Fisheries

More than a year into the war in Ukraine, Alaska’s government is doing its part by sending aid in the form of seafood from the Last Frontier. The Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute is handling the state’s food distribution.

Bruce Schactler, the institute’s food aid program and development director, said ASMI doesn’t own any of the seafood but has helped manage the state’s aid programs.

That includes sending over $300,000 worth of Alaskan seafood, or about 3,600 cases of canned pink salmon, to Ukraine.

“We do things on behalf of the Legislature, the State of Alaska,” he said. “Most recently, at the request of the Legislature, we sent three containers of canned salmon over to Ukraine.”

When the state government decides to send aid, it sets a budget and ASMI solicits bids from companies across Alaska. Companies then bid on the sale and offer stock at competitive rates to ensure a maximized amount of product.

The state has aided in several disasters over the years. Through ASMI, it has sent food to the Philippines after devastating typhoons and areas suffering food insecurity in Africa and the Middle East as well.

Schactler says ASMI has a history of running the state’s aid programs.

“ASMI’s been facilitating humanitarian aid for (the) last 20 years,” he said.

The institute was asked about domestic food insecurity at a recent presentation to the state House Fisheries Special Committee. The issue has been particularly acute, as the state has been slow to send food stamps or process applications since August.

Schactler said ASMI would be interested in sending food to those in need across the state, but needs funding and approval from the Legislature first.

“I’ve discussed it with the State Department and I’ve discussed it with a few members of Congress in Washington, D.C., but I have not been contacted or heard anything further than that,” he said.

If the state decides to purchase domestic seafood for Alaskans in this year’s supplemental budget, aid could be sent to food banks as soon as next week. But if aid isn’t included until the 2024 regular budget, folks would have to wait at least until July.

John Ryan lives in Hollis, on Prince of Wales Island. He’s seen the island’s population of sea otters soar over the last handful of years, and he’s worried. Residents like Ryan worry the boom will shut down profitable dive fisheries — like sea cucumbers and geoduck.

“The quota has gone down over the years, and it’s hurting people’s livelihoods,” he said. “That money that’s generated from that, it’s going through and it’s raising families and puts food on families’ tables.”

Sea otters have a critical place in the ecosystem. Scientist and University of Alaska Southeast professor Barbara Morgan said otters eat shellfish that would otherwise decimate vital kelp beds — which would be a big blow to the ecosystem. The sea urchin is the main predator for a kelp bed, and they happen to make up a large portion of the sea otter diet.

“Kelp beds are hugely important to the environment that they are in,” Morgan explained. “They provide protection for the coast that they are along. They break the power of waves as they come onshore. So that really limits how much the wave can affect the coast.”

But there wasn’t always a healthy population in Southeast. Russian fur traders overharvested the animals in the 18th century, and years later, wildlife officials started to try and build the population back up. Now, there’s thought to be more than 25,000 animals around the region.

Now that otters’ numbers are growing rapidly, Morgan said one specific concern is that established populations on the western outer coast of Southeast Alaska will make their way into the inner channels of the Alexander Archipelago.

“And that would put them into areas that have really active shellfish fisheries, crab, in particular, shrimp, and people don’t want the sea otters to impact harvests of those fisheries and wipe them out,” Morgan explained. “Totally understandable. I’m not sure that we’re an imminent threat, though.”

But Ryan said he wants to get ahead of the issue before it becomes a bigger problem. He shared his concerns in a proposal to the Board of Game, asking the state to devise a plan to manage otter populations.

The board dismissed the proposal out of hand before the meeting began. They said they don’t have jurisdiction. That’s because sea otters are protected under federal law by the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act.

“It’s not something that’s going to be put into place overnight,” Ryan said. “It’s going to take years. But there needs to be a harvest.”

So Ketchikan’s Borough Assembly highlighted it as a key federal policy issue during a recent lobbying trip to Washington, D.C.

Borough Mayor Rodney Dial says local officials want to see the federal government manage otter populations more aggressively — or turn over management to the state.

“So we’re just asking for a dialogue,” Dial said. “We’re asking for the federal government to be involved in the process, to listen to people on the local level, and hopefully, that we can all work together to, you know, — because everybody loves sea otters. And, you know, we just need to find a way to balance the population so that the sea otter population doesn’t wipe out populations of other creatures.”

