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Fish Factor: China to put extra 25% import tariff on Alaska salmon, pollock, herring and groundfish starting July 6 By LAINE WELCH - Shockwaves rocked the Alaska seafood industry when China announced on Friday that it will add an additional 25 percent tariff on seafood imports starting July 6 in retaliation to Trump’s trade war.

 “The 25 percent will be added to the current base tariffs which typically range from 5 to 15 percent,” said Garrett Evridge, a fishery analyst with the McDowell Group.

The list of seafood products includes all Alaska salmon, pollock, cod, herring, flatfish, Dungeness crab, snow crab, Atka mackerel, sablefish, geoduck clams and more.

“This is devastating news,” said Frances Leach, executive director of United Fishermen of Alaska which represents 34 groups. “The tariff will not just impact commercial fishermen but will also affect the more than 60,000 individuals who are employed by the state’s fishing industry.”

China has been Alaska’s top seafood customer since 2011, purchasing 54 percent of all seafood exports valued at $1.3 billion in 2017. - More...
Sunday AM - June 17, 2018

Fish Factor: Candidates for Alaska governor shared their positions on the Pebble Mine & Salmon Habitat Ballot initiative By LAINE WELCH - Five candidates for Alaska governor met up at the Bristol Bay Fish Expo in Naknek last week. The debate focused on a wide range of topics affecting rural Alaska, including two hot fish issues.

Naknek is the hub of the world’s largest sockeye salmon run at Bristol Bay, which also is at the heart of the proposed plans for the Pebble Mine.  

Governor Bill Walker said emphatically that he is not in favor of the Pebble Mine.

“I had an interesting discussion with a group that said it can be done safely. My response was what if it doesn’t. Look at all that is at risk. I am very pro-development and pro-mining but not in that location,” Walker said.

Mead Treadwell, a Republican candidate from Anchorage, said he will not trade one resource for another. 

As a former deputy commissioner of the Alaska Dept. of Environmental Protection, Treadwell said he helped write state water quality standards. 

“If this mine cannot meet the kind of water quality and habitat protection standards that we have created to protect our fisheries, then it won’t happen,” he stated.

“From what I’ve seen it is going to be very hard for Pebble to make it through the process… But it makes sense to have a strong public process where we get to analyze what is happening,” Treadwell added.

Republican candidate Scott Hawkins of Anchorage said the mine has the legal right to go through the permitting process, but that it “very well may be the wrong mine in the wrong place because if anything goes wrong, there is just so much at stake.” 

“I think the mine is losing momentum,” Hawkins added. “All the big investors have decided that it just doesn’t work on several levels. A lot of it is just how controversial it is to the people in this region and that is hurting the mining industry.”  

Mark Begich, a Democrat from Anchorage, has long touted the “wrong mine/wrong place” meme, which was first stated years ago by former Senator Ted Stevens.  - More...
Sunday AM - June 17, 2018

Fisheries: Climate change has fish moving faster than regulations can keep up; Researchers say out-of-date regulatory system hasn't kept up with the realities of global warming - The world's system for allocating fish stocks is being outpaced by the movement of fish species in response to climate change, according to a study undertaken by an international team of marine ecologists, fisheries and social scientists, and lawyers.

"Fish fleeing warming waters will cross national boundaries and add new 'shareholders' to existing fisheries," said senior author William Cheung, associate professor in UBC's Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries and director of science for the Nippon Foundation-UBC Nereus Program, which helped fund the research. "Without a pre-agreed mechanism to accommodate these unexpected fish shareholders, we could witness more international disputes over the allocation of fisheries resources."

The study analyzed 892 fish stocks from around the world using models, developed by Cheung and his team at UBC, that show climate change is driving marine species toward the poles. They found that 70 or more countries will see new fish stocks in their waters by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions continue on their current trajectory.

"Marine fishes do not have passports and are not aware of political boundaries; they will follow their future optimal habitat," said co-author Gabriel Reygondeau, postdoctoral fellow at UBC. "Unfortunately, the potential change of distribution of highly-valuable species between two neighbouring countries will represent a challenge for fisheries management that will require new treaties to deal with transboundary fish stocks." 

The study cited a dispute between Canada and the United States in the 1980s and 1990s after warming regional temperatures caused Pacific salmon to change their migration patterns. U.S. fisheries intercepted Canadian-bound salmon and Canadian fisheries retaliated by targeting salmon migrating to spawn in the U.S. After six years of disagreement, a new joint management agreement was implemented.

