The Pacific halibut
fishery opened on March 14 amid little fanfare and flattened markets.
The first fish of the
eight-month season typically attracts the highest prices and is rushed fresh to
high-end buyers, especially during the Lenten season. But that’s not the case
in this time of coronavirus chaos, when air traffic is stalled, and seafood of
all kinds is getting backlogged in global freezers.
Alaska’s share of the
2020 halibut catch is about 17 million pounds for nearly 2,000 fishermen who
own shares of the popular flatfish. A week into the fishery, fewer than 50
landings were made totaling just over 262,000 pounds and, as anticipated,
prices to fishermen were in the pits.
Earliest price reports
at Homer were posted at $4.20-$4.40 per pound, Kodiak prices were at $3.25 for
10-20 pounders, $3.50 for halibut weighing 20-40 pounds and $4 for “forty ups.”
Prices ranged from $3.75-$4.00 at Yakutat and $3.50 “across the board” at
Wrangell, according to Alaska Boats and Permits in Homer.
The highest prices of
$5, $4.75 and $4.50 were reported at Southeast ports that have regular air
freight service, although they are expected to drop by $1-$2 per pound a major
buyer said.
The average statewide
price for Alaska halibut in 2019 was $5.30 a pound and $5.35 in 2018.
For this season’s start,
some Alaska processors were buying small lots of halibut on consignment or
filling existing orders; others were not buying at all.
“We are tentatively going
to be buying longline fish on the first of May after the Columbia ferry gets
back on line,” said a major buyer in Southeast who blamed not having
traditional ferries that haul thousands of pounds of fish each week, and a lack
of air freight options at smaller communities.
“We’re down here where
transportation is dictating where fish has to go,” he added.
Most of Alaska’s halibut
goes into the U.S. market where in recent years it has faced stiff competition
from up to 8 million pounds of fresh Atlantic halibut, primarily from eastern
Canada. And although Russia has banned purchases of U.S. seafood since 2014,
increasing amounts of halibut caught by Russian fishing fleets are coming into
our nation. Trade data show that 2 million pounds of Pacific and Atlantic halibut were
imported to the U.S. over the past year through January 2020, valued at nearly
$6.7 million.
A major Alaska buyer
said: “One of our salespeople shot us a deal showing that right now you can buy
frozen at sea, tail off, 3-5 and 5-8 pound Pacific halibut from Russia for
$3.25 a pound.”
Also newly appearing on
U.S. shelves: Farmed halibut fillets from Norway retailing at $9.99 a pound.
Hatchery hauls
Alaska salmon that got
their start in hatcheries made up 25 percent of last year’s total statewide
catch.
In 2019, roughly 50
million hatchery salmon were caught by Alaska fishermen, mostly pinks and
chums, valued at $118 million, or 18% of the state’s total salmon harvest
value.
That’s according to the
annual salmon enhancement report by the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game.
Currently there are 30
hatcheries producing salmon in Alaska, of which 26 are operated by private,
nonprofits. ADF&G operates two sport fish hatcheries in Anchorage and
Fairbanks, the federal government runs a research hatchery near Sitka, and the
Metlakatla Indian tribe also operates a hatchery.
The hatcheries are funded
by a fishermen’s tax and sales of a portion of the returning fish and receive
no state dollars. They also produce salmon for sport, subsistence and personal
use fisheries at no cost to the state of Alaska.
“For the coastal
communities the hatchery program is a lifesaver for many of the people who fish
for a living. It gives about 25% of the salmon harvest and that supplementation
is a critical component for their business model,” said Steve Reifenstuhl, who
on March 15 retired after 40 years as general manager at the Northern Southeast
Regional Aquaculture Association.
At Prince William Sound,
where most of Alaska’s hatchery fish call home, 31 million salmon were caught
last summer valued at $64 million, or 56 percent of the region’s total dockside
value. Nearly 83 percent were chums, 61 percent were pinks and 34 percent were
sockeye salmon.
For Southeast Alaska,
the second largest hatchery region, fishermen harvested about 6.5 million
hatchery fish valued at $32 million, or 37 percent of the region’s landings
value. Chum salmon contributed $24 million of that total.
Kodiak has the state’s
third highest hatchery production and about 3.4 million hatchery salmon were
caught last year, nearly all pinks. The value to fishermen was close to $5
million, or 11 percent of the total dockside value for Kodiak fishermen.
Three hatcheries in Cook
Inlet produce primarily sockeye and pink salmon. About 42,000 hatchery-produced
salmon were harvested there last year for a total of nearly $2 million, or nine
percent of the value for the region.
About 1.7 billion tiny
salmon were released by Alaska hatcheries in 2019 which operators predict will produce
a total return of about 52 million salmon in 2020 including 35 million pinks,
13 million chums, 2.2 million sockeyes, 1.2 million cohos, and 100,000 Chinook
salmon.
Alaska’s on acid
Alaska waters are
showing effects of increasing acidity faster and more severely than lower
latitudes because cold water is richer in carbon dioxide and melting sea ice
and glaciers worsen the problem. The off-kilter ocean chemistry reduces the
amount of minerals sea creatures need to build and maintain their shells.
That’s the verdict in
the 2019 report by the Alaska Ocean Acidification
Network, which updates the
science going on around the state. The Network has modeled 40 years of ocean
changes in the Gulf and is doing the same for the greater Arctic.
At Sitka, researchers
are testing the effects of acidification and ocean warming on the earliest life
stages of herring; early signs point to warming as the bigger threat.
At the Alutiiq Pride
Shellfish Hatchery at Seward, studies on razor clams indicate they are hurt by
increasing acidity.
Tiny swimming sea snails
called pteropods that make up 40 percent of the diet of juvenile pink salmon
already are showing extensive shell corrosion in both the Gulf of Alaska and
Bering Sea.
The 2019 report also
updates the monitoring being done since 2017 by the ferry Columbia as part of
an unprecedented Alaska/Canada project to learn how increasing ocean acidity
affects fisheries. The 418-foot ferry sucks up water samples every two minutes
and has produced more than 700,000 measurements. The monitoring will resume
when the Columbia is back on the water in May.
“The fantastic thing
about this vessel is it’s going from Bellingham to Skagway and back every
week. That’s a
1,600-kilometer run. Nowhere in the world is there a ferry system that’s
outfitted with CO2 sensors that’s running that scale of a transit. This is
really exciting,” said Wiley Evans, program technical lead with the Hakai
Institute.
Early data point to an
extremely variable seascape in which the surface water is more corrosive in
fall and winter, representing the most vulnerable time for species that are
sensitive to acidity. When spring arrives, the phytoplankton bloom removes
carbon dioxide from the water through photosynthesis, and the water gets warmer
making conditions more favorable for shell production.
So far, only a limited
number of Alaska’s commercially important species have been
studied for their response to
increasing acidity.
