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The 2024 commercial Tanner crab and golden king crab season in Southeast opens Feb. 17 at noon, and the registration deadline for both fisheries is Jan. 18. For the 2024 golden king crab season, fishermen will be required to call-in to the department every single day. Mandatory call-ins the day before to state what management area they plan to fish in is new this year, beginning Feb. 16. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) announced the guideline harvest level (GHL) in Registration...
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Alaska fishermen will be able to harvest red king crab for the first time in two years, offering a slight reprieve to the beleaguered fishery beset by low numbers likely exacerbated by climate change. There was no such rebound for snow crab, however, and that fishery will remain closed for a second straight year, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced earlier this month. “The Bristol Bay red king crab fishery for the prior two seasons were closed based on low abundance and particularly low abundance of mat...
Local fishing industry representatives met with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) in Petersburg last week looking for a Golden King Crab compromise. The department acknowledged frustrations voiced by the fishermen this year regarding management hindering the golden king harvest. King and Tanner Task Force (KTTF) meetings were organized to brainstorm and come to a common understanding. In the latest KTTF meeting held at the Petersburg Public Library on Sept. 28, the industry and the...
Golden king crabs appear to have returned to Frederick Sound en masse after years of low commercial harvests, but it remains to be seen how much crab will be up for grabs for fishermen next season. The commercial golden king crab fishery in Southeast, which typically opens in mid-February, is regulated by an annual recommended harvest strategy developed by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G). Under the harvest strategy, the department establishes a guideline harvest level (GHL) and a...
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game has closed the commercial red and blue king crab fishery for the 2023-2024 season, the sixth year in a row, citing stock survey numbers that remain well below the regulatory threshold. The survey estimated 119,000 pounds of legal male red king crab are available for harvest, significantly below the 200,000 pounds required to open the commercial fishery, said Adam Messmer, lead king/tanner crab biologist for ADFG. While that’s an improvement from last year, where the survey estimated 95,000 pounds, i...
Management failure of the Golden King Crab fishery To the Editor: I am one of 24 golden king crabbers in Petersburg. Our Petersburg fleet dominates the fishery and has relied heavily upon the golden crab resource in times of abundance. As the 2023 golden crab season comes to an end, Petersburg needs to know what really happened. The 2023 golden king crab GHL (Guideline Harvest Level) for Frederick Sound was set at 13,255 pounds by ADFG several months ago. Your fleet was very disappointed with the historically low number as we saw large numbers...
Less than five years ago, prospects appeared bright for Bering Sea crab fishers. Stocks were abundant and healthy, federal biologists said, and prices were near all-time highs. Now two dominant crab harvests have been canceled for lack of fish. For the first time, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in October canceled the 2022-2023 harvest of Bering Sea snow crab, and it also announced the second consecutive year of closure for another important harvest, that of Bristol Bay red king crab. What has happened between then and now? A sustained... Full story
SEATTLE (AP) — Alaska officials have canceled the fall Bristol Bay red king crab harvest, and for the first time, have also scrapped the winter harvest of smaller snow crab. The move is a double whammy to a fleet from Alaska, Washington and Oregon chasing Bering Sea crab in harvests that in 2016 grossed $280 million, The Seattle Times reported. The closures reflect conservation concerns about both crab species following bleak summer populations surveys. The decisions to shut down the snow crab and fall king crab harvests came after days of d...
March means more fishing boats are out on the water with the start of the Pacific halibut and sablefish (black cod) fisheries this past Sunday, followed by Alaska’s first big herring fishery at Sitka Sound. For halibut, the coastwide catch from waters ranging from the West Coast states to British Columbia to the far reaches of the Bering Sea was increased by 5.7% this year to 41.22 million pounds. Alaska always gets the lion’s share of the commercial halibut harvest, which for 2022 is 21.51 million pounds, a nearly 10% increase. Exp...
Frigid February fishing in Alaska features crabbing from the Panhandle to the Bering Sea, followed in March by halibut, black cod and herring. Southeast crabbers will drop pots for Tanners on Friday, and they’re expecting one of the best seasons ever. Fishery managers said they are seeing “historically high levels” of Tanners with good recruitment coming up from behind. The catch limit won’t be set until the fishery is underway but last year’s take was 1.27 million pounds (504,369 crabs), which weighed 2.5 pounds on average. Crabbers know they...
Kodiak fishermen are getting an advance price of $8.10 per pound for Tanner crab in the fishery that opened Jan. 15. High crab prices have led all other seafoods during the COVID-19 pandemic as buyers grab all they can to fill demand at buffet tables, restaurants and retail counters around the world. “Our strategy was to get a price before the season even started. It’s simply bad business to go fishing without a price,” said Peter Longrich, secretary of the 74-member Kodiak Crab Alliance Cooperative which negotiated the deal with local processo...
A hearing on seafood bycatch didn’t satisfy a bipartisan group of Alaska legislators at a meeting of the House Fisheries Committee on Nov. 15. The bycatch issue came up again this summer when all Yukon River salmon fisheries were canceled due to so few returning Chinook and chums. Along with ocean and climate impacts, villagers questioned the takes by huge trawlers that catch and process fish at sea. A presentation of the committee hearing by Glenn Merrill, regional administrator at NOAA Fisheries/Alaska, showed that in the 2019 Bering Sea p...
