January 30, 2024 — Marine heat waves appear to trigger earlier reproduction in juvenile Pacific cod, leading to higher mortality in the species’ early life stages and fewer juvenile fish surviving in the Gulf of Alaska, according to research from the Oregon State University.
During 2014 to 2016 and again in 2019, unusually high ocean temperatures were followed by steep declines in adult Gulf of Alaska cod. The fishery was closed in 2020, and a federal fishery disaster was declared in 2022.
January 24, 2024 — Marine heat waves appear to trigger earlier reproduction, high mortality in early life stages and fewer surviving juvenile Pacific cod in the Gulf of Alaska, a new study from Oregon State University shows.
These changes in the hatch cycle and early growth patterns persisted in years following the marine heat waves, which could have implications for the future of Gulf of Alaska Pacific cod, an economically and culturally significant species, said Jessica Miller of OSU’s Coastal Oregon Marine Experiment Station at Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport and the study’s senior author.
“We found that the fish were hatching two to three weeks earlier. To see that dramatic of a shift in hatch dates of a species due to a one- or two-year event is pretty remarkable,” Miller said. “That those changes continue to persist suggests that marine heat waves might be having long-lasting impacts that also influence the likely trajectory of the species under climate change.”
August 28, 2023 — NOAA Fisheries has finalized its plans for a new quota system for Pacific cod trawling, which will require U.S. fishermen to join a cooperative to harvest cod in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands region in most of 2024.
Under the Pacific Cod Trawl Cooperative Program, NOAA Fisheries will set an overall harvest quota and then assign quota permits to cooperatives. The cooperatives, which must be associated with a processor, will then determine how much cod each individual member can catch under those permits. Quota shares for cooperatives will be determined by historic landing data.
August 21, 2023 — Commercial fishermen netting Pacific cod from the Bering Sea and Aleutians region will be working under new individual limits starting next year designed to ease pressure on harvests that regulators concluded were too rushed, too dangerous and too prone to accidentally catch untargeted fish species.
The new system will require fishers who harvest cod by trawl – the net gear that scoops up fish swimming near the bottom of the ocean – to be part of designated cooperatives that will then have assigned quota shares. The fisheries service at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said it has notified eligible participants and is asking for applications.
The cod-trawling program, to start next January, is the first new fishery quota system started since 2012 in federal waters off Alaska, according to NOAA Fisheries.
The Pacific cod harvest is the second-biggest commercial groundfish catch in the waters off Alaska, after pollock, according to NOAA Fisheries. The 2021 commercial harvest totaled 330.4 million pounds and was worth $86.5 million, according to NOAA Fisheries.
January 6, 2022 — The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) revised the 2022 total allowable catch (TAC) amounts for pollock and Pacific cod in the Gulf of Alaska. The changes, which increases the pollock TAC and decreases the Pacific cod TAC, were put into effect at 12 noon Alaska local time on January 1, 2022.
According to NMFS, the pollock TAC will increase from 99,784 metric tons (mt) to 141, 117 mt. The TAC for Pacific cod decreased from 27,961 mt to 24,111 mt.
July 22, 2021 — Stakeholders of an isolated Aleutians fish plant contend state appointees on the federal fisheries management board have ignored calls for help to keep more of the area’s large Pacific cod catch in Alaska despite a court order that shot down the first attempt to do so.
Representatives from Aleut Corp., which owns the fish processing plant in Adak through a subsidiary, and Peter Pan Seafood Co., have said they need to be able to rely on a foundational allocation of cod from federal fisheries to reopen the currently shuttered plant.
It’s believed a reliable allocation of roughly 5,000 metric tons of Pacific cod to the plants in Adak and Atka, where a plant is also currently closed, would provide a base volume of fish that would allow an operator to keep it open year-round with purchases in the state waters cod and other fisheries throughout the year.
Doing so could provide the ultra-remote community of approximately 300 residents with nearly 200 jobs during peak activity and several dozen steady positions if the plant were operated year-round, they estimate.
The North Pacific Fishery Management Council that oversees the largely Seattle-based trawl cod fishery is in the process of reforming those allocations amidst other regulatory changes.
June 24, 2021 — The North Pacific Fishery Management Council moved quickly to adopt a preliminary preferred alternative (PPA) to rationalize the last major race for fish in the Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands — trawl-caught Pacific cod — which also relegated Adak’s state-of-the-art seafood plant to the bottom of the pile in terms of access to the resource.
“I am announcing today that, based on the Council’s preliminary preferred alternative in the CV [catcher-vessel] trawl package, Peter Pan Seafood Company is suspending all further work in Adak,” said Steve Minor, Manager of Business Development for Peter Pan, on the day after the Council approved the motion.
April 15, 2021 — Pacific cod stocks have begun to rebound in the Gulf of Alaska, but the total allowable catch (TAC) for 2021 remains low at 17,321 metric tons. Last year, managers curtailed the fishery in federally managed waters after stock assessments put the biomass near the bottom of the threshold for conducting the fishery.
Though recruitment of younger cod and uncaught fish from last year have added to the abundance in most recent assessments, full recovery of the stock could take years. The warm-water “blob” of 2014 has been blamed for the crash.
April 9, 2021 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:
For a young Pacific cod, first feeding is a life-or-death moment. Cod larva are nourished by a yolk sac after they hatch. Once the yolk sac is depleted, they must find food within days in order to survive. If there is no prey available during that critical window for first feeding, young fish face starvation.
Warming Alaska waters are increasing the risk of prey mismatch and starvation for cod larvae, a new study finds.
NOAA Fisheries scientists collaborated with our partners to look at how temperature shifts affected first feeding Pacific cod larvae in two large ecosystems: the southeast Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska. The models made predictions for 1998–2019, a period that encompassed warm and cool years, including a series of extreme heatwave events beginning in 2014.
“Warming can increase the metabolic demands of fish and shift the timing of their food production. So you have temperature unravelling the system, moving food around. And you have fish needing food now. When mismatched prey timing and increased metabolic demand line up, it can be pretty disastrous,” said Ben Laurel, NOAA Fisheries scientist at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center, who led the study. “The better we can understand and predict these effects, the more effectively we can manage them now and in the future.”
April 5, 2021 — Pacific cod stocks have begun to rebound in the Gulf of Alaska, but the TAC for 2021 remains low at 17,321 metric tons. Last year managers curtailed the fishery in federally managed waters after stock assessments put the biomass near the bottom of the threshold for conducting the fishery.
Though the recruitment of younger cod and the uncaught fish from last year have added to the abundance in most recent assessments, full recovery of the stock could take years. The warm-water blob of 2014 has been blamed for the crash.
The warming waters began in 2013 and precipitated a 79 percent decline in the stocks. Prevalent theories suggest that warmer waters raise the metabolic rates for the young cod. At the same time the forage species for young cod appeared to have higher concentrations of protein and lower concentrations of fat. More recent studies determined that the eggs of cod survive in a narrow range of temperature (3 to 6 degrees C, or 37.4 to 42.8 degrees F).
Stocks also continue to decline in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands harvest areas. The 2021 TAC for the Bering Sea has been set at 111,380 metric tons with a TAC of 13,796 metric tons for the Aleutian Islands.
The 2020 TACs for the respective areas had been set at 141,799 metric tons and 14,214 metric tons.