Trawl bycatch

http://www.tholepin.blogspot.com/

I'm not even going to read this.......always pisses me off. I already know how the story ends.

Just tear-able, go look at the pictures and see how happy the deck hands are drinking their beer and looking at the 4 foot deep pile of bottom fish and halibut going to waste.
And the government wants to limit us to one fish and pay those ass-holes to catch a second fish!

I will never read that type of thing before work again. Make my blood boil. This might be the only fishery that pisses my off more than GN's.

JFC!!!

I knew there was a reason I did not want to open that link up. How this egregious waste of such a wonderful resource is allowed to continue in this day and age stuns me.


Fishy

I see one small halibut and the rest looks like rocksole

Sickening to see the obscene amount of wasted biomass incurred in these deplorable fisheries.

GDITMMM!

West Coast Trawl is 100% retention now.

Pretty good stuff in this one, see some of the comments. NOAA gets blasted pretty hard for protecting the commercials.



RFA encourages anglers to sit down and view the testimony, archived it its entirety at the House Resource Committee website at

http://resources.edgeboss.net/wmedia/resources/112/2011_10_26_fc.wvx



For an abbreviated look at NOAA's bad day at Congress, use the scroll bar in the media window to fast-forward ahead to a few of the best parts.



1:15 - Committee Chairman Doc Hastings describes lack of response from Obama administration regarding National Ocean Policy bureaucracy.



40:20 - Rep. Rush Holt provides single token letter of angler support for the executive order, that of John McMurray, an advisor for Environmental Defense Fund hand-picked by Lubchenco to represent New York fishermen at the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council (MAFMC).



1:34:10 - Rep. Don Young (R-AK) grills Dr. Lubchenco on her comments that "quite a few fishermen" support the executive order, though she's unable to produce a name except to say the MAFMC ("same one as you put catch shares involved into," replies Young.)



1:42:00 - Rep. Steve Southerland (R-FL) questions the use of new "regulation" under the executive order, though neither Dr. Lubchenco nor Sutley seem willing or capable of appropriately answering the congressman's question about regulations and enforcement.



1:54:40 - In his opening five-minute remarks, Donofrio calls executive order "a complete government takeover of our fisheries," while criticizing NOAA for not funding scientific efforts which he calls the "administration's complete disregard of personal liberties and state's rights."



2:13:03 - In answering a question from Chairman Hastings about science, Donofrio says NOAA "couldn't run a kindergarten playground," charging the fisheries service with perjuring itself in a recent black sea bass lawsuit, saying "they lied to the judge, yet they're keeping us at the dock based on MRFSS data."



2:23:30 - Rep. Bill Flores (R-TX) calls the ocean policy "ideological" and asks Donofrio about how his input as a stakeholder is considered by NOAA. "Dr. Lubchenco's administration has been whacking people off the councils and stacking them with their own people," Donofrio replied. "So of course she throws it back to the council now and said 'okay the councils are going to make the decision.'"

AM, the question was tongue in cheek.

So many people are to busy with their fast food, drive up lives to care about what happens in politics or their environment because they have to rush home to watch DWS or some other drivel.....

We really have gotten pathetic.


Fishy

Way to much bycatch waste allowed by National Marine Fisheries
Service (NMFS), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA),Commerce.

2011 and 2012 Harvest Specifications for Groundfish

http://www.fakr.noaa.gov/frules/76fr11111.pdf

This is from the IPHC program manager for Halibut today.

I can’t recall if we’ve gotten into the details of how bycatch in the trawl fisheries off AK is managed, so this may be a repeat of what I’ve mentioned previously. In any case, the North Pacific Council manages bycatch thru limits on the amount which the trawl fishery is allowed to kill each year. That limit, termed PSC (Prohibited Species Catch) limit, is set at 2000 metric tons (or 3.3 million lbs net weight) for the entire Gulf of AK trawl fisheries. Once the limit is reached, trawling stops and trawl fisheries are closed. So a week of high bycatch by the trawlers is “shooting themselves in the foot”, as it will ultimately impact their ability to catch cod, rock sole, or whatever they may be targeting.

As an aside, the Council is in the process of reducing the PSC limits for the Gulf fisheries. (There is also a limit for all hook-&-line fisheries as well.) The halibut sportfish industry has been sadly under-represented and fairly silent during this debate at Council meetings. Obviously you have concerns about this, so I’d strongly encourage you to get involved by sending letters to the Council and read the documents to see how policy is being shaped and decisions made. The Council is the agency who makes those decisions, not IPHC, and any industry views and comments need to be directed to the Council process.

