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Yahoo
4 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
NOAA firings, cuts will reduce services used to manage Alaska fisheries, officials say
Fishing boats are seen in Kodiak's St. Paul Harbor on Oct. 3, 2022. Deep job cuts at NOAA Fisheries will negatively affect the scientific work normally done to support fishery management, agency officials warned. (Photo by Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon) Trump administration job cuts in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will result in less scientific information that is needed to set and oversee Alaska seafood harvests, agency officials have warned fishery managers. Since January, the Alaska regional office of NOAA Fisheries, also called the National Marine Fisheries Service, has lost 28 employees, about a quarter of its workforce, said Jon Kurland, the agency's Alaska director. 'This, of course, reduces our capacity in a pretty dramatic fashion, including core fishery management functions such as regulatory analysis and development, fishery permitting and quota management, information technology, and operations to support sustainable fisheries,' Kurland told the North Pacific Fishery Management Council on Thursday. NOAA's Alaska Fisheries Science Center, which has labs in Juneau's Auke Bay and Kodiak, among other sites, has lost 51 employees since January, affecting 6% to 30% of its operations, said director Robert Foy, the center's director. That was on top of some job losses and other 'resource limitations' prior to January, Foy said. 'It certainly puts us in a situation where it is clear that we must cancel some of our work,' he told the council. The North Pacific Fishery Management Council, meeting in Newport, Oregon, sets harvest levels and rules for commercial seafood harvests carried out in federal waters off Alaska. The council relies on scientific information from NOAA Fisheries and other government agencies. NOAA has been one of the targets of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which has been led by billionaire Elon Musk. The DOGE program has summarily fired thousands of employees in various government agencies, in accordance with goals articulated in a preelection report from the conservative Heritage Foundation called Project 2025. NOAA's science-focused operations are criticized in Project 2025. NOAA Fisheries, the National Weather Service and other NOAA divisions 'form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity,' the Project 2025 report said. The DOGE-led firings and cuts leave Alaska with notably reduced NOAA Fisheries services, Kurland and Foy told council members. Among the services now compromised is the information technology system that tracks catches during harvest seasons — information used to manage quotas and allocations. 'We really have less than a skeleton crew at this point in our IT shop, so it's a pretty severe constraint,' Kurland said. Also compromised is the Alaska Fisheries Science Center's ability to analyze ages of fish, which spend varying amounts of years growing in the ocean. The ability to gather such demographic information, an important factor used by managers to set harvest levels that are sustainable into the future, is down 40%, Foy said. A lot of the center's salmon research is now on hold as well. For example, work at the Little Port Walter Research Station, the oldest year-round research station in Alaska, is now canceled, Foy said. 'We're talking about the importance of understanding what's happening with salmon in the marine environment and its interaction with ground fish stocks,' he said. Much of the work at Little Port Walter, located about 85 miles south of Juneau, has focused on Chinook salmon and the reasons for run declines, as well as the knowledge needed to carry out U.S.-Canada Pacific Salmon Treaty obligations. As difficult as the losses have been, Kurland and Foy said they are bracing for even more cuts and trying to figure out how to narrow their focus on the top priorities. Despite the challenges, Foy said, the Alaska Fisheries Science Center has managed to cobble together scheduled 2025 fish surveys in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska, which produce the stock information needed to set annual harvest limits. Some of the employees doing that work have been pulled out of other operations to fill in for experienced researchers who have been lost, and data analysis from the fish surveys will be slower, he warned. 'You can't lose 51 people and not have that impact,' he said. It was far from a given that the surveys would happen this year, Foy said. The science center team had to endure a lot of confusion leading up to now, he said. 'We've had staff sitting in airports on Saturdays, not knowing if the contract was done to start a survey on a Monday,' he said. At the same time the Trump administration is making deep cuts to science programs, it also is pushing fishery managers to increase total seafood harvests. President Donald Trump on April 17 issued an executive order called 'Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness' that seeks to overturn 'restrictive catch limits' and 'unburden our commercial fishermen from costly and inefficient regulation.' Federal fishing laws, including the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, require careful management to keep fisheries sustainable into the future. Unregulated fisheries have collapsed in the past, leading to regional economic disasters. Part of the impetus for the executive order, a senior NOAA official told the council, is the long-term decrease in overall seafood landings. Prior to 