Wildlife

The Tongass Advisory Committee ended a 16-month series of meetings Thursday, formally completing its effort to advise the Tongass National Forest in a transition from old to young growth logging.

The committee met in Ketchikan last week to finalize its recommendations to the U.S. Forest Service and review the agency’s draft Environmental Impact Statement for a forest plan amendment.

The plan would transition the Tongass to second-growth logging in 16 years.

Les Cronk is a committee co-chair and a timber industry representative. He said the committee was happy with the Forest Service’s use of their recommendations in the agency’s preferred alternative.

“As far as our recommendations for the transition, we were. It fell short in certain areas when it came to the implementation and monitoring that we also recommended, so we have a few other recommendations,” Cronk said. “But as far as what needed to go into the plan amendment, yes.”

The committee began meeting in August 2014. Its charter ends in February. But Andrew Thoms, a conservation representative on the committee, said they will stay involved.

“We’re going to keep working together with the Forest Service, and other people that are on the TAC, to see that the implementation recommendations and the plan are put together in a way that is successful moving forward,” Thoms said.

Committee members are still working on a plan for a multi-stakeholder collaborative to provide input as the transition is implemented.

At the end of the meeting, committee members agreed the process was challenging, but that it went well.

Cronk said committee members had a lot of concerns at the beginning, but they were committed to finding a solution.

“People stayed at the table and worked through, compromised, and really did a commendable job of handling a very difficult topic: to come up with a unanimous consensus on how to achieve, hopefully, a positive transition for the Tongass,” Cronk said.

The Tongass Advisory Committee is made up of representatives from local government, Native tribes, the timber industry, environmental organizations and other forest users.

The draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Tongass forest plan amendment is open for public comment through Feb. 22.

What many Americans consider to be a cute, back-floating mammal is a pest, even a thief, to some Southeast Alaskan fishermen.

Humans and sea otters enjoy consuming the same bottom-dwelling seafood: Dungeness crabs, clams, sea cucumbers and urchins.

But in some areas these organisms have completely disappeared, according to Phil Doherty, director of the Southeast Alaska Regional Dive Fisheries Association (SARDFA).

This has increased competition between dive fishermen and sea otters.

Harriet Wadley has been a commercial sea cucumber diver for 27 years. She dove for abalone until the dive fishery closed in 1996.

“We had an abalone fishery here until the otters ate us out of it,” she said. “And then I switched about the time that the abalone fishery was dying, the sea cucumbers started up.”

A paper published by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in 2014 says the sea otter population is growing by 12 to 14 percent a year, which equates to 3,000 more animals in 2015 than 2014. And more otters mean an expansion of their range.

Before reintroduced in the 1960s sea otters were absent in Southeast for over a century, driven to extinction by the Russian fur trade.

But now they seem to have the leading edge on humans.

In 2011, a study by SARDFA documented $22.4 million dollar losses to commercial fisheries as a direct result of predation by otters.

“We harvest at a very, very low rate: 2-4% of the population of the species per year.  And in areas where sea otters have expanded into they eat just about everything,” Doherty said.

Many sea cucumber, clam and urchin dive fishing areas have been closed to commercial fishing because sea otters have eaten the areas bare, he said.

It wasn’t easy starting out as a female fisherman, Wadley said. She was inexperienced — green but eager. A diver with a good reputation eventually agreed to take her out for abalone.

“I ended up getting more poundage than the rest of the divers put together,” she said.

Now Wadley owns her own 45-foot boat named “Vulcan.” She has a sea cucumber quota and manages her own personal dive fishing operation. Wadley and one other person take her boat out for seven-hour fishery openings.

She swims to the ocean bottom with four empty bags and a tank of oxygen on her back. Her partner waits on the boat. He will pull up the heavy bags packed with cucumbers.

“Boy, once you get underwater, I mean, it’s beautiful down there,” Wadley said.

But the last few times she went out, cucumbers were pretty “skinny.”