As it stands, sea otter populations are managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Current protections allow Alaska Native people to harvest sea otters for subsistence food purposes, and use their fur to create goods and sell them in the form of handicrafts. Federal regulations state that an individual has to have at least one-fourth blood quantum to be a qualified hunter, and they must be from a coastal area.

Anyone who is not Alaska Native is federally prohibited from harvesting the animals, or selling or buying their pelts.

Fishermen have raised concerns over otter populations before — in 2010, then-Congressman Don Young introduced a bill that would roll back some restrictions on the sale of sea otter pelts in response to pressure from fishermen.

Grant EchoHawk, one of the assembly members who traveled to Washington with Dial, said the goal is simply to find balance, and strike up a conversation.

“What we’re looking for is to make sure that … the pendulum isn’t swinging too quickly in the wrong direction,” EchoHawk said.

EchoHawk said he wanted to make sure that lawmakers had the most up-to-date data on otters in Alaska, since the populations have risen considerably since the species came under federal control. A 2015 University of Alaska Fairbanks study found that Southeast Alaska’s sea otter populations have grown by 10% to 15% each year.

“Ultimately, we just want to make sure there’s smart decisions being made,” he said.

No matter what happens, Ketchikan’s tribe says that area tribes need to be involved in the decision-making.

“Anybody who’s proposing changes in the regulations should be talking about the tribes before they propose regulatory changes,” said Tony Gallegos, Ketchikan Indian Community’s cultural resources director.

Gallegos said that tribes are best able to manage the sea otter population, as part of their traditional lifestyle. He said that right now, he doesn’t want to see any changes to the federal law protecting the otter — at least, not until scientists have better data.

“There needs to be a determination on what a good optimal population size is and then try to maintain the sea otter population at that level,” he said. “And that’s probably going to require culling those populations by hunting.”

Whether any changes are coming, though, is an open question. Officials at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declined to say whether they’re exploring options for otter management.

A previous version of this story had an incorrect current population estimate for sea otters in Southeast Alaska. The number has been corrected. 

For crews working on fishing boats in Alaska, danger lurks in a helpful and possibly innocent-looking device: the winch.

Winches are hauling devices on which cables are wound. On fishing boats, they are used to lift anchors, nets and other objects. The combination of speed, force and close quarters on deck can lead to accidents involving them.

Over a 20-year period, there were 125 serious injuries to Alaska fisheries from winches, including amputations and crushed bones, according to a newly published study by experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The study is published in the Journal of Agromedicine.

The study tracked winch-related traumatic injuries from 2000 to 2020 that were reported to the Alaska Fishermen’s Fund, the state-administered entity that administers fishing-related injury and illness claims. Because the tally is limited to reports filed to the fund, it is almost certainly an undercount, and possibly a significant undercount, the study said.

Of the reported 125 injuries, over 80% of the injuries occurred on boats fishing for salmon, with events over several gear types, the study found. Topping the gear-type list were boats using purse seines, nets that surround fish and are drawn together to pull them from the water. Reported injuries also occurred in the drift gillnet fleet and the setnet fleet, which use nets in different ways, as well as on boats that use longline baited hooks or pots to harvest fish. About half of the injuries were caused by anchor winches, a third by deck winches and the remainder by other types of winches.

In most cases, the injuries happened when body parts were caught in or compressed by winches or the cables attached to them, the study said. Hands, wrists and arms were the body parts most frequently injured, though there were also injuries to other body parts, including skull fractures. Amputated fingers were among the most commonly reported injuries, though there was one case of an arm amputation. About half of the reported injuries were to fingers.

The study did not assess or rank the severity of reported injuries, said lead author Tristan Victoroff, a CDC epidemiologist. “However, some of the injuries we found, such as amputations … and crushing injuries, can be severe enough to end a fishing season –” or even a fishing career, Victoroff said by email.

There is some awareness in the fishing industry of winch dangers, particularly in the seine fleet, but not much data is available to show how often entanglements occur, he said. “What our study showed is that winch injuries can and do happen with some regularity in Alaska, across different winch types and fisheries,” he said.

The study includes some recommendations for improved safety.

Equipment can help, it said. For purse seine boats, emergency stop devices, called “e-stops,” are recommended for deck winches. “Being able to stop the winch as fast as possible could make the difference in preventing a severe injury,” Victoroff said. For anchor winches, guiding rods could help prevent injuries that occur when anchors are being pulled up by their chains, the study said.