2020, about 9.5 billion pounds of seafood was harvested commercially each year, said Sam Rauch, NOAA Fisheries' deputy assistant administrator for regulatory programs. Now that total is down to about 8.5 billion pounds, Rauch said. He acknowledged that the COVID-19 pandemic played a role in the reduction, as did economics. At their Newport meeting, council members raised concerns that the push for increased production might clash with the practices of responsible management, especially if there is less information to prevent overharvesting. Nicole Kimball, a council member and vice president of a trade organization representing seafood processors, cited a 'disconnect' between the goal of increased seafood harvests and the 'drastically lower resources' that managers normally rely upon to ensure harvest sustainability. The typical approach is to be cautious when information is scarce, she noted. 'if we have increased uncertainty — which we'll have with fewer surveys or fewer people on the water — then we usually have more risk, and we account for that by lowering catch,' she said at the meeting. In response, Rauch cited a need to cut government spending in general and NOAA spending in particular. That includes the agency's fishery science work, he said. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX 'We have to think about new and different ways to collect the data,' he said. 'The executive order puts a fine point on developing new and innovative but also less expensive ways to collect the science.' Even before this year, he said, NOAA was struggling with the increasing costs of its Alaska fish surveys and facing a need to economize. The agency had already been working on a survey modernization program prior to the second Trump administration. The Alaska portion of the program, announced last year, was intended to redesign fisheries surveys within five years to be more cost-effective and adaptive to changing environmental conditions. Foy, in his testimony to the council, said job and budget cuts will now delay that modernization work. 'I can almost assuredly say that this is no longer a 5-year project but probably moving out and into the 6- or 7-year' range, he told the council. Since Alaska accounts for about 60% of the volume of the nation's commercial seafood catch, it is likely to have a big role in accomplishing the administration's goals for increased production, council members noted. Alaska's total volume has been affected by a variety of forces in recent years. Those include two consecutive years of the Bering Sea snow crab fishery being canceled. That harvest had an allowable catch of 45 million pounds in the 2020-2021 season but wound up drastically reduced in the following year and shot down completely in the 2022-23 and 2023-2024 seasons because of a collapse in the stock. Another factor is the shrinking size of harvested salmon. Last year, Bristol Bay sockeye salmon were measured at the smallest size on record. The total 2024 Alaska salmon harvest of 101.2 million fish, one of the lowest totals in recent years, had a combined weight of about 450 million pounds. Past years with similar sizes harvests by fish numbers yielded higher total weights. The 1987 Alaska salmon harvest of 96.6 million fish weighed a total 508.6 million pounds, while the 1988 Alaska salmon harvest of 100.6 million fish weighed in at 534.5 million pounds, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
Yahoo
13-02-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Fishery managers start a process to tighten salmon bycatch rules in Alaska's Bering Sea
Strips of chum salmon hang on a drying rack on Aug. 22, 2007. Residents of Indigenous communities in Western and Interior Alaska have long depended on chum salmon, and declining runs have caused distress in those communities. The North Pacific Fishery Management Council has advanced a set of proposed new rules to limit bycatch of Alaska chum salmon in the Bering Sea pollock fishery. (Photo by S. Zuray/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) Federal fishery managers took steps on Tuesday to impose new rules to prevent Alaska chum salmon from being scooped into nets used to catch Bering Sea pollock, an industrial-scale fishery that makes up the nation's largest single-species commercial seafood harvest. The North Pacific Fishery Management Council advanced a suite of new protections intended to combat the pollock trawlers' salmon bycatch, the term for the incidental catch of unintended species. Proposed steps in the package include numeric caps on total chum salmon bycatch, with varying allocations for different sectors of the pollock fleet; protective limits in corridors known to be used by salmon migrating through the ocean back to Western Alaska freshwater spawning areas; and provisions that would link new limits in the ocean to real-time salmon counts and conditions in the rivers. The action followed years of complaints about ocean bycatch of chum salmon at a time when runs in Western Alaska rivers have dwindled, becoming so low at times that no fishing was allowed. The council's meeting in Anchorage, which started on Feb. 3 and wrapped up with the vote on Tuesday, was devoted almost exclusively to the problem of bycatch and its effects of chum salmon runs in the Yukon and Kuskokwim river systems. The vote to advance the protective package followed days of sometimes-emotional testimony from residents of rural Western and Interior Alaska villages who have long depended on chum salmon – one of the five species of Pacific salmon – as a food staple. Residents who testified described the anemic salmon runs as a crisis threatening family well-being, local economies and Indigenous cultures and identities. In some of the testimony at the meeting, representatives of the Association of Village Council Presidents, a Bethel-based consortium of Western Alaska tribes, were among those who described the impacts of the salmon crashes on the lives of Indigenous people. Nels Alexie, a traditional chief for the association, phrased the issue succinctly. He was at the meeting 'because of my traditional stomach,' he told the council on Saturday. 