North Pacific Archives - Page 5 of 248

Alaska Salmon Fishery Closes Hatchery-Related Conditions on Marine Stewardship Council Certificate in Latest Audit

February 14, 2025 — The following was released by the Marine Stewardship Council:

The Alaska salmon fishery has successfully met all Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) Standard requirements related to hatcheries, according to a recent audit by independent assessment body MRAG Americas. This achievement was possible through dedicated efforts by the Alaska Fishery Development Foundation, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s (ADF&G) Commercial Fisheries Division and Alaska Private Non-Profit Hatchery Corporations and reinforces Alaska’s commitment to environmentally sustainable fishing under MSC certification.

A Legacy of Sustainability

Alaska has a long history of demonstrated success in sustainable management of wild salmon runs as a constitutionally mandated priority. Alaska salmon fisheries have been MSC-certified for 25 years, making them one of the longest-running certificate holders. Through annual audits and five-year recertifications, these fisheries consistently meet MSC’s globally recognized standards for sustainable fish stocks, ecosystem protection, and effective management. In November 2024, the fishery was recertified, marking a quarter-century of engagement in the MSC program.

Advancements in Hatchery Research & Management

In collaboration with the ADF&G, Alaska fisheries have implemented comprehensive marking of hatchery production salmon in order to track the origin of fish to certain hatcheries and to assess and regulate fishery contributions and hatchery-wild interactions. The MSC audit confirmed that Alaska’s hatchery management practices and strategies align with wild salmon conservation policies, ensuring long-term sustainability.

Science-Driven Conservation

The State of Alaska Hatchery Research Project, led by ADF&G and a panel of state, federal, and academic scientists, played a key role in evaluating hatchery-wild salmon interactions. The latest MSC audit reaffirmed that wild salmon populations continue to thrive, maintaining the necessary genetic integrity to remain productive into the future.

Global Market Trust

MSC certification provides third-party verification of sustainability, ensuring continued access to key global markets that require rigorous environmental standards. This milestone highlights the cooperative efforts of Alaska’s salmon fisheries and ADF&G to uphold sustainable, science-based fisheries management.

ALASKA: Fishery managers start a process to tighten salmon bycatch rules in Alaska’s Bering Sea

February 13, 2025 — Federal fishery managers took steps on Tuesday to impose new rules to prevent Alaska chum salmon from being scooped into nets used to catch Bering Sea pollock, an industrial-scale fishery that makes up the nation’s largest single-species commercial seafood harvest.

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council advanced a suite of new protections intended to combat the pollock trawlers’ salmon bycatch, the term for the incidental catch of unintended species. Proposed steps in the package include numeric caps on total chum salmon bycatch, with varying allocations for different sectors of the pollock fleet; protective limits in corridors known to be used by salmon migrating through the ocean back to Western Alaska freshwater spawning areas; and provisions that would link new limits in the ocean to real-time salmon counts and conditions in the rivers.

The action followed years of complaints about ocean bycatch of chum salmon at a time when runs in Western Alaska rivers have dwindled, becoming so low at times that no fishing was allowed.

The council’s meeting in Anchorage, which started on Feb. 3 and wrapped up with the vote on Tuesday, was devoted almost exclusively to the problem of bycatch and its effects of chum salmon runs in the Yukon and Kuskokwim river systems.

The vote to advance the protective package followed days of sometimes-emotional testimony from residents of rural Western and Interior Alaska villages who have long depended on chum salmon – one of the five species of Pacific salmon – as a food staple.

Residents who testified described the anemic salmon runs as a crisis threatening family well-being, local economies and Indigenous cultures and identities.

Read the full article at Alaska Beacon

First Nation calls on Alaskan fishery to stop intercepting vulnerable salmon

February 13, 2025 — Tŝilhqot’in chiefs are calling on the Alaskan District 104 Fishery to stop intercepting vulnerable salmon stocks bound for their territory, stating the fishery’s harvesting is infringing on Tŝilhqot’in Aboriginal rights.

“Our people depend on the salmon run every year to ensure that our families do not go hungry,” Nits’ilʔin (Chief) Joe Alphonse said in a Feb. 11 press release issued by the Tŝilhqot’in National Government (TNG).

The chiefs are making their call at the Pacific Salmon Commission’s fortieth annual meeting in Portland, Ore. The commission works to implement the Pacific Salmon Treaty which authorizes the Alaskan Salmon Fishery.