“When you get into an area where there are sea otters it looks like a World War II bombed out zone,” she said. “There’s dust everywhere. They do a lot of damage to the bottom.”

Wadley said sea otters like abalone best, so that fishery closed first. Next it was urchins, and then cucumbers. Geoduck clams are next, she said.

“They’re totally eating us out of house and home.”

The Southeast Alaska Regional Dive Fisheries Association (SARDFA) supports legislation to reduce sea otter numbers by incentivizing harvests by Alaska Natives.

But in 2014 another fishing group, the Southeast Herring Conservation Alliance (SHCA), wrote in a public comment that the herring fishery benefited from a greater abundance of sea otters.

SHCA wrote that an increase in sea otter harvest by Natives could trickle down to a reduction in herring spawning habitat, in turn reducing herring abundance.

Federal law prohibits hunting of marine mammals in American waters; Alaska Native subsistence hunters are exempt from the law.

According to U.S. Fish and Wildlife documents, 1,137 sea otters were harvested statewide this year.

177 sea otters were reportedly taken in Sitka, down from 349 animals in 2014 and 550 in 2013. In the past, Sitka has documented more harvested otters than any other city in the state. Over the last 25 years, Hoonah reported less than a third of the harvest by Sitka, and Ketchikan a sixth.

But this year, Hoonah’s reported harvest more than tripled from 49 sea otters in 2014 to 180 animals so far in 2015.

Nathan Soboleff is a contracted sea otter tagger for Fish and Wildlife in Juneau.  He is also a Tlingit-Haida marine mammal hunter of the Raven-Dog Salmon clan.

Soboleff said that after a hunt, Natives have 30 days to bring the otter’s hide and skull to an office for tagging. To legally document the animal, he places a tag through the nose of the hide.  He also removes a pre-molar tooth from the skull and keeps it for research.

“It’s like a growth ring on a tree. So they will sand down the tooth and read the growth rings on them,” Soboleff said.

In 2011 and 2013, bills were introduced by federal and state lawmakers to create incentives for Natives to hunt more sea otters. The proposed bills were supporting the declining commercial Dungeness crab and dive fisheries.

In 2013, state Sen. Bert Stedman, (R-Sitka), introduced a bill proposing a $100 bounty for each sea otter harvested by an Alaska Native.

The bill did not pass.

Mike Miller, chair of the Indigenous People’s Council for Marine Mammals (IPCoMM), said that Natives were mostly opposed to the bounty bill.

Miller, who lives in Sitka, said his group supports legislation that encourages economic opportunity for Native communities, but “the one thing we didn’t want to do was inadvertently to change from that goal to a predator control issue which is more just about getting rid of the animal.”

But Phil Doherty, SARDFA, said that Native subsistence and commercial fishing interests aligned.

“It is a win-win,” he said.

According to Doherty, the bill proposal was about “trying to help the Native hunters pay for some of their expenses.”

But Miller said that the enacted bill could have caused a flood in the market of sea otter pelts, which would drive their value down and ultimately harm Native communities.

During state legislative session last February, minutes report Senator Stedman said, “Otters continue to proliferate and they are more invasive than humans.”

He did not respond to requests for comment.

According to Doherty, the fate of Southeast dive fisheries lies in the hands of politicians in Washington, tied up in the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Harriet Wadley said she doesn’t understand why the government prohibits hunting of sea otters by non-Natives.

“We control every other population: deer, bear, wolves. We keep every population in control and under balance,” she said. “Why is it because this creature is cute that we can’t maintain a balance and open up a hunting season on them?”

Wadley estimates the sea cucumber fishery has six years of life left if nothing is done about otters.

After that, she says she’ll be done diving.

Wadley said she doesn’t know what will come next. Maybe winter kings, or perhaps vacation.

Crystal. Lion’s mane. Sea nettle. Moon. Comb. The Big Red. These are some of the species of jellyfish that live in Southeast’s waters.

