Forecast is for Strong Summer Chum Harvest on Lower Yukon

By Margaret Bauman

A dreary Chinook forecast aside, fishermen on the Lower Yukon River are anticipating a robust run of oil-rich summer chum salmon to fill market orders both domestically and in Europe.

“We have good markets,” said Jack Schultheis, sales manager for Kwik’Pak, at Emmonak, a subsidiary of the Yukon Delta Fisheries Development Association. The big question was how well buyers in England would respond to change, what with the state of Alaska embracing Global Trust over the Marine Stewardship Council to conduct third party certification of Alaska salmon fisheries.

Schultheis said in an interview June 4 that he expected to have 500 commercial fishing permit holders from the Lower Yukon River beginning to deliver their harvest once the fishery opened in late June.

That harvest, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, is projected at a potential 500,000 to one million salmon. The fall chum surplus potentially available for commercial harvest is anticipated at 500,000 to 700,000 fish. Schultheis said he anticipates prices to fishermen will be about the same as those paid in 2011, 75 cents a pound for summer chum and one dollar a pound for fall chum.

No directed harvest of king salmon was anticipated.

Alaska’s wild salmon certification through the Marine Stewardship Council ends in October, and the Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation has selected Global Trust to do its third party certification after that. AFDF made that decision in January after nine processors, including Kwik’Pak decided to pull the stopper on funds for third party certification through MSC, verifying that theirs is a sustainable fishery that adheres to best practices.

Alaska processors have expressed much concern over the past few years over the need to distinguish Alaska’s wild seafood from other wild seafood certified by MSC, to maintain the Alaska brand from a state where sustainability of seafood is mandated in the state constitution.

In April, the Purse Seine Vessel Owners Association in Seattle, which represents many fishing vessel owners operating on the West Coast and in Alaska, opted to be the new MSC client for certification of Alaska’s salmon fisheries.

Alaska Fish and Game Commissioner Cora Campbell has defended the state’s decision to offer sustainable salmon certification through Ireland-based Global Trust, saying there was great concern over one party seeking control of the certification process. Campbell did not mention either MSC or Global Trust in her comments made during the European Seafood Exposition in Brussels, Belgium.

Kwik’Pak has worked hard to establish good markets both domestically and in Japan, as well as Europe, including the United Kingdom.

The majority of its headed and gutted fish are sold domestically and in Japan, while a lot of chum fillets are told in Europe and US markets. In the UK, the filets go to grocery stores, and the company Kwik’Pak works with has done a tremendous job supporting Alaska salmon, Schultheis said.

“They have Alaska salmon in the three largest groceries in the UK and they have really marketed and pushed the fish really hard in those grocery stores. The volume of product, fresh frozen product, has increased a couple hundred percent over five years,” he said. “They market this fish, got shelf space for it.”

The task before Kwik’Pak now is convincing these UK buyers that third party certification by Global Trust, which has in fact worked to certify fisheries for MSC, provides the same level of certification as MSC.

Eco-labels are very strong in the UK, on fish, eggs and meat, Schultheis said.

Years back, when sustainability became a big issue, the large grocery chains of the UK poured millions of dollars into promoting the MSC policy. Now Kwik’Pak is having individual meetings with its UK buyers to explain that the seafood standards that must be met for certification by Global Trust are equal to those of MSC.

“If the state (of Alaska) says this is the policy, I’m going to abide by that,” he said.

“I consider it to be a state policy that the state has decided to drop out of the MSC program. Regardless of what I personally think, sustainability is the state policy and I am supporting the state in that decision,” he said. Margaret Bauman can be reached at margieb42@mtaonline.net.

Bristol Bay Harvest Nears 20 Million Salmon

What a difference a week makes.

From July 6 to July 13, Alaska’s wild salmon commercial harvest jumped from 22,249,000 to 38,937,000 fish, with the catch of sockeyes alone edging toward 27.5 million fish, and climbing.

In Bristol Bay, where the forecast was for a potential 2012 harvest of 21.76 million sockeye, the catch reached 19.4 million fish, including 18,979,000 reds, 380,000 chum and 14,000 kings.

Those still on the grounds July 16 said they were still getting a substantial number of sockeyes to deliver to the processors’ tenders, and the overall harvest could still top 20 million sockeyes.

Through July 13, the date the state issued its last Bristol Bay daily run summary for the season, the total sockeye run in the bay reached 26.9 million fish, compared with a forecast of 32.23 million fish, and the harvest reached 19.2 million reds, compared to the preseason forecast of 21.74 million reds.

On the Lower Yukon River, the harvest had reached 176,000 chum salmon by July 13.

