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Alaska commercial fishing news and notes
About me
- Deckboss
- I'm a journalist covering Alaska's commercial fishing industry. My real name is Wesley Loy. Reach me at wloy61@gmail.com.
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2022
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October
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- Big crab news for Kodiak
- This just in
- Peltola wants $250 million in crab disaster relief
- A fatality-free year for Alaska commercial fishing
- 'Prepared to fight'
- Crab industry's cry for help
- St. Paul to seek federal disaster relief
- USCG cutter aids injured fisherman in B.C. waters
- The continuing fight over Metlakatla's fishing rights
- Herring looking up in Prince William Sound
- A crab catastrophe
- A minimum age policy for halibut and sablefish
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October
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15 comments:
Small consolation: The Bering Sea Tanner crab season will open with a modest total allowable catch:
https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/static/applications/dcfnewsrelease/1440997158.pdf
We need to find a biologist on the planet. It's not a catastrophe, sockeye salmon smolts upon entering saltwater find a smorgasbord of plankton, insects, small crustaceans, squid and small fish. 90 million Bristol Bay sockeye eat a lot of Red King crab larvae, the big fish eat little fish. A female king crab, depending on her species and her age, will carry between 45,000 and 500,000 eggs. When they first hatch, the larvae resemble tiny shrimp. When the young crabs finally settle to the bottom, if they don't get caught for dinner first, they are about the size of a dime and are still very susceptible to predation. The larvae settle from July through early September, when the outmigration of billions of sockeye smolts are looking for a new food source.
Our ability to deplete this stock in such a short period of time amazes me. Basically, stocks were fished out within one generation. It would seem that the lessons learned from the boom and bust in the Kodiak crab fishery would have carried over to the Bering Sea stocks. Interestingly, the ADN article does not specify a cause for this collapse. A lack of effective management of ADFG's wild stocks has tragically resulted in unnecessary suffering for most of them.
4:38AM couldn't be more right: shut down that predatory menace up there in a place that's always been. Whoever that person is, should be Alaska's next Guv!
What accounts for the crab crash?
A motion the North Pacific Council passed yesterday says:
"Science indicates changes in the ecosystem and temperature as the primary driver of poor crab recruitment and low abundance."
Good that we've apparently ruled out other possibilities such as mismanagement, fishing pressure, bycatch, habitat degradation and handling mortality!
Read the motion here:
https://meetings.npfmc.org/CommentReview/DownloadFile?p=1f631d76-5e1f-4d3b-b36c-fa0509c60972.pdf&fileName=D2%20Council%20Motion%20BBRKC.pdf
Dropper chains on the Pollock nets. Couple of tough B seasons for the Pollock fleet. Lots of time scratching the bottom. For opilio anyways. They should have shut down red crab 5 years ago. Nothing to blame but greed and stupidity there.
Here's a statement Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers, a trade association, posted to Facebook:
"These are truly unprecedented and troubling times for Alaska's iconic crab fisheries and for the hard-working fishermen and communities that depend on them. For the second year in a row, the Bristol Bay red king crab fishery is closed. Paired with that, the Bering Sea snow crab fishery is closed for the first time ever. Second- and third-generation crab fishing families will go out of business due to the lack of meaningful protections by decision-makers to help crab stocks recover." — Jamie Goen, executive director of Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers
Ms. Goen's statement:
"Paired with that, the Bering Sea snow crab fishery is closed for the first time ever. Second- and third-generation crab fishing families will go out of business due to the lack of meaningful protections by decision-makers to help crab stocks recover."
Has me a bit perplexed.
Isn't ADFG's action of shutting down the fisheries an attempt to enact "meaningful protection?" What does her organization want...? If TACs were reduced preemptively years ago — I'm sure her group would've been crying then also.
Dunno. Just seems a bit contradictory to me.
King crab have been around for millions of years, they wouldn't have lasted all that time if they could not tolerate a few degrees of temperature change. It's mismanagement and they don't have the integrity to admit it.
Crabbers wanted bottom contact by trawlers addressed, but NPFMC didn't agree.
Busyness as usual, money talks and bs walks. They have the most $ and people in charge in their back pockets. Foreign owned fleet with name's American
Has anybody set pots at NOAA, and their National Marine Fisheries Service Headquarters
"...the agency paved the way for this collapse by engaging in sampling bias and data falsification, which inflated annual population estimates and led to a multi-year regime of ruinous overfishing..." Dr. C. Braxton Dew
"This stunning turnaround cannot be attributed to any natural phenomena but to blatant scientific obfuscation and falsification by NMFS, an Arm of NOAA."
When Noah built the Arc, he didn't buy a government study.
https://peer.org/alaska-red-king-crab-dethroned-by-scientific-fraud
What better way to get disaster relief money than to blame "global warming."
The entire situation is an embarrassment, people at ADFG should be fired.
Sockeye hopefully won't but can and have dropped to very little very quickly as well....they didn't figure it out either
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