Eric Lunde, a scuba diver in Ketchikan, describes one he encountered:

“It was this gelatinous moon-like greyish orb with just a little bit of a translucent skirt. It was just very still, drifting in the water.”

A California researcher is incorporating public observations like these, posted on jellywatch.org, into his research.

Dr. Steven Haddock from the University of California, Santa Cruz said jellyfish can survive, even thrive through cold and dark Alaska winters. He said a common perception people have of jellyfish is that they “like warmer water for some reason. But in Alaska, the species like the lion’s mane, are really restricted to colder water.”

Haddock researches marine bioluminescence, zooplankton and jellyfish in the deep sea, off the California coast. But he typically doesn’t study nearshore jellies.

He hopes citizen science data will help paint the big picture of jellyfish blooms across the planet.

“We can actually get a lot of insight into what’s happening on a large scale with regard to jellyfish abundances,” Haddock said.

His citizen science project has two main objectives. One goal is to document a wider ocean range than he, the scientist, can observe on his own.

“Citizen science in general is valuable because it is multiplied with such large numbers,” he said.

Haddock said that his research boat charters are expensive and he can only be out on the water for a limited period of time.

Meanwhile people worldwide experience the ocean every day, and make valuable observations.

“To tap into that pool of citizen scientists has huge advantages for the data set,” he said.

While some hypotheses contend that a warmer climate has increased jelly blooms, Haddock said more widespread data are needed to determine if these theories are accurate.

Citizen science research also has educational benefits. Haddock hopes it will help combat a misconception that jellyfish are evil invaders of the ocean.

He said that posts to his website that include a photo are useful, but documenting an observation without a photograph is better than no posting at all.

Haddock described the value of one posting by a Ketchikan diver:

“He gave a perfect description. So he didn’t have a photo, but he gave a description of this jelly that sounds like a deep-sea species that we discovered here in Monterey, and a colleague of mine just described it recently,”Haddock said. “It’s called Tiburonia. We call it ‘The Big Red’ because it’s like the size of a beach ball. So this guy diving said ‘I feel like I’m reporting a big-foot sighting.’”

He added: “I think it actually could be a sighting of this relatively newly discovered deep-sea species that he saw just while scuba diving off Ketchikan.”

Haddock only knows this citizen scientist by Jellywatch username, yet he reported a valuable observation to the scientific community.

What Haddock really needs are observations of “no jellyfish sighted,” posted on his website. He said “clean seas reports” give documented sightings greater research validity. Haddock wants to know whether a lack of postings means an actual deficit of jellyfish, or just a lack of human observations. Seeing no jellyfish is just as significant as seeing many.

The annual run of lamprey is headed up the Yukon River. Diverse commercial markets for the snake-like creature have opened up over the past few years but catching them can be tricky.

To catch a Yukon River lamprey, you need good, solid river ice, and perfect timing.

For almost 15 years, Kwik’pak Fisheries has tried to operate a commercial lamprey fishery on lower Yukon sometime around Thanksgiving, but general manager Jack Schultheis says more than other fisheries, this one is hit or miss.

“It’s not a run like salmon that goes on for days or weeks. The lamprey run goes on for hours, and then that’s it,” he said.

Lamprey swim upriver to spawn.  But unlike salmon, lamprey bunch together in one big horde as they move upriver, and run under the cover of ice.

Fishermen at Mountain Village started the commercial lamprey harvest on Nov. 17, when a few thousand pounds of lamprey were taken.  That harvest was curtailed by a lack of adequate river ice to give fishermen access to the main channel, according to Schultheis.

Kwik’pak is expecting a stronger harvest of lamprey from the village of Grayling sometime in the next few days.

The unpredictable nature of the lamprey harvest makes it hard to commercialize, according to Schultheis, because buyers want a steady supply year after year.  Nevertheless, Yukon River lamprey gets shipped far and wide for a variety of purposes.