“Once we got fishing, there were plenty of fish,” said Kwik’Pak’s Jack Schultheis. “But basically a million fish went by that were harvestable and that hurt. That’s what really took it out of us. If we could have fished on those chums, everything would be fine on economics. It was not being able to fish on those chums because of the low king returns,” he said. “Those one million fish that went by represent about $8 million to the economy of the Lower Yukon.”

“We basically put in $1 million instead of $8 million.”

Schultheis said he is hopeful that they can make up for the fish made unavailable during the summer run with the fall run of chum salmon, which began July 16.

In Prince William Sound, the Copper River catch rose slightly to 1,787,000 fish, including 1,746,000 reds, 28,000 chum and 11,000 king salmon. Counting other districts, Prince William Sound’s overall harvest stood at nearly 10 million salmon, including 3.3 million reds, 2.2 million chum, 4.4 million pink and 12,000 kings.

The harvest on the Alaska Peninsula, mainly the South Peninsula, rose to 3,034,000 salmon of all species, including some 2.296,000 sockeye, 452.000 chum, 275,000 pink and 9,000 kings.

At Kodiak the harvest rose to 1.5 million salmon, with the overall catch at 1,046 000 reds, 341,000 chum, 175,000 pink and 5,000 kings.

In Southeast Alaska, the harvest also rose significantly, to 2,738,000 fish, including 2,102,000 chum, 247,000 pink, 184,000 sockeye, 109,000 kings and 97,000 silvers.

Copper Makes Salmon Vulnerable to Predators

A Washington State University researcher says in a new report in the journal Ecological Applications that minute amounts of copper from mining operations can affect salmon in a way the results in them being eaten easily by predators.

Jenifer McIntyre, a postdoctoral research associate in WSU’s Puyallup Research and Extension Center, said she found the metal affects salmon’s sense of smell so much that they won’t detect a compound that ordinarily alerts them to be still and wary.

Her research was conducted for a University of Washington doctorate with colleagues at UW and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“My paper builds off of a large body of literature on this topic, mostly led by NOAA scientists,” she said in an interview July 16.

Earlier research showed that copper is neurotoxic to a fish’s sense of smell. Other research showed that when a salmon’s sense of smell is affected, its behavior changes.

McIntyre put the two together, exposing juvenile coho salmon to varying amounts of copper and placing them in tanks with cutthroat trout, a common predator.

The results, she reported, were striking.

Salmon are attuned to smell a substance called Schreckstoff, German for “scary stuff,” which is released when a fish is physically damaged, alerting nearby fish to the predator’s presence.

In her experiments, conducted in a four-foot-diameter tank, fish that were not exposed to copper would freeze in the presence of Schreckstoff, making it harder for motion-sensitive predators to detect them. On average, half a minute would go by before they were attacked, McIntyre said.

By contrast, salmon in water with just five parts of copper per billion failed to detect the Schreckstoff, kept swimming, and were attacked in about five seconds, she said.

The unwary exposed fish were also more likely to be killed in the attack, being captured 30 percent of the time on the first strike. Unexposed fish managed to escape the first strike nearly nine times out of ten, most likely because they were already wary and poised to take evasive action.

McIntyre also noticed that the behavior of predators was the same whether or not they had been exposed to copper.

Researchers Find Decreasing Trends in Salmon Spawning

A new study of productivity of 64 sockeye salmon populations concludes that the number of adult sockeye salmon produced per spawner has been decreasing over the last decade or more along the West Coast of North America.

The report by Randall Peterman and Brigitte Dorner was published recently in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences. It says that this widespread decrease in productivity, from Washington state north through British Columbia and Southeast Alaska, has important implications for management of salmon stocks and requires research into its potential causes to help determine future management strategies.

Peterman is a professor and Canada research chair in fisheries risk assessment and management at Simon Fraser University’s School of Resource and Environmental Management, in Burnaby, British Columbia.

He noted in an email response to a query on the study that biologists in several fisheries management agencies, including the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, provided data to the researchers.

Peterman said it is possible that the downward trends in productivity across the sockeye stocks south of central Alaska are the result of a variety of causes, such as freshwater habitat degradation or contaminants, that have each independently affected many small regions. Still, he said the large spatial extent of similar time trends in productivity for over 25 stocks has occurred in both relatively pristine and heavily disturbed habitats.

This, he said, suggests that shared mechanisms are a more likely explanation, such as high mortality owing to predators, pathogens or poor food supply across Washington, British Columbia, Southeast Alaska and the Yakutat region of Alaska.

Peterson and Dorner analyzed productivity in 64 sockeye salmon populations. They found that the decline in productivity of Fraser River sockeye salmon in British Columbia was not unique to that river system, and that productivity has also declined rapidly in many other populations since the 1990s.