Here is a link to the Council web site on halibut bycatch:
http://www.fakr.noaa.gov/npfmc/bycatch-controls/bsai-goa-halibut-bycatch.html

In no way am I trying to condone the amount of halibut killed as bycatch, Richard. We believe bycatch is higher than I should be, in large part due to the open access management system for the trawl fishery. In other jurisdictions where an IQ program has been established, halibut bycatch has dropped tremendously, to the benefit of all fishers. We have been making comment to the Council on many occasions that bycatch needs to be lowered. I hope you and others in the sport fishing sector will become more vocal in that debate.

I understand the concern for Halibut but it is just one of 130 species of by catch being wasted up there for many years .

Data for the 1992 Bering Sea pollock trawl fishery show discards of nearly 130 species, including over 100 million pollock, 8.5 million rock sole, 3.2 million Pacific cod, and 2.3 million flounders (NOAA/NMFS 1992). Another 200 million pollock were reported to be discarded in other Bering Sea groundfish fisheries. The aggregate discards in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska bottom fisheries approach 1 billion animals annually, exclusive of discards occurring in the inshore salmon and herring fisheries and offshore crab fisheries.

http://www.fao.org/docrep/003/t4890e/T4890E04.htm

AM, thanks!

The proposed 2011 and 2012 harvest specifications for ground fish of the GOA and Pacific halibut PSC allowances were published in the Federal Register on December 8, 2010 (75 FR 76352).Comments were invited and accepted through January 7, 2011. NMFS did not receive any comments on the proposed harvest specifications. In December 2010, NMFS consulted with the Council regarding the 2011 and 2012 harvest specifications. After considering public testimony, as well as biological and economic data that were available at the Council’s December 2010 meeting, NMFS is implementing the final 2011 and 2012 harvest specifications, as recommended by the Council.

http://www.fakr.noaa.gov/frules/76fr11111.pdf

For those interested on what is happening with the ground fisheries up north, I would suggest taking your time when reading the 29 pages in this pdf.

equals- why I can not catch or if able, keep a cod of any kind in the lower Puget Sound.
Thank you Mr. Dicks and your well supplied lobbyists from the commercial fleets.

Honestly.....

This is the day and age in which you get crucified if you throw your coffee cup into the wrong trashcan at SEATAC.

But 10 million lbs a year of dead bycatch. No big deal.......

How many kings have you killed lately?

http://tholepin.blogspot.com/2012/11/how-many-chinook-did-you-kill-this-year.html

Salmon crisis or NPFMC crisis?

By Don Johnson
Soldotna
Some people are claiming that Alaska is experiencing some kind of salmon crisis but is that what is really happening? If there were a real salmon crisis most would expect the blame to be directed towards either a freshwater or saltwater source problem. Freshwater fishermen would claim the problem to be in the saltwater and saltwater fishermen claim it to be in the freshwater. Some even see it as all sides just catching to many fish.
In general most of our local salmon fisheries have been fishing the same way since about 1980 but there has been a substantial increase in one type of fishery. That fishery is our Commercial Pollock Fishery. This trawler fishery targets pollock and it catches a lot of them but it also accidentally kills about 3.4 king salmon per metric ton of pollock. It is a proven fact that just our legal commercial trawlers take over a million tons of pollock each year. Just doing some basic math shows a possible 3.4 million king salmon being killed and dumped by this fishery each year but the NPFMC has set annual trawler by-catch kill caps on king salmon at 25,000 in the Gulf of Alaska and 60,000 in the Bering Sea.
While these commercial trawlers were by-catching salmon, they were also by-catching and tossing overboard dead smaller bait fish which salmon feed on; thus also reducing the prey our salmon have access to. Tremendous schools of herring, cod, rockfish, sand fish, hooligan, candle fish, smelt, stickleback, wolf fish and squid have been permanently wiped out with bait fish by-catch dumping. This environmental destruction then forces our salmon to forage longer to meet their daily and future calorie intake needs. As trawlers kill and dump this salmon prey back into the ocean, they dramatically increase a salmon’s chances of never achieving sufficient fat reserves to make it back to their native freshwater rivers and streams.
The result of all this trawlers fisheries abuse are dwindling fish stocks across the board because of the enormous amount of fish being trashed in the North Pacific Ocean. Fish are basically being killed faster than they can reproduce and just like Wall Street finally collapsed itself with poor oversight and mismanagement, our pollock fishery is also headed towards that same fate. If the North Pacific Fishery Management Council does not take decisive action to reduce pollock catch levels, this fishery must also collapse because of its own mismanagement. Of the four Alaska pollock stocks, two are currently shut down to commercial fishing and a third is just a fraction of what it used to be. In spite of all the warning signs, which include five years in a row of low juvenile survivorship, this industry has continued to target pollock spawners by taking huge numbers of pregnant females just before they release their eggs.
The NPFMC has no idea how many salmon are out there cruising the North Pacific or how many are being trashed as a direct result of its trawler fisheries but it has arbitrarily set salmon by-catch limits anyway at 25,000 per year in the Gulf of Alaska and 60,000 per year in the Bering Sea. How does any fisheries management body set by-catch limits if it has no idea how many fish they are dealing with? With this kind of mis-management it is possible to set by-catch limits equal to total reproduction limits without knowing it, thus resulting in total resource collapse. Setting caps on salmon by-catch is not a management plan, it is only a plan for fisheries disaster.
Do we have a salmon crisis? I believe most can see that the facts point to us actually having a fisheries management crisis. The true problem is that the NPFMC allows its members to have direct financial conflicts of interests. This membership defect reaches to the very core of the Council’s ability to correctly act on the public’s behalf to safeguard our fisheries natural resources. Just like on Wall Street, profit driven Council members are an over-riding consideration within this issue. This is not a salmon crisis, it is a NPFMC membership crisis and if it continues, it will eventually collapse all of our fisheries interests.