Enhanced safety training is also recommended, especially because many of those at risk on fishing boat are relatively inexperienced. The injury statistics reflect the dangers to the young; more than half of the 125 reported traumatic injuries over the period were to workers under 30.

In general, crew members should have completed marine safety training within the past five years and be up to date on their U.S. Coast Guard-required certifications, Victoroff said. “It’s critical that crew are prepared to respond to adverse events that may occur, whether from winch injuries or other types of emergencies,” he said.

The CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health has a series of recommendations for fishers’ safety, he noted.

Commercial fishing in Alaska has become safer overall in recent decades. While the profession’s physical hazards are famous — “The Deadliest Catch” is about Bering Sea crab fishing and is one of the best-known reality TV shows — Alaska commercial fishing fatalities have declined since 1990, according to the CDC. There were no commercial fishing deaths in the most recent year-long period measured, from Oct. 1, 2021 to Sept. 30, 2022, making that the second fatality-free year, after 2015, according to the Coast Guard.

This story originally appeared in the Alaska Beacon and is republished here with permission.

The tanner crab fishery begins on Sunday in Southeast Alaska. But crabbers are facing low prices, and bitter crab disease is expected to reduce the sellable catch.

Typically 60-80 boats participate throughout Southeast.

This year the prices are expected to be low compared to recent years. An Anchorage Daily News article lists the end of pandemic stimulus money as a possible factor in reducing consumer demand. But there’s a geopolitical component to this story, according to Haines tender Brent Crowe.

“The biggest thing that’s happening right now is that the collapse of the snow crab fishery in the Bering sea has disrupted the supply chain,” he said. “Markets that are used to having crab available are looking elsewhere. And the Japanese market has started sourcing crab from Russia, through China to circumvent the embargo on Russian seafood.”

The embargo was put in place after Russia invaded Ukraine. Crowe says because Russians seafood processors have difficulty finding buyers, they are cutting their prices. Crowe says the availability of that cheap Russian seafood has impacted the tanner crab market.

“Last year the price was $8,” he said. “Right now it’s looking to settling in the $3 range, the initial offering was $2.50.”

The price drop led to a two-week strike in Kodiak. Crowe says there is no indication a similar action will take place in Southeast.

“Southeast fishermen generally don’t organize like that,” he said. “They either just participate or they don’t based on whether they see it as profitable. Central gulf fishermen seem to be more organized in that kind of a way.”

Some crabbers could see their income further reduced by bitter crab disease. The disease causes the flesh to taste like aspirin. There are some visual cues to the condition, and processors don’t buy those crabs.

The amount of affected crab varies with location, but in the Lynn Canal it can be as high as 80%. That means crabbers get money for only one in every five crab they catch.

The sick crabs are cooked to kill the disease, and brought to the landfill to avoid its spread. Crabs have been known to catch the disease after feeding on dead infected crabs. The disease is caused by a single-celled plankton that uses the crab as part of its reproductive cycle.

Adam Messmer is a shellfish biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

“It gets into the crab’s blood and starts replicating within the crab,” Messmer said. “It slows the crab down, and you see that in fish tickets too, that the first couple of landings that a fisherman will have will have fairly low amount of bitter crab. And then as the season progresses, the percent of bitter crab goes up. And the thought is that those crabs are slower since they are sick, to crawl into the pot.”

Messmer has studied some sick crabs in his lab. The single cell organisms that cause bitter crab are called dinoflagellates. Messmer says they use the crab as a host before releasing their spores.

“We’ve seen them sporulate in the lab, and the crab will kind of sit up on its legs, and start shaking and this red cloud comes out of its mouth, almost out of a science fiction movie. And those are the spores of the young dinoflagellate that are sent out into the water column,” he said. “And, at least the one in the lab, as soon as it was done doing that, it died instantly.”

Bitter crab is not harmful to humans. The only effect is a bad taste in the mouth. Messmer says scientists have not been able to determine what causes bitter crab numbers to rise and fall.

“I think it’s just something we are going to have to live with in this area. For a long time it’s stayed really steady,” he said.

On Sunday at noon, the Department of Fish and Game will announce the duration of the opener. Crabbers can expect a minimum of five days in the most productive and best studied areas, with another five days to fish the less desirable areas.

The first-ever cancellation of Alaska’s Bering Sea snow crab harvest was unprecedented and a shock to the state’s fishing industry and the communities dependent on it.