The authors also found that the region with downward trends in productivity has spread further north over the past two decade, an observation they said is consistent with large-scale changes in climate-driver oceanographic patterns that were previously implicated as drivers of sockeye productivity.

The study, “A widespread decrease in productivity of sockeye salmon populations in western North America,” appears in the August issue of Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences.

The online link to the study is at http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/F2012-063

Deadline Approaching to Comment on Bristol Bay Draft Watershed Assessment

With a peer review panel set to meet Aug. 7-9 in Anchorage to discuss a draft watershed assessment on large-scale mining in Southwest Alaska, the Environmental Protection Agency is receiving plenty of public comment.

Through July 12, the EPA said the agency received some 39,500 public comments.

Comments are being accepted through July 23.

Information on the peer review panel and how the public can sign up to participate is online at https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2012/07/06/2012-16441/notice-of-the-peer-review-meeting-for-epas-draft-report-entitled-an-assessment-of-potential-mining.

The public is invited to observe the panel deliberations in Anchorage on the first two days, Aug. 7-8, and to make oral comments to the peer review panel on Aug. 7. Anyone planning to comment or simply come to observe these sessions must register online by July 23.

Proponents of the massive copper, gold and molybdenum Pebble Mine at the headwaters of the Bristol Bay watershed had urged the EPA to extend the deadline for comments, saying that there had been enough time given for people to read it and submit comments.

Opponents of the mine, however, praised the EPA for its decision to stay on track with the 60-day pubic comment period.

Commercial Fishermen for Bristol Bay, a nationwide coalition of nearly 100 fishing industry organizations and support businesses representing thousands of commercial fishermen, has issued a statement of support for the EPA.

The Pebble Limited Partnership, which hopes to submit permit applications to build the mine later this year, issued a statement July 16 urging those involved in resource development in Alaska to object to the draft watershed assessment, which it labeled “this poorly crafted document.” The partnership has also criticized the document as rushed, inaccurate and speculative in nature.”

Oregon Fisheries Net More Value in 2011 Harvest, prices were up for most commercial fishermen

More seafood, far more value.

 That sums up the 2011 season for most Oregon fisheries, according to Oregon Department of Agriculture (ODA) officials and a consortium of four Oregon seafood commissions.

Nick Furman, director of Seafood Oregon – a consortium featuring the Oregon Dungeness Crab Commission (ODCC), Oregon Trawl Commission (OTC), Oregon Salmon Commission (OCS) and Oregon Albacore Commission (OAC) – said the state’s commercial seafood and fishing industry had an outstanding year, in fact the best in 23 years, with overall harvest value exceeding $145 million for all Oregon fisheries.

Both the amounts harvested (285 million pounds of fish and shellfish, up substantially from 216 million pounds in 2010) and dollar value were the best in nearly three decades. But the real key, at least for fishermen’s economic survival, lies in the dollar value.

“We remind fishermen that it’s not the pounds of fish that you take to the bank,” Furman noted. “It’s the dollars you take to the bank.”

The influx gave the state’s struggling coastal communities a much-needed boost, say ODA marketing experts, who have worked diligently for years to promote Oregon seafood in various export markets.

Among them are the researchers with the Oregon State University (OSU) Extension Service, Oregon Sea Grant, and Hatfield Marine Science Center (HMSC), the university’s campus for research, education and outreach in marine and coastal sciences located in Newport’s South Beach district. With its annual budget of almost $46 million, 300 university, state and federal employees, and 150,000 visitors to the education outreach and free-choice learning center, HMSC plays a key role in Oregon’s coastal economy.

Much of the impact is in the seafood industry, where research efforts aim to keep seafood harvested off Oregon’s shore fresh, safe, plentiful and sustainable.

For example, food technologists developed a thin edible protective film to coat fish fillets and keep them fresh much longer. OSU researcher Jae Park has helped surimi – low-value fish processed into a high-value seafood product used to imitate crab and scallops – become an international commodity, which has helped revitalize fisheries in Oregon and beyond. And the Community Seafood Initiative (CSI) in Newport supports the commercial fishing industry and coastal communities by providing access to applied research and capital via a non-profit organization led by Executive Director Heather Mann and a nine-member board.

“We believe a knowledgeable industry is a powerful industry,” said Mann. “Listening to and providing seafood industry representatives and businesses with access to credible and accurate information allows them to not only better position themselves competitively, it also allows them to make proactive strategic decisions rather than reactionary choices.”

Among other things, CSI helps preserve seafood-related working waterfronts, offers value-added product development services, and operates the FishTrax program – a pioneer effort that uses an electronic fishing information system to deliver essential information to key markets and consumers.

Fishermen must still harvest and the prices must be right to make their efforts worthwhile.