Mr. Johnson should have left Wall Street out of it. Doesn't he know that the Street belongs on the Dark Side.

I heard it was all Doc's fault.

I don't even like the fact that "gill netters", in many cases....are allow to keep and sell "by catch"......in river gill netters, need to go/develop a way of releasing non-target fish.....or get out of the business.

In 2011, an estimated 25,499 Chinook salmon were taken in the bycatch of BSAI pollock trawl fisheries (NMFS 2012), of which 7,136 were estimated from the trawl “A” season and 18,363 were estimated for the “B” season. Since 1991, the year with the highest overall Chinook bycatch in the BSAI was 2007 (Fig. 2) when an estimated 121,770 fish were taken. The genetic sample set for the 2011 “A” season Chinook salmon bycatch was 695 fish, corresponding to a sampling rate of 9.7%. The genetic sample set for the 2011 “B” season Chinook bycatch was 1,778 fish, corresponding to a sampling rate of 9.7%. The annual sampling rate for the entire year was 9.7%. There were more Chinook salmon taken in the “B” season than in the “A” season for the first time since 2005.

2011 was the first year systematic random sampling was employed for collecting genetic tissue from the Bering Sea Chinook salmon bycatch and Figure 4 shows that the resulting Chinook salmon bycatch samples were collected in proportion through time and space with the total catch. The sample spatial and temporal distribution was excellent in 2011 compared to previous years when samples were collected more opportunistically.

From the 2011 Chinook salmon bycatch, a total of 2,756 samples were analyzed of which 2,720 samples were successfully genotyped for 35 or more of the 43 SNP loci, a success rate of 98.7%.

Results suggest that 85% of the 695 samples from the “A” season originated from Alaskan river systems flowing into the Bering Sea with the Coastal Western Alaska stock contributing the most (54%), followed by the North Alaska Peninsula (22%), and Upper Yukon (7%). The other major contributor was British Columbia (7%) (Table 1).

For the “B” season, over 79% of the 1,778 samples originated from Alaskan river systems flowing into the Bering Sea with the Coastal Western Alaska region contributing the most (74%). This was followed by British Columbia (8%) and the U.S. west coast stock (6%)

For the entire year, an estimated 81% of the bycatch samples were estimated to be from Alaskan river systems flowing into the Bering Sea with the Coastal Western Alaska stock contributing the most (68%), trailed by the North Alaska Peninsula (9%). Other contributors were British Columbia (8%), and U.S. west coast (6%) (Table 3). The “overall” and “B” season stock compositions were similar, which was anticipated given that 72% of the samples were from the “B” season. In 2011, 72% of the Chinook salmon bycatch was from the “B” season of the Bering Sea pollock fishery.

Full report here....

http://www.afsc.noaa.gov/Publications/AFSC-TM/NOAA-TM-AFSC-244.pdf

No one should be surprised. Just one more hole in what appears to be sinking ship.