The Alaska Department of Fish and Game is forecasting 30,056 tons of herring will be available for harvest in next spring's Togiak sac roe fishery.
That's a gigantic number, far higher than this year's quota of 21,622 tons. The industry, however, took only 17,226 tons.
Read the department's 2013 Togiak herring forecast here.
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6 comments:
can anyone say 50 bucks a ton
I heard that the BOF will be considering whether to make herring a 'forage' fish this coming spring. Maybe there is a connection between the lack of Chinooks in western Alaska and the huge harvest of herring that takes place in Togiak. It is hardly worth the effort at today's prices to fish for herring in Togiak. One small Chinook is worth more than a ton of herring, that is if you can find it. The Dept. better wake up and start figuring out just how valuable herring are to the rest of the creatures living under and above the water. We are on a slow but certain decline which if it is not checked will take us to the tipping point. We can then be put in the column of other Chinook fisheries that once were but are no more.
Uh, is this the same model the department used to forecast the "huge" herring return to Sitka this past spring that turned into such a dud???
Its coming to be known as the RED HERRING model.
Get out there and support herring as a forage fish measure and end all commercial herring fisheries in Alaska now!
The trouble with the seak forecast method is it does not account for winter mortality. It only calculates the post spawn biomass, so it underforcasts on the upswing and over forcasts on the downswing of stocks. They need to be able to take inseason estimates into consideration to account for winter mortality. The system of forecasting the spawned biomass is accurate.
ADF&G need to wake up and stop the madness on these huge 30,000 ton quotas, what good is it if you fish for nothing 50- $75 a ton is nothing!and for those who will fish for these prices is a fool,because the world value,japan market, doesn't drop due to you fishing for nothing, it just drops the price for every other US herring fishery.Does the market support the amount of this quota?no,it softens the whole industry,just because it's there doesn't meen it should be harvested.
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