Unfortunately for that industry and those communities, those conditions are likely to be common in the future, according to several scientists who made presentations at the Alaska Marine Science Symposium held in late January.

The conditions that triggered the crash were likely warmer than any extreme possible during the preindustrial period but now can be expected in about one of every seven years, said Mike Litzow, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric scientist based in Kodiak. By the 2040s, those conditions can be expected to occur one out of every three years, he said.

Blame “borealization” for the disaster befalling snow crab, which is an Arctic species, Litzow said. That term refers to an ecosystem becoming boreal, with groups of organisms — called “taxa” by scientists — that have been south of the Arctic until recently.

“If we think about an Arctic animal at the southern edge of its range that’s exposed to really rapid warming, that leads us sort of inevitably to the concept of borealization,” said Litzow, director of NOAA Fisheries Kodiak laboratory and shellfish assessment program. “As you warm Arctic ecosystems, those systems become prone to a state change, where Arctic taxa such as snow crab become replaced by subarctic taxa that are better able to tolerate ice-free and warm conditions.”

Snow crab are dependent on the winter sea ice and the cold conditions created even after the seasonal melt, he said. While they are widely dispersed through the Bering Sea, the sweet spot for the commercial harvest — the place where the crab are big enough to be commercially valuable — is in the southeastern Bering Sea.

But consecutive years of extreme warmth in the Bering Sea, conditions that precluded much ice formation even in winter, kept temperatures above the 2-degree Celsius threshold that is ideal for snow crab — and made the area suitable for sea life from farther south, including groundfish that may prey on juvenile crab, Litzow said.

Though fishery managers are in the process of crafting a detailed plan to rebuild the stock to help harvesters, processors and communities in the short term, in the long term the suitable habitat for snow crab will be farther north, he said.

Litzow said that points to a need to change management of snow crab and other fisheries.

“We really need to start evaluating our risks less on our lived experience and more in terms of the trends going forward,” he said.

Borealization is occurring around the Arctic Ocean and the seas that border it, a product of climate change.

In Alaska’s Bering and Chukchi seas, that means that suitable habitat for Arctic-specialized species like snow crab and fat-packed Arctic cod is shrinking, and lower-latitude species like Pacific cod and pollock are increasingly found at higher-latitude areas, as University of Alaska Fairbanks-led research has detailed. Borealization is happening on land, too, with woody plants growing farther north and animal populations shifting.

For Bering Sea snow crab, which in 2021 dwindled to the lowest abundance of adults observed in the 50-year record, the crash took multiple steps.

The low abundance in 2021 followed what was a record-high population of crab surveyed in 2018. Dramatic increases in ocean conditions forced those snow crabs into a smaller area, said Gordon Kruze, a professor emeritus at UAF’s College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences. The higher temperatures, combined with a much denser population, increased crab metabolism — so much so that the crabs’ caloric needs in some cases quadrupled, “leading to mass starvation,” Kruze said.

The concurrent crash of red king crab in the Bristol Bay region was also devastating economically, but it is not unprecedented. For the second year in a row, no harvests of that iconic Alaska species will be allowed. It is not the first such closure; the harvest was also barred for two consecutive years in the mid-1990s.

Between the snow crab and red king crab closures, losses are not just the nearly $300 million in foregone direct payments that the state has calculated, said Scott Goodman, executive director of the Bering Sea Fisheries Research Foundation. Losses probably amount to at least $1 billion when all multipliers are considered, “which really paints a bleak picture for the industry, and really any strategies to get through and find ways to help here are complicated,” Goodman said at the symposium.

“The reality in Alaska is that major plants that process crab are closing,” he said. “The reality at the community level is, impacts are extreme. Entire fleets are tied up.”

One ongoing project, though, offers a glimpse of hope that human intervention could restore the populations in the future.

Chris Long, a scientist working at the NOAA Alaska Fisheries Science Center laboratory in Kodiak, has been experimenting for several years with projects that might show how to enhance natural crab stocks with hatchery-raised larvae. Much of his work focuses on red king crab in Kodiak, a region  in Kodiak, a region where the once-thriving king crab fishery crashed in the 1980s and never recovered.

In experiments so far, very few of the larvae have survived after being spread in the water, at best about 2%, he said in his presentation at the symposium. However, that survival rate is not much different from what happens in the wild, where crab larvae are tempting and ideal food for bigger fish.