'Quickly, would you please give me back my chums and my king salmon?' Vivian Korthuis, chief executive officer of the organization, made similar comments. 'We are not separate from our rivers or the ocean. We are salmon people. It is our cultural identity and our way of life,' she said in her testimony on Saturday. The long-running debate over bycatch has, at times, pitted the interests of Indigenous residents along the river systems against those of the companies and Alaska coastal communities dependent on the Bering Sea pollock harvest. Pollock is the nation's largest single-species commercial seafood harvest; the trawl equipment used to catch those fish features large nets that are towed through midwater areas above the seafloor. Council members, as they prepared to vote on Tuesday, said they got the message from the Alaskans who depend on salmon from the river systems. 'What I heard loud and clear was the council should be doing everything it can to help Western Alaska salmon get back to the rivers,' said council member Rachel Baker, who is also deputy commissioner of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Although the specifics have been months in the making, the council's vote on Tuesday was in some ways an early part of the process. The vote does not put any specific new protections into place. Rather, it launches a detailed evaluation of the numerous bycatch-reduction tools proposed in the different alternatives and how they could work in combination. Once its staff members complete that evaluation, the council is expected to vote as early as December on what members deem to be the best blend of new protections for Western Alaska chum salmon. If the council gives its approval in coming months, the new bycatch-reduction rules would go into effect in 2027, though parts of the fishing industry might follow some of those rules voluntarily in 2026. The long rollout reflects the requirement that fishery managers abide by federal laws and the environmental impact statement process. 'It's a long process and it's a bit of a grind, but I think we'll get through it and come out with something that is meaningful in the end,' said council member Anne Vanderhoeven. Advocates of the Indigenous communities dependent on Western Alaska chum salmon said Tuesday's council action was a victory, despite the wait for any specific new rules to take effect in the ocean. 'Sometimes small steps are a win,' Michael Williams Sr., a Yup'ik leader from the village of Akiak, said just after the meeting adjourned. He likened the progress at the council to the way the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission a decade ago started work with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to jointly manage salmon runs on that river. That co-management was a necessary response to reduced runs, said Williams, one of the leaders of the commission. Eva Burk, a Dene Athabascan from Nenana and a member of the council's advisory panel, said the options for protective corridors in the Bering Sea were especially important. Tribes proposed that idea, and the concept relies on traditional knowledge, she said. 'It's been known for 100 years that this is a passage for Western Alaska chum, so we just wanted that corridor option to be fleshed out,' she said. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX Those corridors are needed to rebuild stocks that use the Western Alaska rivers, she said. 'In the changing environmental conditions that people are pointing out, it's important to have genetic diversity,' she said. 'We need these fish.' Since 1991, the amount of chum salmon netted annually as bycatch in the Bering Sea pollock fishery has ranged from a few thousand to a high of about 700,000 in 2005, according to the council's analysis. Bycatch hit its second highest total in 2021, when 545,901 chum salmon were incidentally caught in trawl gear, according to the analysis. Bycatch was reduced substantially in the following years' pollock harvests and was recorded at 35,125 fish last year, according to the analysis. Genetic analysis consistently shows that most chum salmon netted as bycatch in the Bering Sea pollock harvest are not Alaska-origin but produced by Asian hatcheries, though Alaska-origin fish tend to cluster in particular locations. Additionally, the salmon crashes in Western Alaska river systems have been blamed by scientists primarily on climate change and related factors rather than bycatch, including successive marine heatwaves. Council member Jon Kurland, who is Alaska regional director for the National Marine Fisheries Service, referenced that scientific consensus on Tuesday. 'I don't think there's any other fishery issue in Alaska that so powerfully demonstrates the challenges that we're all facing from climate change,' Kurland said. That is not something the council can reverse, he said: 'The council cannot stop climate change.' Still, bycatch is identified as a factor that can also reduce returns to the river systems, and it is something the council can address, he said. The message from public testimony was that 'every salmon matters to in-river communities,' he said. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