“Some of them go to Europe, some of them go to Asia, and some of them go into the bait market in the lower 48,” Schultheis said. “And that all hinges on how much volume we get.  When we get a lot of lamprey, then it is feasible to ship overseas – that’s in 20,000 pound increments.  It’s gotta be a really good year to get that kind of volume.”

By those standards, 2014 was a very good year, with just over 40,000 pounds of lamprey sold commercially.

The parasitic creatures are typically caught with long handled dip nets, or impaled on long poles fixed with spikes.

Lamprey also have a long history of subsistence use in certain villages, where they are commonly referred to as eels. Nearly half of their body mass is fat, making them a good high-energy food for sled dogs. As human food, they are often smoked and jarred. And their skins can be used to make bags or even parkas.

While their average size is decreasing and 500-pounders are rare today, new research suggests Pacific halibut may adapt favorably to increased ocean temperatures.

Greenland halibut may not be so lucky.

Dr. Cathleen Vestfals, Oregon State University, presented her Ph.D. research at the UAF School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences Juneau Fisheries Seminar recently.

Vestfals researched the life cycles of two different halibut species that reside in the Eastern Bering Sea: Pacific halibut and Greenland halibut. Both are large flatfish, have big mouths lined with sharp teeth and inhabit some of the same areas.

Pacific halibut get much larger than Greenland halibut do: 8 feet long compared to 4 feet. Pacific halibut are mottled green on top and white on their bottom-facing side. Greenland halibut are blackish purple on top, iridescent yellow-green on their underside.

And they may respond differently to climate change.

For her research, Vestfals compared the success of the two flatfish species in past warm and cold years.

Pacific halibut live from California, north through the Bering Sea and across the Pacific to Japan. Due to the extent of their southern range, Pacific halibut may continue to breed and disperse successfully if the ocean becomes a few degrees warmer.

“We would expect that they would do really well under warming conditions. Their habitat is likely going to expand under warming scenarios,” Vestfals said.

Greenland halibut, on the other hand, occupy only circumpolar waters. If the ocean warms by a few degrees, their cold water habitat may contract northward.  According to Vestfals, fisheries scientists already “have noticed a northward shift in species and changes in species assemblages in response to warming.”

So global warming could mean fewer Greenland halibut.

According to Vestfals, Pacific halibut “have a better chance than Greenland halibut would to make it.”

To follow flatfish, visit the Flatfish Fan Club Facebook page Vestfals made.

The Innoko Flats wood bison herd is going into its first winter in the wild.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game transported 130 wood bison to Shageluk by air and barge earlier this year, in an effort to reintroduce the species to Alaska.

Fish and Game Wood Bison Project Leader Tom Seaton reports that the vast majority of the herd is staying close to where they were originally released.

“As of Friday, there was a group about 10 miles north of Shageluk and another group about 10 miles south of Shageluk. And then there are two more groups kind of spread out between Holy Cross and Shageluk, so kind of a north-south transect through that whole flats area.”

Nevertheless, some brave bison have broken away from the herd to scout out new habitat. A young bull was sighted close to Galena in September – more than 150 miles from the release site. And a lone cow ventured down to the Kuskokwim River and back – a round trip of almost 180 miles.

Overall, Seaton feels like the bison reintroduction has gone very well, with a normal rate of mortality. But the real test of their survivability is coming up.

“Really, winter is going to be the true test. Especially late winter deep snows. If we could avoid late winter deep snows just with luck we are going to go through the winter pretty well. If we get really deep snows late this winter when the bison are still learning their habitat, I think we could have some difficulty.”

Deep snow would make it harder for the bison to get to the grasses and plants that they need to eat all winter long.

There has been no evidence of bison deaths by predation or disease thus far.

Based on experiences with reintroducing wood bison elsewhere, Seaton predicts that it will take predators such as wolves and bears a few more years to figure out how to take down a bison, and already he has seen bison and bears grazing in close proximity without incident.

The wood bison are being monitored by airplane on a regular basis, and a few bison were fitted with satellite trackers that allow biologists to record their movement by computer.