Legislation passed last session may turn out to help make mariculture-assisted crab fisheries a reality, Long said. The law, House Bill 41, expanded authorizations for nonprofit hatcheries, adding various types of shellfish to the suite of species that those organizations will be allowed to grow, and it created a framework for the state to regulate cultivation of those shellfish.

If the process works, crab enhancement projects are more likely to get industry funding, thanks to the new legislation, Long said.

Whether crab enhancement will be successful is, for now, an unanswered question. Future success might depend on precise local conditions, Long said. “In one place, crab enhancement might work. But in another place, you’re putting a bunch of expensive fish food into the ocean,” he said.

This story originally appeared in the Alaska Beacon and is republished here with permission.

Local governments around Southeast Alaska are speaking out against a lawsuit that threatens to shut down trolling for king salmon across the region this year. The lawsuit aims to protect an endangered population of orcas in Washington state.

Ketchikan, Wrangell and Petersburg are set to join a growing chorus of Alaska voices highlighting the impact the suit could have on the region’s fishing fleet.

The lawsuit from the Washington state-based Wild Fish Conservancy centers on an endangered Puget Sound population of orcas known as Southern Resident killer whales.

Killer whales eat salmon — especially big, meaty king salmon — and the conservation group argues federal officials haven’t properly accounted for the impact the Southeast king salmon fishery has on the Puget Sound orcas.

Late last year, a federal judge issued a report that threatens to close the Southeast king salmon fishery until the National Marine Fisheries Service comes up with a fix.

So right now, the region’s 1,800 trollers are facing an uncertain future, says Alaska Trollers Association Executive Director Amy Daugherty.

“Our fleet is basically waiting to hear if they can gear up,” she said in a phone interview Friday.

The winter king salmon fishery is currently underway. The summer king fishery typically opens July 1. She says king salmon trolling is a $29 million chunk of the economy — and almost three times as much when you consider related economic activity like fish processors.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy said on Talk of Alaska last month that the state would fight the pending ruling if necessary. Sitka’s local government also adopted a resolution opposing the lawsuit.

And later this month, borough assemblies in Ketchikan, Wrangell and Petersburg will consider adopting resolutions of their own opposing a chinook shutdown.

Ketchikan Gateway Borough Assembly member Glen Thompson is co-sponsoring one of the measures.

“It’s urgent for the borough to at least take a political stand saying we oppose the shutdown of our troll industry, and we need to work through this and resolve the issue,” Thompson said by phone Friday.

He says a chinook shutdown would have ripple effects throughout the fleet — and the region’s economy.

“That’s the one that kind of drives everything else. That’s the money fish. That’s the headliner,” Thompson said. “If you shut down the chinook fishery, it really has a major impact on all the troll fisheries as well.”

Fellow Ketchikan co-sponsor Austin Otos says the suit unfairly targets the Alaska fishing fleet. In a statement, Otos says the outside group has “little to no knowledge about how Alaska manages (its) state fisheries.” He says trolling is “sustainable” and “has little impact on Puget Sound fisheries.”

“Troll permitted Chinook catch through the (U.S.-Canada) salmon treaty has declined over the past years, and completely closing it due to killer whale populations in the Lower 48 would decimate our local economy,” Otos wrote.

Fishermen, processors, local governments and community members all over Southeast are pitching in cash to help the Alaska Trollers Association in the fight. Daugherty says Sitka, Petersburg, Pelican, Port Alexander and Craig have collectively contributed thousands, and Sitka’s assembly is considering another $25,000 contribution.

“We are doing everything we can to keep our fishery viable and our fishermen on the water. We realize the importance to the small Southeast economies and the families,” Daugherty said. “Trolling is a small-boat fishery, a low-impact, hook-and-line, one-fish-at-a-time, and we’re very respectful of the habitat and the environment.”

Ketchikan isn’t currently considering a financial contribution of its own, but assembly members Otos and Thompson say they’re open to the idea.

Assemblies in Ketchikan and Petersburg are scheduled to vote on their measures on Monday. Wrangell’s assembly will consider the resolution on Feb. 14.

Ketchikan’s Borough Assembly meets at 5:30 p.m. Monday in the White Cliff Building on First Avenue. The full agenda is available online. The meeting is broadcast on local cable channels and the borough’s website.

CoastAlaska’s Angela Denning contributed reporting