Read the full article at The Hamilton Spector

ALASKA: King crab fishery approved in Southeast AK

February 13, 2025 — Crabbers in Southeast Alaska could soon be able to harvest red king crabs after the Alaska Board of Fisheries approved a proposal enabling regulators to open a small, limited commercial king crab fishery.

Previous regulations banned officials from opening a commercial king crab fishery in Southeast Alaska unless the estimated biomass of legal male red king crab exceeds 200,000 pounds. The requirement has made it nearly impossible for regulators to open a season in the region; Southeast Alaska has only authorized three commercial red king crab seasons over the last 20 years.

The Alaska Department of Fish & Game (ADF&G) and commercial fishers argue that the requirement was based on an outdated claim that it wasn’t financially viable for crab processors to open for anything less than a harvest based on that 200,000-pound threshold.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

ALASKA: Alaska Board of Fisheries rejects hatchery production cuts

February 12, 2025 — A proposal to slash hatchery production of pink and chum salmon in Southeast Alaska was rejected by the Alaska Board of Fisheries over the weekend.

The measure, known as Proposal 156, aimed to cut hatchery egg takes by 25 percent but failed to gain majority support from the seven-member board, Intrafish reported.

The proposal sparked a heated debate, with commercial fishermen, sport fishing interests, and aquaculture advocates warning of the economic fallout. The Sitka Sound Science Center, which runs Alaska’s oldest salmon hatchery, was among those opposing the measure, citing its role in training and education.

Proponents of the reduction argued that hatchery-raised salmon creates too much competition in the ocean for food resources, potentially harming wild king salmon populations. With ongoing king salmon closures and growing user conflicts, some groups pushed for lower hatchery production as a precaution.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

ALASKA: Board of Fish rejects proposal to cut SE hatchery production of chum by 25-percent

February 11, 2024 — The hatchery debate touches on the biggest unknown in salmon ecology: What occurs in the ocean between a salmon’s birth, and when it returns to spawn?

Proposal 156 was submitted to the Board of Fish by Virgil Umpenhour, a member of the Fairbanks Region Fish & Game Advisory Committee, and some form of this same idea has come before the board at least four previous times. Umpenhour believes that the millions upon millions of chum and pink released into the wild by hatcheries in Southeast Alaska every year are affecting the marine environment, to the detriment of wild stocks of other species, like chinook in Western Alaska. He proposed that the Board of Fish cut back hatchery releases in Southeast by 25-percent.

Stakeholders in Southeast packed the board’s meeting last week (2-7-25) to oppose the plan. “Just line up, folks, because we got a long room,” said member Mike Wood as chair of the “Committee of the Whole.” This committee allows the board to step away from the agenda for a bit to take a deeper dive into related proposals. Proposal 156 generated only ten favorable comments from the public, and 400 opposed.

Sitka troller Jacquie Foss was one of them.

“Like any operation, you need diversification in order to be profitable,” said Foss. “And this would take a major pillar from our ability to be profitable.”

The short story is that while king salmon make the headlines, hatchery-produced chum salmon have become an economic mainstay in the Southeast troll fishery. They’ve increased significantly in value over the last decade or more, and some of the returns have been just staggering – millions of chum returning to a release site in West Crawfish Inlet in 2018, was a bonanza for trollers from around the region.

Many stakeholders objected that someone from Fairbanks would try to roll back this kind of economic opportunity.

“Heather Bauscher, Petersburg, AC,” Heather Bauscher formerly chaired the Sitka Advisory Committee, but has since moved to Petersburg. “We were in unanimous opposition to this. Initial concerns were that the proposer is not from this region and doesn’t understand the impacts that this would have for communities.”

And communities are pushing back, in any way they can. In an extraordinarily rare move, a member of the Alaska Legislature testified before the Committee of the Whole. Rep. Jeremy Bynum (R-Ketchikan) joined the House of Representatives about a month ago, representing Ketchikan. He and three other legislators signed a letter opposing the proposal, including Sen. Jesse Kiehl (D-Juneau), Rep. Andi Story (D-Juneau), and Rep. Sara Hannan (D-Juneau). Rep. Rebecca Himschoot (I-Sitka) wrote a separate letter with similar concerns.

