Saving Seafood

Multinational salmon research trip underway in Gulf of Alaska

February 20, 2019 — The International Gulf of Alaska Expedition 2019 is underway, according to the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission, with the chartered 62-meter Russian research vessel Professor Kaganovskiy having departed Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada on Saturday, 16 February.

The expedition is setting out to study salmon while they are at sea, rather than when they journey back to rivers and streams to spawn at the end of their lives. The study is the first comprehensive winter study of Pacific salmon in the Gulf of Alaska. According to a press released provided by the NPAFC, the study will visit 72 stations in the Gulf and will return to Vancouver next month on 18 March.

Researchers hope the study will provide information and understanding of the abundance, condition, country of origin, and location of stocks from Pacific salmon-producing countries.

The NPAFC is comprised of the five Pacific salmon producing countries: Canada, Japan, the Republic of Korea, the Russian Federation, and the United States of America. The expedition is comprised of 21 researchers from those five countries.

The project, expected to cost USD 1.3 million (EUR 1.2 million), has received funding from multiple sources including government, industry, NGO, and private contributions.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Commercial catches of Pacific halibut increase for most Alaska regions

February 11, 2019 — Contrary to all expectations, commercial catches of Pacific halibut were increased for 2019 in all but one Alaska region.

The numbers were revealed Friday at the International Pacific Halibut Commission annual meeting in Victoria, British Columbia.

The reason was due to increased estimates of the overall halibut biomass based on expanded surveys last summer from Northern California to the Bering Sea, said Doug Bowen who operates Alaska Boats and Permits in Homer.

“There’s a couple of strong year classes from 2011 and 2012 that are just starting to show up in the commercial catches and I think the scientists are cautiously optimistic that we could see some better harvests as a result of those halibut entering the fishery,” he said in a phone call as he was leaving the meetings.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Seafood mislabeling common across North American supply chains, study finds

February 7, 2019 — New research completed at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, has found mislabeing is prevalent throughout the supply chain.

Researchers found that 32 percent of fish overall were mislabeled. The highest rate of mislabeling was at retailers (38.1 percent), followed by processing plants (27.3 percent) and importers (17.6 percent).

Conducted in collaboration with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), the study was published in the journal Food Research International.

“We’ve been doing seafood fraud studies for a decade,” Robert Hanner, the lead author of the study and associate professor at the University of Guelph, said in a press release. “We know there are problems. But this is the first study to move beyond that and look at where the problems are happening throughout the food supply chain.”

“If you can see the name is changing across the supply system, that’s a red flag,” Hanner told SeafoodSource.

Hanner said he could not definitively prove whether some of the mislabeling is intentional, but found a “pretty significant price differential” in certain substitutions, such as farmed salmon labeled as wild salmon, tilapia labeled as red snapper, and basa labeled as haddock and cod.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

New drive to reduce lobster fishing gear to help rare whale

February 7, 2019 — Interstate fishing managers are starting the process of trying to reduce the amount of lobster fishing gear off the East Coast in an attempt to help save a declining species of rare whale.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission announced on Wednesday that it would consider options designed to reduce vertical lobster fishing lines in the water by as much as 40 percent. The lines pose a threat to the North Atlantic right whale, which is one of the rarest marine mammals in the world.

The commission said it would try to reduce the amount of gear with a combination of trap limits, seasonal closures, changes to gear configuration and other methods. The rules are under development and it will take months before they come up for public hearings.

The commission said in a statement that the drive to reduce lines in the water is “in response to concerns about the North Atlantic right whale population and the potential impacts of whale conservation measures on the conduct of the lobster fishery.” But some lobster fishermen said they need more details about the effort before they will get on board.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the San Francisco Chronicle

International Pacific Halibut Commission sets US, Canadian catch limits for 2019

February 6, 2019 — The International Pacific Halibut Commission last week agreed on catch limits for the Pacific halibut fishery which runs from California to Alaska, according to KBBI.

In 2018, the IPHC, the public organization responsible for managing the  U.S. and Canadian West Coast halibut fisheries, was unable to agree on quotas for the season, and as a result the quota remained the same as the 2017 season. Before last year, the last time the United States and Canada could not come to a quota agreement was nearly a century ago.

