December 12, 2023 — After a significant pollock purchase of USD 1.75 million (EUR 1.6 million) in November, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is seeking to buy more wild Alaska pollock with a deadline to receive bids of 13 December.
Simultaneously, the agency awarded a significant walleye contract worth more than USD 1.4 million (EUR 1.3 million).
December 12, 2023 — Five environmental and tribal organizations have signed their support onto a lawsuit against federal fisheries managers. The suit alleges that the National Marine Fisheries Service has violated environmental policies by using outdated data to guide the way it regulates the trawling industry in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Chain fisheries. This includes the Alaska pollock fishery, responsible for the vast majority of salmon bycatch in the region.
“There’s so many factors as to why salmon declines are where they’re at right now in our rivers,” said Laureli Ivanoff, the executive director of Native Peoples Action, one of the supporting organizations. “We know it’s not just the pollock industry. However, if the analysis and if the environmental impact statement that they use for analysis and for decision-making was updated, there would be a more complete picture of what’s happening in the ocean to base their decisions on.”
The lawsuit calls into question the use of environmental impact statements dating back to 2004 and 2007. It was originally brought in April by the Association of Village Council Presidents (AVCP) and Tanana Chiefs Conference (TCC), tribal non-profit organizations that together represent the vast majority of communities hit hardest by salmon crashes in Western Alaska. The groups are being represented by the national environmentalist law organization Earthjustice.
In early December 2023, five Alaska Native and fisheries conservation organizations: Native Peoples Action, Ocean Conservancy, the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, SalmonState, and the Alaska Marine Conservation Council, filed what is known as an amicus brief on the same side as the original two plaintiffs. It is a way for parties with a stake in the outcome of a lawsuit to offer additional information that courts may consider before ruling.
December 11, 2o23 — The North Pacific Fishery Management Council, which oversees the quota of the Alaskan pollock industry, decided to maintain the same quota for the species in 2024 at its recent meeting on 9 December – despite industry calls for a higher catch.
The council’s latest meeting decided that the total allowable catch (TAC) of pollock for the Eastern Bering Sea would be 1.3 million metric tons (MT), the same quota that it had last year. The flat quota is in spite of increases in biomass, which has increased the allowable biological catch (ABC) to 2.31 million MT – up from 1.9 million MT last year.
December 8, 2023 — The Biden administration could jump into a high-profile lawsuit involving a Southeast Alaska Native community that’s fighting with Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s administration about its fishing rights.
The U.S. Department of Justice said in a filing late Tuesday that it’s considering submitting a friend-of-the-court brief in the dispute between the state and the Metlakatla Indian Community, a tribal government.
The three-year-old Metlakatla lawsuit, filed by the tribal government against Dunleavy’s administration, centers on the extent of fishing rights granted to the community’s members.
The Justice Department didn’t say which side it would take in the suit.
But the Biden administration has already filed a lawsuit against the state that it says is aimed at protecting the rights of rural subsistence fishermen in Southwest Alaska. And its filing Tuesday describes the federal government as having a stake in the Metlakatla lawsuit because it is the “trustee of the community’s federally reserved tribal fishing rights, with a general trust responsibility to preserve and protect those rights.”
December 8, 2023 — Alaska Native and fisheries conservation organizations have gone to federal court in support of a lawsuit challenging how the National Marine Fisheries Service manages North Pacific trawl fisheries.
The amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) brief is a response to the lawsuit brought by the Association of Village Council Presidents, Tanana Chiefs Conference, and city officials of Bethel, Alaska, against federal fisheries managers. The lawsuit alleges that NMFS has “violated the National Environmental Policy Act by authorizing large-scale industrial fishing companies to catch billions of pounds of fish without appropriately considering the impacts in light of rapid environmental changes, ongoing species collapses, and closures on in-river salmon fisheries,” according to the supporters.
It’s the latest legal maneuver in the ongoing fight between the trawler fleet and other advocacy groups over salmon bycatch and environmental effects.
“If successful, the litigation could lead to better consideration of the impacts of industrial fishing and precautionary measures designed to minimize bycatch and killing of species like salmon, herring, crab and halibut,” according to a joint statement by SalmonState and the allied groups.
December 6, 2023 — For newly hatched Western Alaska chum salmon, there is no time to waste when it comes to making their way to the open ocean. The tiny fry begin their journey from their natal streams just days or weeks after being born. When they finally reach the Bering Sea, sometime from mid-June to mid-July, their priority becomes consuming marine prey and building the energy reserves that will carry them through their first winter. Throughout their years in the ocean, the Western Alaska chum will travel extensively between the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska.
