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Fish Factor: Could Hagfish Become a Viable Fishery? By LAINE WELCH - Hagfish is the real name for what is commonly called slime eels and it could become a viable fishery with ready markets standing by.

Little is known about hagfish in Alaska, although they are commonly caught elsewhere in the U.S. and abroad. In Oregon, for example, a fleet of 15 to 20 boats catches up to two million pounds each year in customized five gallon buckets or large barrels and pay fishermen up to $1.25 a pound. 

Now, two Alaska biologists are testing the waters for a fishery with longliner in Southeast who were given a special permit to catch 60,000 pounds of hagfish for their studies.   

“It’s commonly seen as a pest,” said Andrew Olson, a biologist with the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game in Douglas. “In longline fisheries for sablefish, they often leave slime blobs on the hooks and strip bait, and they get into shrimp pots as well.” 

Olsen is in the second year of a hagfish study with fellow researcher Aaron Baldwin. Their goal is to “keep the science ahead of any fishery to make sure it is sustainable” by learning more about the unique species.

 “We are looking at basic biology such as length, weight and egg counts in females. We can’t yet age the fish and they don’t thrive well in captivity. We are really starting from scratch,” said Olson.  

Reproduction and spawning have never been witnessed or documented, and biologists don’t know where or when hagfish do so.

“We’ve seen eggs, and juveniles, but nothing in between,” said Baldwin. “No one has ever seen a baby hagfish.”          

A single foot and a half inch, nine-ounce hagfish can fill a bucket with slime in seconds from 100 glands alongside its body.

“It’s extruded and looks like a white latex liquid that comes out when it’s dry and it expands when it hits seawater. The slime molecules will entrap water molecules and it is an amazing substance,” he said.

The slime has several functions - it suffocates predators, helps hunt prey by forcing them out of burrows and it lubricates entry into fish through the anus. 

“It has digestive enzymes so when you open up a sablefish, for example, it is literally bones, hagfish slime and a few hagfish inside the fish. They start with the internal organs and eat every bit of flesh that’s in there,” Baldwin explained. 

Most slime, as with slugs, is just mucus, he said and doesn’t have the capability of absorbing water molecules and expanding. 

“Hagfish produce a very unique substance. It is definitely one of a kind,” Baldwin added.

Studies by the U.S. Navy and other researchers has shown that the chemical makeup of hagfish slime is stronger than spider silk.  

“Because of its qualities there are lots of efforts to make synthetic duplicates or bioengineer bacteria to produce the slime for industrial purposes,” Baldwin said. “The US navy is using synthetic hagfish slime to produce a substance that is lighter and stronger than Kevlar. The slime also shows potential as an anti-foulant for ship hulls. And medical research has shown that hagfish slime heals burns quickly and may be used as microfibers for cell repair.”

A well-established market for hagfish is Korea where the meat is a barbecue and stir fry favorite and the skin is sold as “eel skin leather” products.

“It’s been a fun project to work on,” Baldwin said. “We get to work with fishermen on developing a fishery and it’s a species we haven’t paid much attention to so everything we are learning is really new to us.”

If Alaska fishermen encounter hagfish in waters outside of Southeast, Olson and Baldwin would like to know about it. - More...
Friday PM - June 01, 2018

Hunting for fish in Alaska’s steelhead-bearing rivers and streams
By MARY CATHARINE MARTIN
Mark Hieronymus poses with a steelhead caught
in 2014 on a Southeast Alaskan river. 
Photo by Tyson Fick ©2018

The Salmon State: Hunting for fish in Alaska’s steelhead-bearing rivers and streams By MARY CATHARINE MARTIN - For most people, steelhead - sea-run rainbow trout - are “the fish of 10,000 casts.” To catch them, you stand waist-deep in a spring-melt river, growing numb with cold as you cast… and cast… and cast.

Trout Unlimited sportfish outreach coordinator and Bear Creek Outfitter fishing guide Mark Heironymus says it doesn’t have to be that way. A better word than “fishing” for steelhead, he said, is “hunting.” You might go hours between casts, but once you line everything up right, you get your fish.

Though they’re as far north as the Copper River, 319 of the 340 or so steelhead watersheds listed in the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s Anadromous Waters Catalogue are in Southeast Alaska, Heironymus said. (If you count streams, rivers and lakes individually, said J. Johnson, the Alaska Department of Fish & Game’s anadromous waters catalog project biologist, there are 892 in Alaska as a whole “that we know of.”)