The main sticking point for the negotiations was the amount of halibut that Canada was allowed. Recently, Canada has taken about 20 percent of the catch. A U.S. proposal during the negotiations suggested that the number be closer to 12 percent this year, and a compromise was reached at 17.7 percent.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

 

Canadian judge says young salmon must be tested before placed in net pens

February 6, 2019 — A Canadian federal judge, in Vancouver, British Columbia, has ruled that fish farms must test their young salmon for contagious viruses before transferring them into open-net pens, StarMetro, a Vancouver newspaper, reports.

In her 199-page decision issued Monday, justice Cecily Strickland gave the Canadian Department of Fisheries an Oceans (DFO) four months to develop a new policy that considers the threat piscine reovirus (PRV) poses to wild salmon and to comply with the country’s preferred precautionary approach.

The ruling addresses two cases brought separately against DFO, the minister of fisheries and oceans and also Marine Harvest. One lawsuit was filed by biologist Alexandra Morton and the other by the ‘Namgis First Nation.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

 

Rifts Repaired Between Canada and the U.S. at the International Pacific Halibut Meeting

February 5, 2019 — SEAFOOD NEWS — In an eleventh-hour breakthrough in negotiations, both Canadian and American commissioners on the International Pacific Halibut Commission found common ground on two contentious halibut issues last Friday — bycatch and apportionment — while adopting catch limits that split the difference between the two advisory bodies.

With persistently stable populations at low levels, the coastwide stock has yet to show significant signs of recruitment, or younger year classes coming into the commercial fishery. Those two dynamics: stable but relatively low stock size and little sign of recruitment, make even a one or two percent difference in quota impact both the sustainability of the resource and the economic sustainability of certain coastal areas.

U.S. Commissioner Chris Oliver, who is also the Assistant Administrator of NOAA Fisheries, told the gathering the commissioners had agreed to an F47 SPR (spawning potential ratio) which is an indication of the intensity of fishing pressure on the resource. A higher F number means a lower catch limit.

“An F47 SPR is slightly more conservative than F46,” Oliver said as he made the motion everyone had been waiting for all week.  F46 is the fishing intensity level adopted last year.

“There is a little bit greater uncertainly in the stock dynamics this year, so a slightly more precautionary approach is warranted,” Oliver said. He noted the small level of young fish from the year class 2011 and 2012 that showed up in the IPHC survey last summer. That appearance is only one data point now, not reliable enough to count on. However, if they continue to show up in 2019, 2020 and beyond, the scientists would have more certainty of recruitment size and age.

Regarding the portion of quota agreed to for Canada, Oliver said, “For 2B, we’re using a share based calculation that will put 70% emphasis on historical share and 30% on SPR value, for the three years, beginning in January 2020. For this year, Area 2B will get a 17.7% share.”

Over the years, the Canadian and U.S. commissioners have struggled with how to bridge the gap between the 20% of the coastwide total Canada received prior to a coastwide assessment and the 12.3% of the geographic coastwide range. Canada has never recognized ‘apportionment’ — a word rarely used any more — and has accommodated for that by routinely taking higher catch limits.

Discussion have ranged from applying a 50:50 or equal emphasis to the B.C. number or heavily weighting one or the other. This agreement answers the question for the next four years.

IPHC’s two advisory bodies, one representing fishermen and one representing processors, recommented total catch limits that were less than 2 million pounds apart.

In the end, the Commissioners agreed to a coastwide total mortality of 38.61 million pounds of halibut, just below last year’s take of 38.7mlbs.  The Total Constant Exploitable Yield or TCEY (all removals: commercial, recreational, wastage, etc.) by regulatory area for 2019 are listed below in millions of pounds.

2A 1.65

2B 6.83

2C 6.34

3A 13.5

3B 2.90

4A 1.94

4B 1.45

4CDE 4.00

38.61  Total TCEY

The Fishery CEY catch limits (in million pounds) are:

2A   1.50

2B   5.95

2C   4.49

3A 10.26

3B   2.33

4A   1.65

4B   1.21

4CDE   2.04

29.43   Total FCEY

These numbers pose little risk to the resource falling to trigger reference points, but they do pose a greater chance of next year’s quota being lower, and 2021’s lower still if nothing changes.

