Shellfish hatcheries could be in Alaska’s future, under legislation recently signed into law.
The measure allows the Department of Fish and Game to manage shellfish enhancement and restoration projects. Restoration projects are designed to bring a struggling stock back to a self-sustaining level, while enhancement projects would boost the stock to allow for commercial harvest.
The new laws give the department another tool to address declining shellfish stock, such as red and blue king crab, sea cucumber, abalone and razor clams, said Ketchikan-Wrangell Rep. Dan Ortiz, who sponsored the bill that passed the House and Senate in April with a combined 53-2 vote.
The only votes against the measure came from Wasilla Republican Reps. David Eastman and Christopher Kurka, who is running for governor.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy signed the measure into law on July 8.
Unlike aquatic farming where commercial operations can grow shellfish, such as oysters, for private harvest, projects allowed under House Bill 41 would be run by eligible nonprofits with the goal of releasing hatchery-raised stock into the wild for public use, said Wrangell’s Julie Decker, executive director for the Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation, a statewide organization that advocates for research and development in the seafood industry.
At present, the department’s only tool for managing shellfish stocks is closing fisheries, which doesn’t always work, especially if the resource has fallen below a self-sustaining threshold, said Heather McCarty, of the Central Bering Sea Fishermen’s Association. McCarty has been involved the past seven years in efforts to pass legislation similar to HB 41.
This year’s change in the law comes at a time when shellfish populations throughout the state have been in decline due to factors including ocean acidification, predations and other causes that aren’t fully understood, Ortiz said.
There have been widespread king crab closures in the Bering Sea and around Kodiak. In Southeast, Dungeness crab predation by sea otters moving in from the Outer Coast has been a huge problem, Decker said.
“(Sea otters) literally eat everything off the bottom — starfish, sea cucumber, abalone, sea urchins, crab,” she said. “They’ve closed down areas on Prince of Wales Island to crab fishing and dive fishing because there’s nothing left.”
Decker said the legislation is modeled on the state’s salmon hatchery program, which began in the 1970s in response to declining salmon harvests.
Most salmon hatcheries in the state are run by regional nonprofits with a board comprised of local members. The salmon are reared in hatcheries and released into the wild once they reach a certain stage in their lifecycle. The hatcheries are funded, in part, through cost-recovery harvests of returning salmon and fees collected from commercial fishermen.
Decker said a similar system, made possible by the legislation, is the long-term goal for the shellfish industry. However, that is years away from becoming a reality.
“It takes a lot of time, research and capital to get to the point where a nonprofit will be able to supplement particular stocks of shellfish. Not to mention shellfish can be slow growing,” Ortiz said.
At present, there are a handful of nonprofits conducting research projects related to shellfish restoration and enhancement, Decker said. Projects with the most momentum include king crab around Kodiak, the Pribilof Islands and the Bering Sea.
These projects date back to 2007, when a group of crab stakeholders banded together to figure out how to combat declining red and blue king crab populations. The resulting organization, the Alaska King Crab Research, Rehabilitation and Biology Program, began working to perfect the technology to raise crab in a hatchery setting for release into the wild.
Scientists drew from crab-rearing efforts in other countries, working to optimize variables like water temperature and feed in order to create the perfect conditions for baby crab, said McCarty, co-chair of the program.
McCarty said the group knew it would eventually hit a regulatory wall since the laws at the time did not allow for large-scale crab hatchery operations, but first, they wanted to prove they could do it.
“We did multiple years of raising crab, getting them to the point where the survival rate was very high,” she said. “We’d reached a point where we really couldn’t do anything more without legislative action.”
With the passage of HB 41, research projects will be able to scale up over time. While projects remain in a research phase, funding will likely come from grants and other sources available to nonprofits, Decker said.
Although the legislation received wide support, some raised concerns it was moving too quickly.
“Much more information is required to develop and model a meaningful shellfish hatchery program in Alaska,” Petersburg-based fisheries consultant Timothy Koeneman wrote in comments submitted to the Legislature in January.
“An outside review of factors contributing to the failures of once significant shellfish fisheries in the state should be accomplished before embarking on a wide-open process on shellfish hatcheries,” he wrote.
Decker said she expects projects will start slowly, ramping up over time with the aim of answering such questions. All projects will be reviewed by the Department of Fish and Game before permitting.
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