Heironymus said he fishes in at least a dozen unlisted streams a half hour’s flight from Juneau. Listed or unlisted, most see fewer than 200 spawning adults every year — though one river, the Situk in Yakutat, has thousands. - More...
Friday PM - June 01, 2018

Ketchikan: Klawock Husband And Wife Plead Guilty To Willful Failure To Pay Taxes - A husband and wife pleaded guilty yesterday to two counts of willfully failing to pay their income taxes, announced Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Richard E. Zuckerman of the Justice Department’s Tax Division and U.S. Attorney Bryan Schroder for the District of Alaska.

According to court documents, Archie W. Demmert III, 57, and Roseann L. Demmert, 60, both of Klawock, Alaska, held commercial fishing permits and earned six-figure incomes in 2013 and 2014 from commercial fishing, on which they failed to timely pay the required income taxes due. Archie Demmert owned Vetta Bay LLC, which owned the Demmerts’ fishing vessel, the Emerald Beauty.

In addition, according to court documents, from 2006 to 2012 the Demmerts did not timely pay in full the taxes they owed to the Internal Revenue Service. As a result, the total tax loss to the IRS arising from their conduct is more than $300,000.

When charged in July 2017, the Justice Department also alleged the Demmerts did not pay their taxes for 13 separate tax years, for which they owed over $400,000, excluding penalties and interest. The amount of back taxes owed and restitution will be known at the time of sentencing in October. - More...
Friday PM - June 01, 2018

Ketchikan: Vallenar Young-growth Project decision made  - The Vallenar Young-growth Project final decision was signed on May 24, 2018, by Ketchikan Misty Fjords District Ranger Susan Howle. The selected action makes available approximately 155 acres of the 886 acres in the project area.

The final decision makes available approximately 4 MMBF of young-growth timber for harvest, reconditions approximately 1.2 miles of road and helps to restore hydrologic function in the Vallenar Creek Watershed.

The Vallenar Project is located on the northernmost end of Gravina Island, about 4 miles northwest of Ketchikan. According to a Forest Service news release, a contract is expected to be awarded by the end of FY 2018.  - More...
Friday PM - June 01, 2018

Alaska Science: Alaska structures crumble without us By NED ROZELL - In Alan Weisman’s book, “The World Without Us,” the author ponders “a world from which we all suddenly vanished. Tomorrow.”

In his thought experiment, Weisman travels around the world to explore that question, revealing that cockroaches and bedbugs would not fare well without our sloppiness and warmth, but Theodore Roosevelt’s granite face will stare down from Mount Rushmore for the next 7.2 million years.

Weisman devotes a chapter to buildings, going into detail on their natural, gradual destruction. It all begins with water, Weisman writes, quoting a farmer who said a sure way to destroy a barn is to cut an 18-inch hole in its roof.

Posed with the question of the fate of Alaska structures without us, researchers with the Cold Climate Housing Research Center in Fairbanks agreed that the liquid stuff of life is the most powerful agent of demise.

The research center’s Ilya Benesch has witnessed the slow and interesting fade of a mining building in Poorman, Alaska, which benefited from a still-intact tin roof. Built in the early 1900s, the structure, about 70 miles south of Ruby, was still in decent shape about 75 years later. - More...
June 01, 2018

Southeast Alaska (POW): Along Alaska's Pacific coast, early humans could have migrated to the Americas; Geologic evidence supports a coastal theory of early settlement - When and how did the first people come to the Americas?

The conventional story says that the earliest settlers came via Siberia, crossing the now-defunct Bering land bridge on foot and trekking through Canada when an ice-free corridor opened up between massive ice sheets toward the end of the last ice age.

But with recent archaeological evidence casting doubt on this thinking, scientists are seeking new explanations. One dominant, new theory: The first Americans took a coastal route along Alaska's Pacific border to enter the continent.

A new geological study provides compelling evidence to support this hypothesis.

By analyzing boulders and bedrock, a research team led by the University at Buffalo shows that part of a coastal migration route became accessible to humans 17,000 years ago. During this period, ancient glaciers receded, exposing islands of southern Alaska's Alexander Archipelago to air and sun -- and, possibly, to human migration. 

The timing of these events is key: Recent genetic and archaeological estimates suggest that settlers may have begun traveling deeper into the Americas some 16,000 years ago, soon after the coastal gateway opened up.

The research was published online on May 30 in the journal Science Advances. 

"People are fascinated by these questions of where they come from and how they got there," says lead scientist Jason Briner, PhD, professor of geology in UB's College of Arts and Sciences. "Our research contributes to the debate about how humans came to the Americas. It's potentially adding to what we know about our ancestry and how we colonized our planet."

"Our study provides some of the first geologic evidence that a coastal migration route was available for early humans as they colonized the New World," says UB geology PhD candidate Alia Lesnek, the study's first author. "There was a coastal route available, and the appearance of this newly ice-free terrain may have spurred early humans to migrate southward." - More...
Friday PM - June 01, 2018