The Conference Board, the fishermen’s advisory group, recommended 39.6 million pounds of TCEY for 2019, and the Processor’s Advisory Board recommended 37.63 million pounds. Most of the Commissioners agreed total catch limits should drop this year.

The Commission and the advisory bodies also agreed that an exception should be made for Area 2A. Washington state’s treaty tribes, with support from the state and others, proposed a minimum FCEY in that area of 1.5 milion. The IPHC granted that, albiet for an interim, three-year basis.

Another big hurdle in the impasse last year, besides the portion of the halibut that goes to Canada, was accounting for all sizes of halibut bycatch in the Bering Sea.

On Friday, the Commission recommended that staff evaluate and redefine TCEY to include the under-26-inch (U26) halibut that make up part of discard mortalities, including bycatch. The intent is for each country to be responsible for counting its U26 mortalities against its collective TCEY.

The change would, for the first time, include fish that are too small to be caught in the IPHC’s setline survey or for that matter on a commercial hook. They are caught in trawls, however, and currently accounted for by weight based in large part on observer data.

But inclusion of U26 mortalities in bycatch will not further reduce the amount of halibut available for the directed halibut fleet in the Bering Sea to catch, since it is sublegal and not targeted by halibut fishermen.

This story was originally published by SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

IPHC agrees on halibut catch limit after 2018 impasse

February 4, 2019 — The International Pacific Halibut Commission (IPHC) has set 2019 catch limits slightly higher than last year’s levels, it announced.

The body, which sets halibut catch limits in the US and Canada, set the 2019 limit at 38.61 million pounds (17,513 metric tons) for the 2019 season, which should March 15 and must cease on Nov. 14.

In 2018, the IPHC was not able to agree on a catch limit. In a move called both “inevitable” and “disastrous”, the IPHC could not come to an agreement on the catch limits for the seasons in the US, off the coast of Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and California, and British Columbia, Canada. So, the US and Canada set limits independently, which totaled 37.2m lbs, a 9% decrease overall.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

California has a weird new desert. It’s in the Pacific Ocean.

February 4, 2019 — Six years after it was stricken by a wasting disease off the northern California coast, the sunflower sea star — one of the most colorful starfish in the ocean — has all but vanished, and the domino effect threatens to unravel an entire marine ecosystem.

The cause of the sea star’s demise is a mystery, but it coincided with a warming event in the Pacific Ocean, possibly tied to the climate, that lasted for two years ending in 2015. It heated vast stretches of water in patches, and likely exacerbated the disease, according to a new study released Wednesday.

“I’ve never seen a decline of this magnitude of a species so important,” Drew Harvell, the lead author of the study, published in the journal Science Advances, that documented the sunflower sea star’s retreat into possible extinction off California and Oregon.

If the study had a purpose, she said, it was to call attention to the sea star’s demise so that federal officials would take action to list it as endangered and work to save it, possibly with a breeding program using sunflower stars that are surviving in parts of Washington, Alaska and Canada.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

‘Lobster-Whale Work Group’ Faces Complicated Balancing Act As It Works To Protect Right Whales

February 1, 2019 — Fisheries’ managers in the Atlantic states are considering a more proactive approach to regulating the lobster industry in order to reduce risks it may pose for the endangered North Atlantic right whale.

Under pressure from lawsuits and the requirements of the federal Endangered Species Act, the federal government is closely reviewing the health of the right whale population, which is hovering around 410 animals. The result could be the imposition of new gear and other restrictions to reduce the risk of whale entanglement with the rope lobstermen use to position and haul their traps.

That process was slowed by the recent government shutdown and, in the meantime, a new “Lobster-Whale Work Group,” made up of state officials in the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, has proposed a slate of possible actions with the dual goals of protecting the whales and the “viability and culture of the lobster fishery.”

“We’re doing everything we can to appease the people who think it may be us,” says Stephen Train, a lobsterman in Long Island, Maine.

Read the full story at Maine Public