Saving Seafood

Tariffs could harm NW fishing industry in markets on both sides of the Pacific

September 24, 2018 — First, it was Washington wheat farmers and apple growers. Then it was regional wineries. And now, Pacific Northwest seafood companies are getting sucked into the escalating trade war between the Trump administration and China.

The fleet that fishes in the North Pacific, much of it based in Puget Sound, was first caught up in the fight in July, when China imposed sweeping sanctions on many U.S. imports, including virtually all seafood. The immediate risk was clear: China’s tariffs threatened to block access to what many believe will become the world’s largest consumer market for seafood products.

But now there’s a new risk: a Trump administration trade policy that was meant to punish the Chinese, but which could end up making American seafood more expensive for American consumers — a bizarre outcome that could expose the Northwest’s seafood industry to trade-war damage both at home and abroad.

That risk became clear on Monday, when Robert Lighthizer, the United States Trade Representative, released a list of some 5,700 imported Chinese food products that will be hit by heavy new tariffs. Among them, roughly $2.7 billion in imported Chinese seafood items—everything from salmon and flounder to sole and snow crab.

Read the full story at The Seattle Times

Tentative deal reached on renewal of Pacific Salmon Treaty

September 21, 2018 — American and Canadian negotiators have successfully brokered a deal to renew the Pacific Salmon Treaty. The compromise agreement has now been sent to Ottawa and Washington, D.C., to be approved and ratified by their respective national governments.

The Pacific Salmon Treaty is renegotiated every decade between the two countries to govern salmon catch, research, and enhancement in Alaska, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. The treaty expires on its own terms on Dec. 31, 2018. The current negotiations have taken place over the course of two years by two teams seeking to renew the treaty for the next decade, from Jan. 1, 2019, through Dec. 31, 2028.

Aspects of the expiring plan will carry over. Among them, the use of an abundance-based management regime for king salmon, as opposed to hard caps. This should result in harvest rate indices and quotas that will rise and fall depending on abundance of the fish.

Pacific Salmon Commission Executive Secretary John Field praised the negotiators for working out amendments to the treaty, including harvest rate reductions of king salmon when it comes to mixed-stock ocean fisheries.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

 

Salmon preservation plan to impact Alaska and Canada over 10-year span

September 19, 2018 — PORTLAND, Ore. — Alaska and Canada would reduce their catch of endangered Chinook salmon in years with poor fishery returns under an agreement that spells out the next decade of cooperation between the U.S. and Canada to keep various salmon species afloat in Pacific waters.

Members of the Pacific Salmon Commission recommended a new 10-year conservation plan to the U.S. and Canadian governments Monday that would run through 2028 and involve Canada, Alaska, Washington, Oregon and a number of tribal nations in both countries.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at KTUU

 

‘What extinction looks like’: A young orca’s presumed death cuts endangered whale population to 74

September 17, 2018 — Ever since birth, she had to fight to live.

The deep scratches along her back and dorsal fin not only earned her the nickname “Scarlet,” but may also indicate that the young female orca, J50, came into the world through harrowing means: Pulled out of her mother by other whales using their mouths.

Still, she survived, and for a while restored hope that she could help her pod — part of an embattled population of southern resident killer whales known to frequent the waters near Washington state — to rebuild their numbers.

But Thursday, researchers announced grim news.

“J50 is missing and now presumed dead,” according to a news release from the Center for Whale Research, a group based out of San Juan Island that has studied the southern resident killer whales for more than 40 years. The last known sighting of the 3-year-old orca was on Sept. 7, researchers said.

Without J50, the population is now down to 74 members — their numbers reached nearly 100 in 1995 — and many of its existing female members are nearing the age where they will no longer be able to reproduce, Ken Balcomb, founder and principal investigator of the Center for Whale Research, told The Washington Post in July. The pod has not produced viable offspring in three years.

Read the full story at The Washington Post 

Experts Prepare Plan to Capture Ill Orca as Last Alternative

September 13, 2018 — Federal biologists said Wednesday they are preparing a plan to capture and treat a sick, critically endangered orca if there is no other way to save her in the wild.

Officials said they will intervene and rescue the orca only if she becomes stranded or separated from the rest of her tightly knit group of whales.

They want the 4-year-old orca known as J50 to survive in the wild and contribute to the recovery of southern resident killer whales, without putting the rest of the orcas in her pod at risk.

“We don’t intend to intervene while she’s with her family. If we are presented with a situation where a rescue is the only viable alternative, we will rescue her,” Chris Yates, assistant regional administrator for NOAA’s protected resources division, told reporters during a call.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The New York Times

Sea Lions And Orcas Battle It Out In Puget Sound

September 12, 2018 — In the early 1980s, a group of recreational fishermen dropping lines near the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks in Ballard, Washington, started complaining about a particularly large and wily California sea lion.

The shore anglers had good reason to be annoyed. Each time they hooked a fish, this sea lion would pop up and eat it off their line.

The sea lion, nicknamed Herschel by the fishermen, quickly moved on from taking fish off lines to gobbling up steelhead as they tried to make it over the ladder south of the locks. Here, water sluices down stair-stepped pools and migrating fish jump from pool to pool until they reach the Lake Union Ship Canal and spawning grounds beyond. Herschel found that by hanging out under the fish ladder he could gorge himself on steelhead trying to make it upstream.

