Issue: September 2021

The National Maritime Center has resumed counter service appointments at 18 of its regional examination centers, including three in Alaska, two in California, and one each in Hawaii, Oregon and Washington state. No walk-in appointments are available. Late arrivals for appointments will not be permitted and will require rescheduling to another date. Only the mariner conducting business may enter the REC, with other members of their party remaining outside during the appointment. Also, mariners will be subject to COVID-19 screening questions and temperature checks, and any mariners experiencing COVID-19 symptoms will need to reschedule their appointment. Face coverings are required at all times. Anyone removing a face covering will be dismissed and could be subject to exam module failure,...

California legislators have allocated $35 million for a new University of California-San Diego coastal research vessel to engage in education and research to boost understanding of the California climate change impacts on the coastal ecosystem. The 125-foot vessel, expected to take three years for design, build and commission, would replace the Research Vessel Robert Gordon Sproul, which has been used for nearly 40 years to educate thousands of UC San Diego students. The vessel is to be operated by the university’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “After a four-decade run, it is high time Scripps built a new research vessel that can keep up with the high-caliber work they continue to churn out, and help our state navigate the troubles waters of sea level rise and our evolving...

U.S. Department of Agriculture officials are looking to distribute some 7.9 million pounds of frozen Alaska Pollock products from Oct. 1 through Dec. 31 through the National School Lunch Program and other federal food and nutrition assistance programs. According to Craig Morris, chief executive officer of the Association of Genuine Alaska Pollock Producers, that would bring USDA purchases for fiscal year 2021 to nearly 18.3 million pounds of Alaska Pollock, one of the world’s largest commercial fisheries, with the largest concentrations in the Eastern Bering Sea. “We estimate they will spend about $20 million on this contract and that would bring the total (USDA) dollars spent on wild Alaska Pollock this fiscal year to $45 million,” he said. USDA officials said winning bids for bids on ...

A diet high in low-fat food may have kept Alaska Pollock born in 2013 from gaining the weight they needed to survive over the winter, a new NOAA Fisheries study concludes. According to biologist Jesse Lamb of the Alaska Fisheries Science Center (AFSC), research results point to poor diet as a contributing factor. Still there is probably not just one answer, said Lamb, who led the study, which was released in early July, with colleague David Kimmel. “Cannibalism and wind-driven transport to inferior habitat likely also played a role,” Lamb said. “With that combination, the 2013-year class had the deck stacked against them.” The study was prompted by observations that while the number of juvenile Alaska Pollock in the Gulf of Alaska that summer was the largest on record, that a year late...

Historically at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center, stock assessment science and habitat science have been considered separately, but that practice needs to change, according to a scientist with the center’s Habitat and Ecological Processes Research. “We need to develop new approaches to better integrate these two disciplines,” senior scientist James Thorson said, adding that habitat science needs to move beyond just describing habita-specific distribution, fish density, demography and benthic community recovery. Stock assessment science primarily focuses on catch removals, and this affects how many fish are left to reproduce and the number of young fish born in the future, otherwise known as stock productivity. However, Thorson said that the scope of stock assessment science needs to b...