Saving Seafood

Disaster aid for Alaska crab, salmon fisheries in spending bill

December 23, 2022 — Secretary of Commerce Gina M. Raimondo on Dec. 16 announced approval of fishery disaster requests for crab and salmon fisheries in Alaska and Washington over the last several years.

The declarations are for poor or closed Alaska harvests going back to 2020. They cover failures in the crab fisheries for this season and last season, including the recently canceled Bering Sea snow crab and Bristol Bay red crab harvests, as well as the closure of king crab fishing in Norton Sound in 2020 and 2021, the collapse of chum and coho harvests in the Kuskokwim River area, the poor salmon returns in the Chignik area in 2021, and low returns of pink and coho salmon om the Copper River and Prince William Sound areas in 2020.

For Washington, fishery disaster declarations were approved for the 2020 ocean salmon fisheries and the 2019 Columbia River, Willapa Bay, and Puget Sound Salmon fisheries.

“America’s fisheries are a critical part of our national economy and directly impact our local communities when disasters occur,” Raimondo said. “These determinations are a way to assist those fishing communities with financial relief to mitigate impacts, restore fisheries and help prevent future disasters.”

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

WASHINGTON: Fishing Washington’s urban wilderness

December 14, 2022 — Muckleshoot tribal fisherman pursue chum salmon along the heavily industrialized Duwamish River  

Clouds blanket Puget Sound and the rain starts at dawn. “Do you have oil gear?” Leeroy Courville asks as we sit in the wheelhouse of his boat, the High Liner.

“Just this Red Ledge.”

Leeroy laughs and digs out some Grundens gear for me. It’s a good thing too, because the rain starts to beat down.

The High Liner lies tied to the Muckleshoot tribal dock in a heavily industrialized stretch of the Duwamish River. A pair of 454 Mercruiser gas engines power the 32-foot by 11-foot bow picker, but one is broken down. Nonetheless, one is enough to get us out to Elliot Bay, where Courville hopes to gillnet a few more chum salmon before the Tribe closes the season.

“This could be the last day,” he says. “I might just make one set and come in. But if I get 40 fish, I’ll make another set. A hundred fish is $2,000.”

Leeroy bought the boat from his father. “I had that one over there,” he says pointing at a nearby bowpicker. “I sold it and my father gave me this one. I just bought that gray bowpicker over there for my kids.”

Leeroy’s son Kobe arrives with a skiff, and I get into the open boat with him to follow his father out to the fishing grounds. “Only people from the Muckleshoot Tribe can go on our boats,” Leeroy has informed me. The Muckleshoot are among the tribes whose ancestral fishing rights were recognized by the 1974 Boldt decision, a federal court ruling that upheld Washington tribes’ treaty fishing rights.

“My father was fishing before that,” Leeroy says. “And he has some stories.”

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

ALASKA: Hatchery Chums are Returning Strong in Southeast Alaska

August 2, 2022 — While chum salmon runs in the western part of the state are crashing, hatchery chum salmon returns in Southeast are strong. The runs this year are promising to either meet or exceed expected numbers.

Southeast’s main hatchery operators are private non-profits that rear and release salmon to supplement commercial fisheries. Hatchery chums in the region are genetically indigenous fish but they’re raised in captivity and the fry are released into the ocean by the tens of millions. A small percent return three to five years later, nearly all of them caught by seiners, gillnetters, and trollers.

Hatchery chums are worth millions of dollars every year. The top season was in 2012, when they were valued at nearly $63 million.

Last year’s haul was worth about $25 million. This year will probably be better.

Read the full article at Seafoodnews.com

 

ALASKA: Area M, Where Alaska commercial and subsistence fishing interests collide

July 14, 2022 — There have been clashes over regulating Area M for decades, but the battle heated up after the Yukon-Kuskokwim chum crashes began. This is the first in a three-part series.

Kuskokwim fisherman Fritz Charles grew up in Tuntutuliak, on the lower river. There were so many fish then that his parents would put away literal barrels of them. His job as a child was to pack the dry fish tight in the barrels using a special method.

In 2021, chum runs took a sharp downward turn. It was the worst year on record for them on the Yukon River, and it’s the same story on the Kuskokwim. This year, the runs on both rivers are at their second lowest.

In 2021, 153,497 summer chum salmon swam up the Yukon River. That’s compared to an average of about 1.7 million summer chum. The river was missing about 1.5 million fish.

At the same time, Area M commercial fishermen caught 1,168,601 chum at sea while subsistence fishing on the rivers was closed. In the midst of the smallest chum run western Alaska subsistence users had ever seen, Area M fishermen were catching more than ever before.

Do the subsistence fishermen in the Y-K Delta or the commercial fishermen in Area M have a greater claim to the chum? About a decade ago, a comprehensive salmon genetics study of the Area M fishery confirmed that most of the chum caught in the region, around 60%, are bound for coastal Western Alaska. But when you start to break that number down further, that’s where things get complicated.

Read the full story at KTOO

ALASKA: Salmon bycatch, electronic monitoring on the table at Sitka meeting of North Pacific Fishery Management Council

June 9, 2022 — The bycatch of chinook and chum salmon is on the agenda, as the spring meeting of the North Pacific Management Council gets underway in Sitka this week (June 9-14).

In addition to hearing how much salmon is being intercepted in the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea by the trawl fisheries, the council will review a proposal to supplement the human observer program with electronic monitoring.

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council regulates the so-called “federal fisheries” which take place outside the three-mile limit of Alaska’s state waters, and within the exclusive economic zone of the United States which extends 200 miles offshore.