Unfortunately, simultaneous warming trends in the Bering Sea and the gulf appear to have come as a double whammy for Western Alaska’s juvenile chum salmon. A new study by scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game shows a possible link between a period of exceptionally warm ocean temperatures and chum crashes seen across Western Alaska.
“Loss of sea ice is having an impact on various ecosystems. And so with warming we’re seeing a change in the food web,” said Ed Farley, lead author of the study and head of NOAA Fisheries Ecosystem Monitoring and Assessment Program. “That food web is less energetic. It’s poorer-quality prey. And it’s impacting juvenile salmon, especially juvenile chum salmon in the northern Bering Sea. It’s impacting their fitness prior to winter.”
By “poorer-quality prey,” Farley primarily means jellyfish, also known as cnidaria. Jellyfish have been shown to proliferate when ocean temperatures warm.
“There are more cnidaria in the ecosystem of the Northern Bering Sea during warm years, but there was significantly more during this most recent anomalously warm period,” Farley said.
December 6, 2023 — The Association of Genuine Alaska Pollock Producers (GAPP) will receive more funding to continue its “Wild Alaska Pollock” campaign in 2024.
Since enlisting a new board of directors and expanding its annual budget to USD 4 million (EUR 3.4 million) in 2019, the organization has built awareness and demand for its marquee product through the use of the “Wild Alaska Pollock” tagline.
Read the full story at SeafoodSource
December 5, 2023 — The following was released by the office of Senator Ed Markey:
Senators Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) introduced the Fishing Industry Safety, Health, and Wellness Improvement (FISH Wellness) Act, bipartisan legislation that would build upon the success of the Commercial Fishing Occupational Safety Research & Training Program to better address the range of occupational safety and health risks facing fishermen in this highly strenuous and dangerous industry, including worker fatigue and substance use disorder. This legislation would also increase the authorized funding for the program and make these research and training grants more accessible on every coast by eliminating the match requirement.
“Every day, our fishermen are faced with demanding and dangerous working conditions that take both a physical and mental toll, all while they work to bring food to the tables of families across the country,” said Senator Markey. “The FISH Wellness Act will provide much needed funding to ensure that fishermen are getting the information and resources they need to stay safe and healthy on the job.”
“Fishermen contend with extreme weather, long distances and periods away from shore and family, and often strenuous working conditions—factors that contribute to the industry being consistently ranked among the most dangerous in the country,” said Senator Sullivan. “I’m glad to introduce the FISH Wellness Act with Senator Markey, which would expand job safety training opportunities to support our fishermen as they sustainably harvest a world-class renewable resource and strengthen our coastal economies.”
December 5, 2023 — A federal investigation into the unusually large number of Bering Sea and Aleutian killer whales found dead this summer determined that most but not all of the deaths were killed by entanglement in fishing gear.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center on Friday released some details about the deaths in the Bering Sea and Aleutians, which had spurred sharp criticism of seafood trawling practices.
Of the nine killer whales that were found ensnared in bottom-trawling gear, six were killed by those entanglements but two others were already dead before they were netted, the investigation found. The other whale was seriously injured by the gear entanglement but escaped alive, the agency said.
In addition to the nine whales found in bottom-trawl gear, there were two other cases of dead killer whales found entangled in other types of fishing gear.
December 5, 2023 — Successive marine heat waves appear to have doomed much of the chum salmon swimming in the ocean waters off Alaska in the past year and probably account for the scarcities that have strained communities along Western Alaska rivers in recent years, a newly published study found.
In the much-higher water temperatures that lingered in the 2014-19 period, juvenile chum salmon metabolism was super-charged, meaning they needed more food, said the study, by scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. But the food that was available was of low quality — things like jellyfish instead of the fat-packed krill and other prey they normally eat, the study said.
That means for the juvenile salmon trying to survive their first year at sea, “there’s not much gas in the tank,” said the study’s lead author, Ed Farley, manager of NOAA Fisheries’ Alaska Ecosystem Monitoring and Assessment Program.
Juvenile chum salmon that swam from spawning areas in the rivers suffered what was essentially a double hit, said Farley, who works in the NOAA Fisheries Auke Bay Laboratories in Juneau. They encountered one extreme heat wave in their critical first summer when they were in the northern Bering Sea and then, when they entered their wintering grounds in the Gulf of Alaska, swam into the tail end of another extreme heat wave, he said.
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