Read the full article at KCAW

ALASKA: Alaska board rejects proposal for new magister armhook squid fishery

February 11, 2025 — The Alaska Board of Fisheries has declined to establish a new squid fishery, despite claims from some fishers that the species is abundant and marketable enough to justify a commercial fishery.

Submitted by Richard Yamada, the owner of a sportfishing lodge in Southeast Alaska and a commissioner on the International Pacific Halibut Commission, Proposal 230 would have created a directed jig fishery for magister armhook squid (Berryteuthis magister) in the waters of Southeast Alaska. According to Yamada, squid is an underutilized species living in Alaska waters that could be harvested to meet an emerging global demand for squid.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

CALIFORNIA: California loves Dungeness crab. But concerns over whale safety put industry in peril

February 10, 2025 — It was a calm January morning, the waters off Bodega Bay unusually smooth, but crab fisherman Dick Ogg couldn’t shake a grim feeling that the day wouldn’t go his way.

The Dungeness crab season had opened just a few weeks earlier — two months behind schedule — and was off to a slow start. “We’re working very hard to basically get nothing,” said Ogg.

The anemic hauls so early in the season mark the latest setback for California’s commercial Dungeness crab fishery, a roughly $45-million-a-year industry that delivers one of the state’s most iconic culinary delights.

The industry’s future has been complicated by another celebrated sea creature: Each year, a number of humpback whales migrating through California’s waters to and from tropical breeding grounds get entangled in commercial crab fishing gear, encounters that often end in mutilation or death. State regulators are intent on lowering the chances of whales coming into contact with the gear.

There’s reason to be concerned.

Since 1970, when the federal government listed humpback whales as “endangered” after they were hunted to near extinction, the population has made a fragile comeback. Whales along the West Coast have recovered at an estimated annual rate of 8.2% since the 1980s, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with more than 4,500 humpback whales now feeding off California’s coast.

Read the full article at LA Times

ALASKA: The last skipper in Ouzinkie: How Gulf of Alaska villages lost their Native fishing fleets

February 10, 2025 — On an early, foggy summer morning, Nick Katelnikoff steered his boat through the treacherous waters off Kodiak Island’s Spruce Cape and chuckled.

“Trust a blind guy through the rock pile?” he asked.

Katelnikoff, 76, is a veteran fisherman — the kind of guy who, friends say, can call his catch into his boat.

He’s made a career chasing the bounty of the North Pacific, building up a storehouse of knowledge about his maritime backyard that allows him, even with failing eyesight, to confidently steer his 38-foot craft away from rocks that have sunk other vessels.

Katelnikoff describes his heritage as Aleut; he’s one of the Indigenous people who have been pulling fish out of these waters for millennia. Their catches helped sustain trading networks long before white people arrived on Kodiak and began setting up fish traps and canneries — businesses that were supplied, in part, by the harvests of Katelnikoff’s more recent ancestors.

When Katelnikoff was still beginning his career in the 1970s, he was one of a dozen or so skippers in Ouzinkie — a small Indigenous village on an island just off Kodiak’s coast.

But today, that tradition is all but dead: Katelnikoff is the last skipper running a commercial fishing boat from Ouzinkie’s harbor.

Read the full article at Anchorage Daily News

Bristol Bay data show widening gap in fishermen’s earnings

February 7, 2025 — Last year’s lower-than-average Bristol Bay salmon harvest likely went a long way toward long-term polarization of the drift fleet between fishermen earning the highest and lowest revenues. As a trend, drift fishermen with the highest production in the fleet typically made double the earnings of fishermen with the lowest production.

More recently, however, a dwindling number of top producers have been earning five times more money than fishermen at the bottom of the scale, A more dispiriting trend is how an increasing number of fishermen are falling from the middle into the bottom tier when it comes to their seasonal earnings.

“The Bristol Bay fishermen we’ve spoken with seem to have done very well or very poorly, with not much in the middle,” says Sharon Lechner, president and CEO of the Commercial Fishing and Agriculture Bank (CFAB) in Anchorage.

For those not familiar with fisheries economic tools, the State of Alaska’s Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission (CFEC) keeps tabs on earnings in many state-sanctioned fisheries including salmon via data sets known as quartile tables. The tables break out the number of permit holders comprising the top 25 percent, the upper and lower middle 50 percentiles and the lowest 25 percent of the season’s revenues.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

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