Over the next few years, it became apparent that Herschel and a handful of other large male sea lions were seriously depleting the winter steelhead run, putting the population that spawns in Lake Washington’s tributaries at risk of extinction.

California sea lions spend part of the year at breeding sites on the Channel Islands. The bulls that feed at the bottom of fish ladders, where salmon practically swim down their gullets, have a distinct advantage in their battles for mates and territory.

Read the full story at OPB

 

Impossible Choices: The Complicated Task of Saving Both Orca and Salmon

September 10, 2018 — Decades of politics and foot-dragging have stymied the recovery of threatened and endangered Chinook salmon, while an iconic population of killer whales that depends on them veered toward extinction. Now, a last-ditch effort to save the whales may also be what thwarts the recovery of Chinook.

The Southern Resident killer whales are dying. An extended family of 75 orcas living year-round in the sea surrounding the San Juan Islands near Seattle, their numbers never fully rebounded since aquariums that later became SeaWorld captured a third of them in the late 1960s.

And there are other culprits.

Cargo ships and whale-watching boats zip through the Salish Sea, adding noise that interferes with the whales’ ability to locate each other and their prey. The water they live in is toxic. The Puget Sound outside Seattle is tainted with flame retardant, and PCBs and pollutants gush from nearby rivers into the sea.

The Chinook salmon they eat to live are contaminated with mercury, lead and organic compounds like PCBs. The Washington state Department of Health advises humans to limit their consumption of Chinook salmon to eight ounces per week. But Southern Residents eat dozens of the fish per day.

Not only is their food toxic, there’s also less of it than ever before. Five populations of Chinook the whales depend on are listed as threatened; a sixth is endangered. And they’re smaller, declining in size by 10 percent since the late 1970s, according to research published February in the scientific journal Fish & Fisheries.

Read the full story at the Courthouse News Service

Collaborative effort produces a new marine debris action plan for Washington

September 7, 2018 — Trash on our shorelines and in the ocean, also known as marine debris, is a persistent and growing global environmental issue. A lot is at stake particularly in Washington State, where outdoor recreation, shellfish harvests and aquaculture, and commercial, tribal and recreational fisheries are all economically and culturally significant. Marine debris interferes with the health of these important marine resources. Today September 5, 2018, local organizations and agencies released a marine debris action plan for the state, the result of a year-long collaborative process facilitated by NOAA’s Marine Debris Program.

The plan will facilitate and track actions that prevent and reduce marine debris throughout Washington, including Puget Sound, the Northwest Straits, Washington’s Pacific Coast, the Columbia River estuary and inland sources. To create the plan, 66 representatives from more than 40 entities participated in two workshops to compile and review current efforts, identify strategic gaps and recommend future actions. NOAA’s Marine Debris Program supported the effort by convening the planning committee, organizing and hosting the workshops and engaging the planning committee.

Read the full story at the San Juan Islander

US and Canadian negotiators reach tentative deal over Pacific salmon

September 7, 2018 — Diplomats are reviewing a Pacific salmon treaty deal. Negotiators from Canada and the United States reached the tentative deal over Pacific salmon almost two weeks ago.

“The proposed amendments to the treaty – and there are a number of them – have been transmitted to the capitals: Ottawa and Washington D.C. for review and consideration by the national governments,” said John Field, executive secretary of the Pacific Salmon Commission in Vancouver, British Columbia.

That was on August 24. But the 10-year annex of the Pacific Salmon Treaty isn’t official until it’s signed by both countries.

The treaty has governed salmon catches, research and enhancement in Alaska, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia since 1985. It’s renegotiated every 10 years.

No details have been released on this latest agreement which would last until 2029.

But Field said he’s confident it’ll be approved before the current deal expires at the end of this year.

“The salmon treaty has a long history with these two countries,” Field said by phone on Thursday. “It’s in their mutual interest to have the treaty to enter into force and I’m confident that both countries are doing everything they can to have them enter into force on time.”

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

Here’s how smartphones are being used to track lost fishing gear

September 5, 2018 — Cell phones are being used by fishermen to bounty hunt for lost fishing gear for pay.

California fishermen created the retrieval project last year along with the Nature Conservancy to get ropes, buoys, pots and anchors out of the water after the dungeness fishery so they wouldn’t entangle whales, and Washington and Oregon quickly followed suit.

“They are using their cell phones and its GPS to take a picture of what the gear looked like, tell when they found it, and any identifying markings on the buoy – the vessel, the ID number, and also the latitude and longitude of exactly where they found it,” said Nat Nichols, area manager for groundfish and shellfish at the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game office in Kodiak. He added that gear loss rates in different fisheries can be “anywhere from 3 to 23 percent.”

Under a special permit, the West Coast bounty hunters head out two weeks after the dungeness crab fishery closes to search for derelict gear.

“Dungies tend to be in shallower water and that means there is more wave energy and the gear can get lost or rolled up on the beach. A lot of it has a tendency to move around because it’s in the tidal surge,” Nichols said.

The fishermen get paid $65 for every pot they pull up. The gear then goes back to the original owners who pay $100 per pot for its return.

Saving whales was the prime motivator for pot retrievals on the West Coast. In Alaska’s crab and pot cod fisheries, it’s ghost fishing and gear conflicts.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News