Sorted by date Results 101 - 125 of 129
One of the biggest sea stars in the world has been devastated by a malady likened to an underwater "zombie apocalypse" and could soon be granted Endangered Species Act protection. Sunflower sea stars, fast-swimming creatures that can have up to 24 arms and grow to three feet in diameter, have largely vanished from their habitat, which stretches from the western tip of Alaska's Aleutian Islands to the waters off Mexico's Baja California. The culprit is sea star wasting syndrome, a body-mangling...
The first-ever cancellation of Alaska’s Bering Sea snow crab harvest was unprecedented and a shock to the state’s fishing industry and the communities that depend on it. Unfortunately for that industry and those communities, those conditions are likely to be common in the future, according to several scientists who made presentations at the Alaska Marine Science Symposium held in late January. The ocean conditions that triggered the crash were likely warmer than any extreme possible during the preindustrial period but now can be expected in...
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has rejected a petition from crab fishers to bar all commercial fishing for six months in an area of the Bering Sea designated as a special protective zone for red king crab, which have suffered a population crash. The decision announced on Jan. 20 by NOAA Fisheries confirms action in December by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council. The council rejected the emergency request, which was made by the Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers, a harvester group. In a statement, NOAA Fisheries said the...
There are at least two distinct populations of harbor porpoises in Southeast Alaska waters, and one of them — which swims around Zarembo and Wrangell islands — appears to be particularly vulnerable to deaths from entanglements in commercial fishing gear, according to newly released information from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists. The breakdown of Southeast Alaska’s porpoises into separate northern and southern populations contrasts with current management, which treats the region’s porpoises as a single populat...
As the Alaska Legislature’s 2023 session approaches, a state Senate leader last Thursday highlighted the potential benefits of that body’s newly formed bipartisan majority coalition. Incoming Senate Majority Leader Cathy Giessel said the nine Democrats and eight Republicans in the coalition have shared values. “This coalition formed with a goal, and that is working together to keep Alaska a producing state – not a consuming state, but a producing state,” the Anchorage Republican told the Resource Development Council for Alaska at a breakfast...
Aid to Alaska fishermen, seafood processors and marketers and communities was included in the year-end congressional appropriations package that won final passage last month. The $300 million in aid follows official disaster declarations issued by U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo for Alaska salmon and crab fishery failures dating back to 2020, as well as some salmon failures in Washington state dating back to 2019. “This will be relief for commercial, recreational, subsistence harvesters, all those who were directly impacted by the f...
Alaska teens have largely ditched cigarettes over the past two decades, but they have substituted that unhealthy habit with another: vaping. About 25% of surveyed high schoolers reported using electronic cigarettes in the past 30 days, according to the Alaska Tobacco Facts Update, released last month by the Alaska Department of Health. The national rate of teen e-cigarette use, also known as vaping, is even higher, at 33%, the report said. Among Alaska youth, cigarette smoking has declined drastically since the 1990s, from 37% in 1995 to 16%...
Disruptions in Alaska over the last year, some of them threatening health and safety of people, are part of the ongoing pattern of rapid warming and transformation of the Arctic, said an annual report released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Last December’s record-wet weather in Fairbanks, marked by crushing snow loads and winter rain that left a thick, long-lasting layer of ice on the ground, was one of those disruptions. So were the August deluge that produced the rainiest day on record in Utqiagvik, the record-setting...
There is danger lurking on the floor of the Bering and Chukchi seas for mussels, snails, clams, worms and other cold-water invertebrates, according to a new study led by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists. If climate change continues its current trajectory, the Bering and Chukchi seafloor areas will be too warm for those creatures by the end of the century. In turn, that means trouble for walruses and other marine species. Snails and mussels are particularly important to commercially harvested fish like halibut and...
Alaska Native tribes seeking better protection from the environmental impacts of Canadian mines have enlisted allies in their flight: Lower 48 tribal governments with concerns of their own about transboundary mining impacts. A delegation of tribal representatives from Alaska, Washington state, Montana and Idaho traveled to Washington, D.C., last week for meetings that pushed for action to regulate downstream effects of mines in British Columbia. The meetings Dec. 6 and 7 were with Biden administration officials and officials at the Canadian...
New controls on how fish are commercially harvested and more research to understand the effects of climate change in the ocean and freshwater spawning grounds are some of the key recommendations of an Alaska task force examining ways to address bycatch, the term for capture of untargeted species in commercial seafood harvests. Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who created the task force a year ago, released the group’s final report on Dec. 8. The collapse of salmon runs vital to western Alaska — and public complaints that too many salmon were being int...
Seventeen of Alaska’s 20 state senators and senator-elects have banded together to form a bipartisan majority coalition that members promise will be moderate and consensus-focused. Gary Stevens, a Kodiak Republican and veteran lawmaker known as a moderate, will be president, returning to the role he held from 2009 to 2012. “It’s a pleasure for me to announce that we have a very healthy majority and we’ve found a way to share responsibilities between all of us,” Stevens said at an Anchorage news conference late Friday. Cathy Giessel, a Republica...