Read the full story at KCAW

Pacific salmon can now reproduce in Alaska’s Arctic, researchers find

April 7, 2022 — Waist-deep in the waters of Jago Lagoon off Alaska’s North Slope, biologist Vanessa von Biela and her research partners got a big surprise in the summer of 2017 when they were sorting through Arctic fish that had been captured in a test net.  Among the hundreds of Arctic cisco in the net was a juvenile chum salmon — the first direct proof of successful salmon reproduction that far north in North America.

The young chum salmon, with its rounded nose, stood out among the masses of pointy-nosed Arctic cisco was quickly noticed by colleague Sean Burril, said von Biela, a research biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

“He happened to hold this one in his hand and he said, ‘Hey, this one feels different,’ and, ‘This one is a salmon,’” she said.

That one juvenile salmon found near the Inupiat village of Kaktovik during fieldwork to study Beaufort Sea fisheries represented a breakthrough — the product of an egg laid in the Arctic waters that survived the winter.

Read the full story at Arctic Today

 

Salmon travel deep into the Pacific. As it warms, many ‘don’t come back.’

March 30, 2022 — During a typical fall, almost a million chum salmon pour into Alaska’s Yukon River, a torrent of wild fish that has sustained the economy and Indigenous culture in the far north for generations. Last year, that run collapsed, with salmon trickling upstream at a 10th of normal levels, forcing the state to airlift frozen fish from other regions to feed the population.

About 400 miles to the south, in Bristol Bay, the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery set a record last year, with more than 66 million salmon returning to the rivers in the watershed. That total is expected to be broken again this year.

Salmon in the Pacific Ocean face dramatically different fates from one river system to the next. As the planet warms, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, scientists say changes in ocean conditions are helping drive these wild swings and collapses of key stocks. These North Pacific fish account for most of the world’s wild-caught salmon, and their survival has implications for economies and cultures around the Pacific Rim.

During her three decades as a government scientist, as climate change has intensified, Laurie Weitkamp has watched these fluctuations in salmon numbers become bigger and the models that predict how many salmon will return from sea become more unreliable.

“Salmon will go out, in what we think is a really good ocean, and then it collapses,” said Weitkamp, a fisheries biologist with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration based in Oregon. “They don’t come back.”

Read the full story at The Washington Post

Alaska legislators discuss bycatch concerns ahead of critical regional halibut meeting

November 26, 2021 — An Alaska legislative committee heard from state and federal fisheries officials earlier in the month prior to a critical regional meeting on halibut bycatch.

The three-hour meeting centered on bycatch concerns with chinook and chum salmon, crab and halibut. Commissioner Douglas Vincent-Lang of the Department and Fish and Game spoke first about catastrophic chum salmon returns in the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers. Bycatch is the unintentional harvest of non-target species while commercial fishing.

According to state data, the Yukon alone was down this year by roughly 1.5-2 million chum salmon from pre-season projections. Chum salmon bycatch by trawlers, which has been rising in recent years, cannot alone explain those reduced numbers, Vincent-Lang said, and the state will now try to determine what caused the historic Western Alaska salmon failures.

But, it was halibut bycatch limits for trawlers that target pollock and cod in the Bering Sea that proved more controversial.

Read the full story at Alaska’s News Source

 

Alaska lawmakers in both parties demand action on excessive fisheries bycatch

November 23, 2021 — A grilling on fish that is taken as bycatch didn’t satisfy the appetites of a bipartisan group of Alaska legislators at a special hearing on Nov. 15 by the House Fisheries Committee.

“We probably could not be more diametrically opposed on many things but we are frustrated with the waste of the resource and we are in lockstep. It’s all about the best economics and the best stewardship of our resources,” said Kevin McCabe, R-Big Lake, who devoted his entire November Capital Report to the topic.

“The fish don’t care if you’re red or blue,” said Sarah Vance, R-Homer, the catalyst behind the bycatch hearing. “We lay aside everything else and focus on good stewardship and making sure that every fisherman is able to get fish in the freezer and food on the table.”

The bycatch issue came to a head this summer when all Yukon River salmon fisheries were canceled due to so few returning chinook and chums. Along with ocean and climate impacts, villagers questioned the takes by huge trawlers that catch and process fish at sea.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

ALASKA: Subsistence users, scientists seek answers for chum salmon declines

August 31, 2021 — Bill Alstrom lives in St. Mary’s on the lower Yukon River. It used to be that if he wanted fresh salmon for dinner, he’d throw a net in the river to catch a couple. But with fishing closures this season, he can’t do that anymore.

“It’s hard to comprehend that this is happening in my lifetime,” said Alstrom. “It makes me sad just thinking about it.”

Chum salmon stocks have sharply declined over the last two years in Western Alaska. It’s a major problem because people in the region, like Alstrom, depend heavily on the fish for food and for work. With chinook salmon low for decades, chum were the fish that families could depend on until last year, when the summer chum run dropped below half of its usual numbers. This year, the run dropped even further, to record lows. The State of Alaska has closed fishing for chum to protect the runs.

Scientists are in the early stages of trying to understand the crash.

Biologist Katie Howard with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game said that the chum declines are not just occurring in the Yukon River.

“When we talk to colleagues in the Lower 48 and Canada, Japan, Russia, they are all reporting really poor chum runs,” she said. “So it’s not just a Yukon phenomenon. It’s not just an Alaska phenomenon, but pretty much everywhere.”.

So why are the chum numbers so low? The short answer is that no one really knows for sure. But there are a lot of theories.

Every week during the summer, subsistence users, biologists and fishery managers gather on a weekly teleconference hosted by the Yukon River Drainage Fisheries Association. They share information and ask each other questions, and the subsistence users bring up one theory for the decline again and again: bycatch.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media