Saving Seafood

ALASKA: Southeast chinook stocks expected to be low again in ’24

December 24, 2023 — It’s likely to be another weak year for king salmon returns to the major river systems of Southeast Alaska in 2024.

The Alaska Department of Fish & Game issued its 2024 Southeast Alaska Chinook Salmon forecasts on Monday (12-18-23).

Of the 11 chinook stocks in the region, only the Chilkat River is expected to have an adequate number of chinook returning to spawn. Nevertheless, this number – known as escapement – is still in the middle of the range, and could be lower depending on how many fish are harvested before they get to the river.

The Alaska Department of Fish & Game has adopted action plans to try and limit the catch of king salmon bound for Southeast Rivers, but some are always intercepted.

However, ADF&G assessment biologist Philip Richards says overharvest is probably not the problem.

Read the full article at KCAW

As salmon disappear, a battle over Alaska Native fishing rights heats up

December 24, 2o23 — When salmon all but vanished from western Alaska in 2021, thousands of people in the region faced disaster. Rural families lost a critical food source. Commercial fisherfolk found themselves without a major stream of income. And Alaska Native children stopped learning how to catch, cut, dry, and smoke fish — a tradition passed down since the time of their ancestors.

Behind the scenes, the salmon shortage has also inflamed a long-simmering legal fight among Native stakeholders, the Biden administration, and the state over who gets to fish on Alaska’s vast federal lands.

At the heart of the dispute is a provision in a 1980 federal law called the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which gives rural Alaskans priority over urban residents to fish and hunt on federal lands. Most rural families are Indigenous, so the law is considered by some lawyers and advocates as key to protecting the rights of Alaska Natives. State officials, however, believe the law has been misconstrued to infringe on the state’s rights by giving federal regulators authority over fisheries that belong to Alaskans.

Now, a lawsuit alleges the state has overstepped its reach. Federal officials argue that state regulators tried to usurp control of fishing along the Kuskokwim River in western Alaska, where salmon make up about half of all food produced in the region. The suit, originally filed in 2022 by the Biden administration against the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, escalated this fall when the state’s lawyers effectively called for the end of federal oversight of fishing across much of Alaska. Indigenous leaders say the state’s actions threaten Alaska Native people statewide.

Read the full article at the Grist

ALASKA: Trident Seafoods announces plan to streamline, modernize operations

December 21, 2023 — Trident Seafoods, a corporate giant among North American seafood processors, is looking for potential buyers for four of its shoreside plants in Alaska as part of a restructuring plan announced on Tuesday from its headquarters in Seattle.

Such bold action is necessary to deliver fair value to fleet, communities and all stakeholders into the future, said Joe Bundrant, CEO of the company built by his father, Chuck Bundrant, starting more than 50 years ago with a single fishing vessel.

Bundrant said he remains confident overall of the Alaska seafood industry and Trident’s role in it. He acknowledged these significant changes and said the company is focused on treating its impacted employees and communities with the respect and compassion they deserve.

“Embracing these changes and operating a more streamlined company will allow us to reinvest in the communities, people, processes, and assets that enable us to continue our mission of responsibly sharing wild Alaska seafood with the world,” he said.

Read the full article at the Cordova Times

NOAA’s 2023 Arctic Report Card highlights human-caused warming

December 20, 2023 — NOAA’s 2023 Arctic Report Card includes new information confirming that human-caused warming of the air, ocean and land is having a broad range impact across the Arctic region, which is warming faster than other parts of the world.

The overriding message from the 2023 report is that now is the time for action, said NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad. NOAA and its federal partners have ramped up their collaboration with state, tribal and local communities to help improve climate resilience. At the same time, Spinrad said, the United States and the global community need to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions driving these changes.

NOAA’s annual Arctic Report Card, now in its 18th year, includes the work of 82 authors from 13 countries.

It includes a section called “Vital Signs” which updates physical and biological changes, chapters on emerging issues, and a special report on the 2023 summer of extreme wildfires.

One new chapter in the report focuses on salmon species that are vital to the heath, cultures and food security of many Indigenous communities as well as to commercial fishing economies. The chapter notes that in 2021 and 2022 sockeye salmon reached record-high abundances in Bristol Bay, while Chinook and chum salmon that are fished along the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers fell to record-low abundance. Declining fisheries have continued into the current year, resulting in harvest closures.