"Most people may not understand that the right to harvest particular species of fish is decided by national and regional fisheries management organizations," said Malin Pinsky, an assistant professor of ecology, evolution and natural resources at Rutgers' School of Environmental and Biological Sciences and lead author of the study. "Those organizations have made the rules based on the notion that particular fish species live in particular waters and don't move much but now we know they are moving because climate change is warming ocean temperatures." - More...
Sunday AM - June 17, 2018

In the late 1990s, Japanese researchers noticed an intriguing pattern while studying in the Bering Sea just north of the Aleutian Islands. During every odd-numbered year, populations of tiny ocean creatures called copepods were very low. The year after, their numbers were high.

Pink salmon eat copepods. And, the Japanese scientists noted, pink salmon are most abundant in odd calendar years. The Japanese scientists postulated that pinks, which have exploded in numbers since the early 1990s, had gobbled up many of the copepods.

About a decade ago, biologists Alan Springer and Gus van Vliet noticed a similar pattern among tufted puffins in a well-studied colony on Buldir Island in the Aleutians. The puffins were laying eggs earlier in even-numbered years and later in odd years. They too wondered if pink salmon might be responsible, by leaving less food for the puffins.

Though they are the smallest of the salmon, pinks are the dominant species in the North Pacific Ocean and Bering Sea. Pink salmon born in hatcheries, where professionals harvest eggs from wild salmon and rear them in captivity before releasing them in the ocean, have doubled in numbers since 1990.

Russians have pink salmon hatcheries that increase numbers in the North Pacific and Bering Sea. Alaskans run hatcheries in Valdez and other places in Prince William Sound. Hatchery managers release more than half a billion pink salmon smolts into Prince William Sound each year, some to be caught by fishermen. Canned and frozen Alaska pink salmon are sold all over the world, with a strong market in China.

Pinks are different from kings, chums and other salmon species. Their life is just two years long, from the time they are eggs until they die after spawning. While other Alaska salmon spend at least two winters in either the Bering Sea or North Pacific, pinks spend only one year in the saltwater surrounding Alaska before returning to freshwater sources to spawn. They remain small until the last few months before they spawn, when they eat like crazy and their body mass increases by 500 percent.

In that time of pinks’ greatest growth — from about March to July in the spawning year — they may be eating so many shrimp, fish, squid and krill that they are not leaving enough for other species. Their ferocity and eating efficiency could even be affecting birds half a world away, off the coast of Australia and New Zealand. - More...
Sunday AM - June 17, 2018

TOM PURCELL: The Incredible Power of Fathers - My 84-year-old father still asks me why I did it.

The "incident," as my family refers to it, dates back to 1973, when my father remodeled our basement into a family room. The project included a small bathroom, which would be the bane of his existence for more than 30 years.

You see, my father, always looking to save a buck - he had six kids to feed, after all - bought the cheapest sink and toilet he could find. Though the sink worked fine, the tiny toilet rarely functioned properly.

My father spent much of his spare time unplugging it. He pleaded with us not to use it unless it was "an emergency" and "for goodness sakes don't even think about number two!"

Armed with this knowledge, then, it is remarkable I did what I did.

One Sunday morning, after chomping on a large Washington apple, I lay on the family room couch, too lazy to go upstairs to the kitchen to dispose of the core.

I noticed, 12 feet away, that the toilet lid was up. In a moment of insanity, I aimed the core at the toilet and flicked my wrist. The core floated majestically in the air, a perfect trajectory, and landed in the center of the bowl with a satisfying "ker-plunk!" - More...
Sunday AM - June 17, 2018

JASE GRAVES: A Father's Guide to the Land of Millstones and Honey Do's - As a married man with three daughters, I enjoy the occasional moment of solitude when I can reset, recharge, refocus, and stand at the open refrigerator in my underwear eating aerosol whipped cream and drinking milk directly from the jug.I was looking forward to reveling in this kind of reclusively boorish behavior recently when I had a week of vacation to myself while the girls were still in school and my wife was at work - wondering if I'd be out of bed by the time they got home.

Unfortunately, I found myself unable to continue ignoring those chores usually assigned to the man of the house and which require a full set of clothing.Based on my experiences that week, I thought I'd offer a few tips to other men like me whose tools all still have that new hardware smell and whose yardwork always begins with untangling an epic mass of electrical cords.

Tip #1 - Prior to spending a significant amount of time outdoors in the sun for the first time since the previous August, generously apply sunscreen to the back of your neck until it reaches the consistency of spackling paste.Failure to do so will result in your neck looking like an inflamed Louisiana hot link, which, in turn, will prompt friends, family and your barber to joke incessantly about the fact that you've finally become a real 'redneck,' which, in turn, will prompt all of them to tell mostly the same 'You might be a redneck' jokes, which, in turn, will make you wish you'd thought up the whole redneck comedy shtick so you wouldn't have to be doing yard work in the first place. - More...
Sunday AM - June 17, 2018