Alaska's Bering Sea crabbers are reeling from the devastating news that all major crab stocks are down substantially, based on summer survey results, and the Bristol Bay red king crab fishery will be closed for the first time in over 25 years. That stock has been on a steady decline for several years and the 2020 harvest dwindled to just 2.6 million pounds. Most shocking was the drastic turn-around for snow crab stocks, which in 2018 showed a 60% boost in market sized male crabs (the only ones...
Are toxins from road runoff a threat to salmon in Anchorage’s most popular fishing streams? A Go Fund Me campaign has been launched so Alaskans can chip in to find out. The push stems from an organic compound in tires called quinone that was newly identified by researchers at the University of Washington, said Birgit Hagedorn, a geochemist and longtime board member of the Anchorage Waterways Council. “The little flakes that rub off of tires, especially larger truck tires, can be transported into the streams via stormwater. And they leach out...
Now that the 2020 pack of Alaska salmon has been caught and put up, stakeholders will get a better picture of how global prices may rise or fall. Nearly 75% of the value of Alaska’s salmon exports is driven by sales between July and October. And right now, lower supplies of wild Pacific salmon by the major producers are pushing up prices as the bulk of those sales are made. For sockeye salmon, global supplier and market tracker Tradex reports that frozen fillets are in high demand and supplies are hard to source for all sizes. With a catch t...
Bering Sea crabbers will soon know how much they can pull up in their pots for the upcoming season that opens October 15. This week the Crab Plan Team, advisers to state and federal fishery managers who jointly manage the fisheries, will review stock assessments and other science used to set the catches for Bristol Bay red king crab, Tanners and snow crab. Normally, the biggest driver would be data from the annual summer trawl surveys that have tracked the stocks for decades. But this year, the...
Troy Larson was kayaking early Friday morning when he saw a ball of juvenile king crabs in front of his house on Sandy Beach Rd....
All systems are go for keeping close tabs on fish and crab stocks in waters managed by the state, meaning out to three miles. While constraints from the coronavirus resulted in nearly all annual stock surveys being cut in deeper waters overseen by the federal government, it’s “closer to normal” closer to shore. “While it’s not business as usual, we are conducting business in as close to normal fashion as we can,” said Forrest Bowers, deputy director of the commercial fisheries division of the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game. “We have kept all...
Sherry Tamone, a professor of biology at University of Alaska Southeast, held a virtual lecture this month as part of the Petersburg Science Series on her research in crab species in Southeast and the effect that warming sea temperatures has on their molt timing. Crustaceans grow in size through a process called molting, said Tamone. Molting is when a crustacean sheds its exoskeleton and builds a newer, bigger one. The process begins when they're newborn larva and lasts through adulthood. When i...
The State of Alaska wants input on plans to distribute nearly $24.5 million in federal disaster relief funds for stakeholders and communities hurt by the 2018 Gulf of Alaska cod crash. Better make it quick – the deadline to comment is April 10. Cod is Alaska’s second largest groundfish harvest (after pollock), but the Gulf stock dropped by 80% in 2018 following a three year heatwave that disrupted food webs, fish metabolism and egg survival on the ocean floor. It combined to push down cod catches to just 28.8 million pounds, compared to nea...
Lost in the headlines about the hits to seafood sales from the Trump Administration’s trade war with China is another international barrier with Russia that’s been going on far longer. In August of 2014 Russia placed an embargo on all U.S. food products to retaliate for sanctions the U.S and other Western countries imposed over the invasion of Ukraine. The ban included Alaska seafood, which at the time accounted for more than $61 million in annual sales to Russia, primarily from pink salmon roe. But here’s the bigger hurt: For the nearly six y...
Lower catches for Pacific halibut are in the forecast for the foreseeable future. That was the message from the International Pacific Halibut Commission at its meeting last week in Seattle. The IPHC oversees halibut stock research and sets catch limits for nine fishing regions ranging from Northern California and British Columbia to the Bering Sea. There are fewer of the prized flatfish (down 4%), they weigh less (down 5%) and no big pulses appear to be coming into the stock was the grim and the results of summer long surveys at nearly 1,370...
They are certainly cute but the voracious appetites of sea otters continue to cause horrendous damage to some of Southeast Alaska’s most lucrative fisheries. How best to curtail those impacts will be the focus of a day long stakeholders meeting set for November 6 in Juneau. “All of the people who have anything to do with the otters hopefully will all be in the same room at the same time,” said Phil Doherty, co-director of the Southeast Alaska Regional Dive Fisheries Association (SARDFA) based in Ketchikan. A 2011 report by the McDowell Group...
Hundreds of fishery stakeholders and scientists will gather in Anchorage next week as the state Board of Fisheries (BOF) begins its annual meeting cycle with a two-day work session. The seven-member BOF sets the rules for the state’s subsistence, commercial, sport and personal use fisheries. It meets four to six times each year in various communities on a three-year rotation; this year the focus is on Kodiak and Cook Inlet. The fish board and the public also will learn the latest on how a changing climate and off kilter ocean chemistry are a...
Federal agencies are meeting now through next March to define U.S. dietary guidelines for 2020-2025, and a high powered group of doctors and nutritionists are making sure the health benefits of seafood are front and center. For the first time in the 40 year history of the program, the dietary guidelines committee has posted the questions they are going to consider. They include the role of seafood in the neurocognitive development in pregnant moms for their babies, and in the diet of kids from b...
