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Study: Alaska Snow Crab Collapse Attributed to Starvation

1May

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Study: Alaska Snow Crab Collapse Attributed to Starvation

Federal fisheries researchers studying the dramatic crash of snow crab in the Bering Sea from 2018 to 2021 have determined that caloric requirements of the crab quadrupled when sea temperatures rose and the crab ultimately starved to death. Snow crabs will eat almost anything they can catch and break open with their claws, a diet that may include fish, shrimp, crabs, worms, clams, brittle starts, snails, algae and sponges, as well as anything dead they find. In 2018, there were more snow crab in the Bering Sea than ever seen before, Cody Szuwalski, a fisheries biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center, said. So the decline of roughly 10 billion crab from 2018 to 2021 was a precipitous unexpected collapse, he said in a ...

Dutch Harbor Holds Top Commercial Fisheries Landings Honors

24Apr

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Dutch Harbor Holds Top Commercial Fisheries Landings Honors

The latest data compiled by the federal fisheries officials show in that in 2022 the Port of Dutch Harbor in Unalaska, Alaska ranked again as first in the nation for seafood landings, while the Port of New Bedford, Mass. maintains its status as first in value of deliveries. The annual “Fisheries Economics of the United States Report,” released by NOAA Fisheries April 4, shows among the nation’s 20 top ports that 613.5 million pounds of seafood, with a value of $159.9 million dollars were delivered to the Port of Dutch Harbor in 2022. The value of 88.4 million pounds of seafood delivered at the Port of New Bedford came to $443.2 million. Eight other Alaska ports, plus two from Oregon, one from Washington state and one from California also made the list of top 20 ports in the count...

Emergency Action on Bering Sea Chinook Salmon Bycatch Denied

24Apr

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Emergency Action on Bering Sea Chinook Salmon Bycatch Denied

NOAA Fisheries has denied a request to institute a zero cap on Chinook salmon bycatch in the Bering Sea, to ensure no bycatch of Chinook salmon in the Bering Sea pollock fishery, saying the petition did not meet criteria necessary for emergency action. The decision, announced by NOAA Fisheries on April 18, was in response to a petition submitted Jan. 17 by five Native Alaska tribal entities, asking Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to close the Bering Sea pollock fishery, which opened on Jan. 20. The petition was signed by the Association of Village Council Presidents, Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, Tanana Chiefs Conference, Yukon River Drainage Fisheries Association and Yukon River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission. The petitioners also asked the Commerce Department ...

27Mar

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NOAA Fisheries Requests $1.1B Budget for 2025

NOAA Fisheries is seeking $1.1 billion to cover operations, research and facilities in 2025, down slightly from the $1.3 billion allocated to the agency by Congress for fiscal 2023, and roughly equal to the fiscal 2024 funds that Congress agreed to earlier in March. One of those budget priorities, the online publication SeafoodSource notes, is funding for Mitchell Act hatcheries in the Columbia River Basin, to help restore fish to that water body and protect biodiversity from offshore wind. The budget request notes that the additional funds are “part of the (Biden) administration’s commitment to prioritize the restoration of healthy and abundant wild salmon, steelhead, and other native fish populations to the Columbia River Basin, and honor the United States’ obligations to triba...

Marine Debris Foundation Establishing Headquarters in Juneau

28Feb

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Marine Debris Foundation Establishing Headquarters in Juneau

The Marine Debris Foundation (MDF), established by Congress as a public-private partnership with NOAA’s Marine Debris Program, will have its headquarters in Juneau, Alaska on the campus of the University of Alaska College and Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, it was announced Feb. 21. The foundation, based alongside the fisheries college and the University of Alaska Southeast, has enormous potential, said Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, who made the announcement in his annual address to the Alaska Legislature. “NOAA's program is our nation's sole government agency exclusively focused on the complex issue of marine debris,” the foundation’s executive director, Susan R. Sherman, said. “Government agencies typically enter into public-private partnerships like this one to expand the scop...

NOAA Fisheries Slates Virtual Listening Sessions on Aquaculture

21Feb

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NOAA Fisheries Slates Virtual Listening Sessions on Aquaculture

NOAA Fisheries has announced virtual listing sessions for the West Coast and Alaska in March to help the agency plan better for the future of its aquaculture program and the potential impact of constraints on achieving its aquaculture goals. The West Coast virtual session is to be held from 10 a.m. to noon Pacific Standard Time on March 1 and the Alaska session from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Alaska standard time. The link to register for the West Coast session is http://tinyurl.com/2c569p3c. For the Alaska virtual session, visit http://tinyurl.com/5b9hswns. A date for the Pacific Islands virtual session is still to be determined, according to NOAA Fisheries.

14Feb

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SPRFMO Adopts New Monitoring Standards

Members of the New Zealand-based South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organisation (SPRFMO), while meeting in Manta, Ecuador from Jan. 29-Feb. 2, adopted U.S. proposals to boost observer coverage and combat labor abuse in South Pacific fisheries. NOAA Fisheries said that the U.S. delegation, including members of the State Department, offered proposals to continue strengthening management and monitoring of the squid fishery in the South Pacific. According to NOAA Fisheries, the fishery has been the focus of claims of rampant illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing in recent years. U.S. efforts led to adoption of a comprehensive high seas boarding and inspection program last year, a program that has increased opportunities for monitoring the fleet. NOAA Fisherie...

Ocean Indicators for Pacific Ocean Salmon Unsettled for 2024

24Jan

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Ocean Indicators for Pacific Ocean Salmon Unsettled for 2024

Biologists with NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center say ocean indicators off the central Oregon coast are decidedly mixed for the coming year, as El Nino develops at the equator, with positive and negative indicators in local waters for emerging salmon. Ocean indicators for juvenile salmon survival that were posted online in early January reflect a rapidly changing ocean that’s tough to predict, they said. As of Jan. 11, researchers said the overall message was that the system is unsettled, so at that point all they could do was watch and wait. The team from the research station regularly monitors ocean conditions along the Newport Hydrographic Line, one of the best records of ocean chance on the West Coast. Scientists have surveyed the line twice monthly, weather permit...

3Jan

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NOAA: Warming Waters May Affect Algae Blooms, Food Web

New research by NOAA Fisheries suggests that the warming of Bering Sea shelf is affecting the timing of algae blooms and the food web dependent upon them. This is particularly true of the unprecedented and widespread warming in during 2018-2019, according to the study, which was released Dec. 22. “This study fills gaps by including data from the recent warming period 2018–2019 and more spatial information on how blooms vary across the region,” Jens Nielsen, a biological oceanographer with NOAA’s Ecosystems and Fisheries-Oceanography Coordinated Investigations Program, said. “Our work lays the foundation for learning more about the link between phytoplankton bloom types and how that influences zooplankton that are food for commercially important fish and benthic crabs,” Nielsen...

NOAA Fisheries Introduces New Communications Tool

3Jan

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NOAA Fisheries Introduces New Communications Tool

NOAA Fisheries on Dec. 26 announced that it has introduced a new communications tool called the Ecosystem and Socioeconomic Profile (ESP), in order to move toward the application of ecosystem-based fisheries management. The tool’s purpose is to facilitate integration of ecosystem and socioeconomic information into fisheries management decisions by distilling information from a variety of sources into a succinct, focused report to help resource managers in decision-making. The ESP was first conceived in 2014, building on NOAA Fisheries’ history of identifying ecosystem and socioeconomic pressures since the 1990s. “The ESP gives managers a streamlined version of what affects each fish stock,” said Alaska Fisheries Science Center biologist Kalei Shotwell, who initiated developmen...