Getting ahead of the economic impacts that tend to accompany fisheries' closures is the basis of a new predictive model put together by a team of scientists from NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center (NFSC) and the University of Washington.
When fisheries shut down, entire communities suffer, the scientific team recognized, and oftentimes, funds doled out to help fishermen weathering rough patches arrive months after they are needed. Th… Read More
Chefs in the Canadian province of British Columbia have banded together to pressure the government to reduce the number of salmon farms off the province’s coast.
Spearheaded by environmental activist David Suzuki the group of over 50 chefs, many of them from high-profile restaurants in Vancouver, are encouraging officials not to renew the leases for 20 net pens that sit on the Broughton Archipelago, an important migratory path for wild-salm… Read More
Alaska Governor Bill Walker and other state officials sent a letter earlier in the month to the federal government to request a disaster declaration for the Kodiak-based Pacific cod fishery in the Gulf of Alaska.
The declaration would free up federal funds for people affected by low cod numbers in the gulf, where biologists turned up an 83 percent drop in the population from 2015, prompting the National Marine Fisheries Service to slash the… Read More
University of Washington fisheries researcher Ray Hilborn said that a new study using satellite data from industrial fishing vessels to map global fishing effort fails to provide any new insight, despite media reports indicating otherwise.
The study, published in Science in February, used messages transmitted between 2012 and 2016 from the automatic identification systems (AIS) of more than 70,000 industrial fishing vessels to create a glob… Read More
The Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute (ASMI) hosted its first ever all-female trade mission recently, with seven European seafood buyers touring Dutch Harbor, Alaska, home to one of the world’s most lucrative fishing ports.
The women represented companies that import some USD 60 million (EUR 48.9 million) in U.S. seafood to France, Germany, Lithuania, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom.
Hannah Lindoff, ASMI’s interna… Read More
Canada’s Fisheries Minister Dominic LeBlanc announced on Tuesday, 6 February, that the Canadian government is moving forward with proposed legislation for a CAD 284 million (USD 227 million, EUR 184 million) overhaul of the nation’s Fisheries Act.
According to CBC News, the legislation would include money to hire new officers to enforce stricter regulations and would free up government funds to rebuild depleted stocks.
The… Read More
Activists fighting a proposed gold and copper mine in Bristol Bay, Alaska breathed a sigh of relief on Friday, 26 January, when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) upheld an Obama-era declaration that the proposed Pebble Mine, which would sit in the watershed for the world’s biggest sockeye salmon run, could cause irreversible harm to area fisheries.
Fishermen, native groups, and conservationists fought against the mine proposal… Read More
NOAA Fisheries adopted in December two Endangered Species Act (ESA) recovery plans for three different species in the Snake River basin. The recovery plans, which NOAA is required to adopt by the ESA, have the goal of delisting regional spring and summer Chinook and steelhead as well as fall Chinook salmon.
NOAA had already adopted a recovery plan for regional sockeye salmon, which are protected by the ESA alongside the other three species target… Read More
Managers are considering lowering U.S. and Canadian West Coast halibut quotas on reports that current fishing levels in the Pacific Ocean could lead to declining stocks in the coming years.
Scientists monitoring the bottom fish for the International Pacific Halibut Commission (IPHC) found fewer younger halibut in Pacific waters from Alaska to California this year, meaning current fishing levels could deplete stocks.
According to new n… Read More
Tests on wastewater effluent from a farmed Atlantic salmon processing facility on British Colombia’s Vancouver Island have come up positive for a virus that can cause heart and skeletal disease in wild salmon.
Samples of the wastewater from the Brown’s Bay Packing Co. processing facility were tested at the Atlantic Veterinary College, where they were shown to contain piscine reovirus, or PRV, which has been linked to disease in … Read More
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