Read the full article at the Cordova Times

ALASKA: Federal fisheries managers hold Bering Sea pollock quota steady

December 20, 2023 — The total amount of pollock allowed to be scooped up by trawlers in the Bering Sea will stay the same in 2024. In its Dec. 9 meeting in Anchorage, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council moved to keep the total allowable catch for pollock at its current level of 1.3 million metric tons, a move that has generated criticism from conservationists, tribes and the trawling industry alike.

Alaska’s pollock fishery is responsible for the vast majority of salmon bycatch in the region. And amid alarming declines in returns of multiple species of salmon to Western Alaska rivers, the pollock trawl fishery has faced increasing criticism for its perceived role driving the crisis. But federal fisheries managers and the trawling industry pushed back, asserting that the claims are unfounded.

Trade organizations representing the trawl industry said during testimony at the council meeting that the decision to hold the pollock quota steady is misguided.

Stephanie Madsen, executive director of the At-Sea Processors Association, told the council the move could lead to missed opportunities to harvest increased numbers of mature pollock in the Bering Sea.

“We can’t bank them like some fish species. They will age out of the system and they will be not available to the fishery,” Madsen said.

Madsen also told the council that the industry request for a modest increase to the pollock quota, which was ultimately denied, was already a compromise.

“I would just remind you that the Russian fishery in the Sea of Okhotsk and the Western Bering Sea take more pollock than our Eastern Bering Sea pollock,” Madsen said. “So a 20,000 metric ton increase in the Eastern Bering Sea is likely to have very little impact on a global situation.”

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media

ALASKA: Alaska congressional delegation steps up efforts to shut down U.S. imports of Russian seafood processed in China

December 19, 2023 — At the Yantai Sanko Fisheries shore plant in China’s Shandong Province, workers cut pollock into trim fillets. The company website touts “perfect quality” from a plant complex with easy access to international shipping lines.

The vast majority of pollock that moves through China’s seafood processing industry comes from Russia, which is prohibited by the Biden administration’s March 2022 sanctions from exporting seafood directly to the United States. But Russian-caught fish labeled as a product of China has continued to pour into U.S. markets, helping to tank what had been record-high prices for the North Pacific trawl fleet that catches pollock off Alaska.

For more than a year, Alaska seafood industry officials have called for expanding the sanctions to cover any Russian seafood processed in China or any other country. In recent weeks, Alaska’s congressional delegation has stepped up efforts to try to make that happen.

Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, has repeatedly asked Treasury Department officials for a new ruling that would reinterpret the sanctions imposed in the aftermath of the invasion of Ukraine to cover all Russia-caught seafood, no matter where it was processed. Rep. Mary Peltola took a lead role in putting together a letter, signed by 38 members of Congress, sent Thursday to President Joe Biden. It asks for the closure of the “loophole” that allows Russian seafood processed in China to be imported into the United States “in defiance of U.S. sanctions.”

If the Treasury Department does not act, Sullivan says he’s planning another attempt to pass legislation that would require the Biden administration to end these imports. He would try to move a bill through the Senate through a unanimous consent vote, a tactic he tried unsuccessfully in June.

“I have been having a tough time getting this over the goal line. We’ve been working this nonstop,” Sullivan said. “Stay tuned.”

This campaign to clamp down on Russian-caught imports has gained momentum from an investigation by The Outlaw Ocean Project — a journalism nonprofit — into the Chinese seafood industry. The reporting, published by The New Yorker in October, found evidence that Yantai Sanko and nine other seafood companies have used the forced labor of more than 1,000 Uyghurs and other largely Muslim minorities from the Xinjiang region in northwest China.

Read the full article at Anchorage Daily News

Sea temperatures’ impact on salmon species explored in 2023 Arctic Report Card

December 18, 2023 — In December 2006, I sat in a similar carpeted room in this city and listened to scientists talk about an Alaska-size chunk of sea ice that was no longer floating on the northern oceans compared to previous years.

That meant that the “refrigerator of the northern hemisphere” was much less powerful than it had been in recent decades, said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. That failing fridge is part of the reason our world has become warmer.

This week, scientists here at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union rolled out their 18th version of the Arctic Report Card, a series of essays and data about environmental changes on top of the world put together by people at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association and featuring the work of many Alaska scientists.