Alaska’s economy shows signs of prosperity. But it’s also facing an emerging crisis. A veteran economist described these contradictory forces in a presentation Nov. 16 at an industry conference in Anchorage. “We have the strangest and weirdest economy that I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been following the economy for a long, long time,” Neal Fried of the Alaska Department of Labor told the Resource Development Council for Alaska. By many measures, Alaska’s economy is in good shape, said Fried, whose economic presentations have become a staple at the...
Alaskans may have decided to re-elect Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Rep. Mary Peltola to Congress, but the final outcome will not be known until the last ballots are tallied next week and, in one or both races, ranked-choice voting is factored into the decision. Murkowski, a Republican who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump, has been the target of ire from Trump and from hard-liner conservatives. She trailed conservative Republican challenger Kelly Tshibaka by a small margin, 91,205 to 94,138, as of Monday (42.84% to 44.22%). But the...
Natalie Bennett was walking surveying a beach on Annette Island as part of a team trying to defend Southeast Alaska from marine invaders when she made a major but ominous discovery: the state’s first documented shell of an invasive European green crab. Bennett, a summer intern with the nonprofit Sealaska Heritage Institute who was working with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, noticed the tell-tale spines on the side of the eye areas. Right away, she notified one of her internship advisers, Barb Lake of NOAA Fisheries. ...
The stakes in Alaska are high in the search for a solution to the problem of bycatch, the unintended at-sea harvest of non-target species, such as hundreds of thousands of salmon a year, by commercial fishermen that are going after pollock or other fish. A special task force is nearing the end of a year-long process to find solutions that satisfy competing interests to the problem of bycatch. Many of the mostly Indigenous residents of western Alaska who depend on now-faltering salmon runs in the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers have said strict rules...
The Alaska Quakers apologized to Alaska Native communities for the boarding schools it ran in Alaska and the United States, which forcibly assimilated and abused Indigenous children, separated them from their families and caused intergenerational trauma. In the 1800s and 1900s, the Quakers ran about 30 boarding schools for Native American and Alaska Native youth in the U.S. and its territories, including one in Alaska — the Douglas Island Friends Mission School in Juneau. Members of the Alaska Friends Conference of the Religious Society of F...
Alaska has special opportunities for developing a thriving aquaculture industry, but also special challenges that stand in the way of such ambitions, according to a new strategic science plan issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The plan is intended to guide aquaculture-related research conducted over the next five years by NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center. The report focuses on “the development of shellfish and algae aquaculture, also known as mariculture.” It adds, “This plan specifically includes shellfi...
When the remnants of Typhoon Merbok were barreling toward western Alaska to unleash what turned out to be the region’s strongest storm in more than half a century, meteorologists knew what was coming. What they could not predict was the exact level and location of flooding – devastation that prompted a federal disaster declaration by President Joe Biden and a whirlwind Alaska tour by Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell. “The large-scale weather models nailed this storm, days in advance. The storm surge model...
Alaska officials are asking the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide 100% of the funds necessary for Western Alaska communities to recover from damages inflicted by Typhoon Merbok. That would match the 100% funding that was committed to help Puerto Rico recover from Hurricane Fiona in President Joe Biden’s federal disaster declaration. Typically, FEMA covers 75% of disaster-relief costs, leaving the remainder to be matched by state, local or tribal governments. For Western Alaska, “we feel that that’s just not acceptable, parti...
Young Alaskans seeking to break into commercial fishing face a lot of the same barriers that confront young farmers in the Lower 48 states, but they have far fewer resources to help overcome those barriers, according to newly published research. A study by Alaska experts with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration argues that the fishing industry and the communities that depend on fishing should have support similar to that offered to young farmers. "The sheer scale, depth, and...
There is only one species of abalone native to Alaska waters, and a new project is underway to try find ways to boost its depleted numbers. An Alaska Abalone Recovery Working Group is brainstorming ideas for strengthening the state’s vulnerable population of pinto abalones, also known as Northern abalones or, to the Indigenous peoples of the region, Gunxaa and Gúlaa. The working group includes representatives from state and federal agencies, tribal governments and others, including support from Alaska Sea Grant, a program based at the Un...
Over a five-year period, 867 Alaska sea lions, seals, whales and small marine mammals like dolphins died or were gravely injured from interactions with humans, according to a report newly released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The report, required by the Marine Mammal Protection Act, lists documented cases of human-inflicted harm from 2016 to 2020 to mammal species managed by NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service. The vast majority of cases involve entanglements in fishing gear or marine debris, and Steller sea l...
For Alaska salmon fishing, the summer of 2022 is the best of times and the worst of times. In the Bristol Bay region, the sockeye salmon run and harvest amounts set new records, as was predicted in the preseason forecast. As of July 18, the run had totaled over 73.7 million salmon, with a harvest of over 56.3 million. The previous record was set just last year, with a 67.7 million run of sockeyes and a third-biggest-ever harvest of nearly 42 million of the fish. But along the Yukon River, a prized salmon run is heading toward a worst-ever seaso...
Alaska was the only U.S. coastal region to have an increase in the confirmed cases of large whales entangled in fishing gear in 2020, a contrast to a national trend of declining cases over the past six to eight years, according to a report issued June 28 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Of the 53 cases of large whales entangled in fishing gear nationally in 2020, 11 occurred in Alaska, according to the report, from NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service. The previous year, there were 75 confirmed cases of whale e...