Marketing experts consider the 2011 numbers even more impressive given the fact that Oregon fisheries are harvesting seafood in a widely recognized sustainable way. Four of those fisheries – Dungeness crab, albacore tuna, pink shrimp and Pacific whiting – have earned certification from the international Marine Stewardship Council, indicating they are well managed and environmentally neutral, thus ensuring sustainable harvests.

Many fishermen say Oregon’s territorial sea is the healthiest they’ve seen in years, perhaps decades.

“While the volume of fish coming in has increased, it hasn’t been at the expense of healthy fisheries and the stocks available,” said Furman. “All this speaks well for the health of the ocean, it speaks well for the management schemes presently in place that ensure we have sustainably-harvested stocks. The result is the increase in pounds of fish harvested and dollar value.”

The $145 million gleaned in 2011 easily bested 2010’s $105 million, and stood about 44 percent above the annual average for the past decade.

Most Oregon fisheries netted higher prices and had higher catches.

Pink shrimp fishermen finished with their best season since 1992, hauling in 48 million pounds of high-grade shrimp with a to-the-fleet value of $24.6 million. While the catch benefitted the fishermen and processors, it also supplied a growing demand for exports, bringing added revenue to coastal communities. With about three months still to go in the season, Dungeness crabbers have already netted $44 million as export demand in Asia boosted ex-vessel prices to “unheard of levels,” reaching a record-high average of $3.37 per pound, easily besting last year’s $2.30 average, said Furman.

“The big story right now is definitely price,” he added. “Oregon is doing something right, and it is represented by healthy stocks, good volume and prices that are going through the roof because of the global economy and worldwide demand for seafood.”

Price also boosted the fortunes of the albacore tuna fishery, which brought in an average haul of 9.5 million pounds, but fetched a 33-year high of $18.7 million as high demand drove market prices sky-high.

Not everyone prospered.

At 2.4 million pounds, salmon landings were well below expectations – even somewhat less than 2010, which was another dismal year for salmon trollers. Prices were slightly higher than 2010, but fishermen said they weren’t high enough to make up for lack of fish.

“Everyone was optimistic, but the fish simply didn’t show up as much as expected,” Furman said. “Last year was the first time in several years that trollers got to fish the Oregon coast for salmon.” This year, he noted, looks more promising, with higher harvest quotas and high fish numbers.


The sardine fishery also dropped, as Oregon landings were well below the norm, bringing a harvest value of $3.2 million – well below the $5.3 million in 2010.

Overall, however, 2011 proved quite profitable for Oregon fisheries ports and coastal communities, and Furman said they’re “seeing evidence of the same level of activity” in 2012.

Terry Dillman can be reached at tdwordwright@gmail.com

Bristol Bay Run Harvest Exceeds 17 Million Salmon

Cold, nasty weather in Bristol Bay notwithstanding, the famed run of wild sockeye salmon has arrived and by July 9, the commercial fleet had a cumulative season harvest of more than 17 million salmon.

That was a jump of nearly 6 million fish since July 6, when the Alaska Department of Fish and Game released its weekly preliminary harvest summary, which showed the Bristol Bay catch at 11,772,000 fish.

The Bristol Bay daily run summary showed that for July 9 alone, the harvest was 1,161,000 salmon, with the average sockeye per drift delivery at 677 in the Naknek-Kvichak district, 430 in Egegik, 204 for the Nushagak and 198 for Togiak. Information on the drift delivery in the Ugashik district was not posted.

Statewide through July 6, state biologists calculated the cumulative harvest at 22,249,000 wild Alaska salmon, up from a statewide total of 9,449,00 a week earlier.

The Lower Yukon River, where the commercial fleet is dependent on summer and fall chum salmon runs, was also having a very good week, with a catch of some 79,000 chum salmon, and by July 9, that harvest had jumped to some 155,100 chum.

State biologists said that the Pilot Station sonar summer chum salmon passage estimate through July 9 was about 1.9 million fish, well above the historical median of 1.2 million fish for that date.

Chum harvests also improved on the Kuskokwim River, where the cumulative harvest reached 17,000 chum and 4,000 king salmon.In Cook Inlet, the harvest rose to 230,000 reds, 14,000 chum and about 2,000 kings.

The Copper River harvest increased to 1.4 million fish, the bulk of them sockeyes, but also 23,000 chum and 11,000 kings.

For Cook Inlet, the harvest doubled to 246,000 salmon, the bulk of them sockeyes, while in Kodiak the salmon harvest increased by one million fish, including 3.6 million sockeyes, 720,000 chum, 341,000 pink and 14,000 kings.

In Southeast Alaska the cumulative harvest reached 1.3 million salmon of all species, including 1,037,000 chum, 115,000 reds, 61,000 Chinook, 30,000 pink and 27,000 silvers.