Read the full article at Anchorage Daily News

NOAA Fisheries Releases 2023 Ecosystem Status Reports for Alaska

December 18, 2023 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

NOAA Fisheries has released the 2023 Ecosystem Status Reports for the eastern Bering Sea, Aleutian Islands, and Gulf of Alaska. These synthesis reports provide current conditions and trends over time for key oceanographic, biological, and ecological indicators in three Alaska marine ecosystems.

These foundational data and information reports support federal commercial fish and crab fisheries management. Each year, scientists and fishery managers at NOAA, other U.S. federal and state agencies, academic institutions, tribes, and nonprofits, contribute to the reports.

For close to three decades, fishery managers have relied on these reports to better understand how commercial fish and crab populations are being affected by changes in the marine environment.

“Warming at rates four times faster than the rest of the ocean, Alaska’s Arctic ecosystems are a bellwether for climate change. Now more than ever having ecosystem and climate-related data and information is essential to support adaptive resource management and resilient commercial, recreational and subsistence fisheries, and rural and coastal communities,” said Robert Foy, director, Alaska Fisheries Science Center.

This year, data from these reports provided broad, contextual ecosystem information for 45 stock assessments and specifically informed 16 stock-level risk assessments.

2023 Highlights Across Alaska

Looking across the three ecosystems this year, there are several notable indicators amidst continued variability in many marine conditions.

  • Ocean temperatures in both the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea have cooled relative to the recent marine heatwave conditions while the Aleutians remained warmer than average
  • Pacific ocean perch continue to be dominant groundfish in the Aleutian Islands, replacing pollock and Atka mackerel in the ecosystem while the Gulf of Alaska ecosystem is now characterized by increased populations of Pacific ocean perch and sablefish and reduced populations of Pacific cod, Pacific halibut, and arrowtooth flounder
  • There were some positive signs for Pacific cod recruitment in the Gulf of Alaska even though adult population abundance remains low
  • Notable indicators of ecosystem health and potential threats to wildlife and human health: Harmful algal blooms are becoming more prevalent in the northern Bering Sea and paralytic shellfish toxins in sampled blue mussels from four Aleutian Islands communities were 47 times above the regulatory limit

Limited availability of Alaska red king crab gives it dominant market position

December 17, 2023 — This year’s quota for Alaska’s Bristol Bay commercial red king crab season was smaller than usual, but fishermen are reaping the reward of high demand in the lead-up to the holidays.

More than 99 percent of the 2.1-milllion-pound quota has already been caught by 31 vessels, according to KUCB. Alaska Department of Fish and Game Area Management Biologist Ethan Nichols said while the total allowable catch was less than half of the 2018-2019 season, it was still welcomed by the region’s fishermen. Bristol Bay struggled with a financially difficult salmon season this past summer, the Bering Sea snow crab fishery remains closed for a second straight year, and Southeast Alaska’s red and blue king crab fisheries have been closed since 2017.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Alaska salmon woes, extreme precipitation, tundra shrub growth part of Arctic transformation

December 14, 2023– The collapses of Western Alaska salmon runs have been among the most consequential climate change impacts in the rapidly warming Arctic over the past two years, according to an annual report assembled by a federal agency.

The 2023 Arctic Report Card, released on Dec. 12 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), includes a special chapter on Alaska salmon among its updates to sea ice, air temperature, and permafrost conditions in a region of the world that is warming up to four times as fast as the global average.

Western Alaska salmon runs provide a “particularly clear picture” of how ocean warming affects ecosystems, said Daniel Schindler, a University of Washington fisheries expert who was a contributing Arctic Report Card author.

Climate change in Alaska is not simply something expected in the future, said Schindler, who spoke Dec. 12 at a news conference held at the American Geophysical Union’s annual gathering in San Francisco, California.

“It’s happening now. It’s been happening for decades. Whether you’re talking about fish or people or birds, there are real impacts that we need to deal with right now,” Schindler said.

Rick Thoman, of the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF), delivered a similar message at the news conference.

“As Alaskans, as people of the Arctic, we are living this change every day. We have no choice, no choice at all, other than to work with what is happening,” said Thoman, one of the Arctic Report Card editors.

Read the full article at KYUK