafood

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

Judge blasts ‘mitigation’ that would imperil both orca and salmon

August 11, 2022 — A federal judge has rejected the National Marine Fisheries Service’s “mitigation” for allowing continued “maximum” commercial harvests of the endangered Chinook salmon the imperiled Southern Resident killer whales need to survive — among the mitigations, that the agency will figure out better mitigations before the orcas go extinct.

U.S. District Judge Richard Jones accepted a magistrate judge’s recommendation for summary judgment in a lawsuit filed by Wild Fish Conservancy in 2020. The recommendation revealed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s fisheries agency violated the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act by authorizing commercial salmon harvest at levels that are pushing protected wild Chinook salmon and Puget Sound orcas to extinction.

The Washington-based nonprofit challenged the authorization of the Southeast Alaska Chinook troll fishery, which the agency approved based on vague plans to fund production of 20 million young salmon annually to increase prey for the orcas by 4 to 5%. But the agency had no plans for where to get the young fish, who would release them and where, the age of the fish at release, the juvenile-to-adult return ratio, how many fish would be needed for future broods and whether all of this would be enough to sustain the orca in the long term.

Read the full article from Courthouse News Service

US West Coast lawmakers want USDA to buy more seafood from their states

May 11, 2022 — A group of Democratic U.S. senators and representatives from West Coast states have written a letter to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack calling on his agency to spend more on seafood purchases from producers in their states.

The letter notes that California, Oregon, and Washington state produce more than USD 500 million (EUR 473.6 million) worth of seafood annually, more than an eighth of total domestic production in the U.S., and 25 percent of the country’s processing and wholesale jobs are located in the three Pacific Coast states.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

WASHINGTON: $3M will help tribes study salmon reintroduction in the Upper Columbia Basin

April 12, 2022 — Bringing salmon back to the Upper Columbia River will take a lot of time and a lot of money, according to the Upper Columbia United Tribes.

The tribes recently received $3 million from Washington’s supplemental budget — a big chunk of change that tribes said will help kick off the second phase of a decades-long study.

However, the tribes still will need to find significant funding sources, especially from federal agencies, to cover the entire study phase, which adds up to an estimated $176 million spread over 21 years, said Laura Robinson, a policy analyst with Upper Columbia United Tribes.

Recently, momentum has built to help along the Upper Columbia reintroduction studies, Robinson said.

“To get this large investment of funds from the Washington state Legislature and governor is really helping increase this momentum,” Robinson said.

Read the full story at OPB News

 

Working with West Coast Tribes to Protect Endangered Species

April 5, 2022 — In late 2019, the National Science Foundation proposed to fund a high-energy seismic research survey in the Northeast Pacific Ocean. It would take place off the coasts of Oregon, Washington, and Vancouver Island in the summer of 2021. These surveys inform earthquake and tsunami hazards in the highly populated Pacific Northwest. The surveys deploy airguns, which create sound waves that transmit through the water. Any marine life in the area could be affected by the sound, including salmon and Southern resident killer whales, which are culturally important to many Pacific Northwest Tribes.

Through an academic study, the National Science Foundation  proposed a marine geophysical survey to collect geological data from Cascadia Subduction Zone. To collect the survey data, the National Science Foundation Research Vessel Marcus G. Langserh would tow airguns that send out sound waves into the water.

Read the full story at NOAA Fisheries

 

California Seeks to Modify Coldwater Pink Shrimp Management

March 31, 2022 — Rules that Oregon and Washington pink shrimp trawlers are already accustomed to may be implemented in California soon.

The California Fish and Game Commission will consider changes to its pink shrimp fishery management plan when it meets in June.

“The effort to develop and implement this FMP began in 2017, and the adoption of the FMP by the Commission is expected in April 2022,” the Notice of Proposed Regulations reads, although the Commission calendar now has the action scheduled in June. “The purpose of the FMP and its implementing regulation is to update the management of California’s pink shrimp fishery to be in line with Oregon and Washington. Updating the fishery’s management would also assist the fishery in obtaining the Marine Stewardship Council certification. This effort is expected to result in a more sustainable and less environmentally impactful fishery.”

Read the full story at Seafood News