salmon

Jon Rowley, who “helped make and shape Seattle’s reputation as a food destination while earning his own reputation as a culinary evangelist nationwide,” has died at 74, said the Seattle Times. 

A plague of parasitic sea lice has spread through salmon farms globally, causing an estimated $1 billion in losses and sending prices of farm-raised salmon up 50 percent, according to the Washington Post. "The lice are actually tiny crustaceans that have infested salmon farms in the U.S., Canada, Scotland, Norway and Chile, major suppliers of the high-protein, heart-healthy fish," the Post said. As a result, the industry has contracted by about 10 percent.

Even as Alaska experienced a banner year for sockeye salmon, some commercial fishermen had to stop hauling in the fish because there weren’t enough workers to process them.

A group representing farmers in Washington State and Oregon is urging the Interior Department to convene the “God squad” — an interagency committee empowered to override the Endangered Species Act — over complaints that the act's protections on salmon are hurting growers and others.

In a transaction that was 25 years in the making, U.S.-based AquaBounty Technologies announced the sale of 10,000 pounds of its GMO salmon to customers in Canada, meaning "genetically engineered salmon has reached the dinner plate," says the journal Nature. "This is the first time that a genetically engineered animal has been sold for food on the open market."

The Prince Edward Island environment minister approved a proposal by AquaBounty, the developer of a genetically engineered salmon, to produce 250 tonnes a year of the fish at Rollo Bay West, on the northeastern shore of the province, reported the CBC.

Salmon fishermen are among many groups in Alaska upset by the EPA’s announcement that the Pebble Limited Partnership can now file for a mining permit in Bristol Bay, in the southwestern part of the state.

West Coast fishery managers decided to severely restrict the commercial salmon season in California this year because of historically low numbers of adult chinook salmon in the ocean, says the San Francisco Chronicle. The drop in population is a lingering effect of the five-year drought.

The 2017 Alaska salmon catch could be twice as much as last year’s, with projections of 204 million fish compared 122 million in 2016, says Alaska Dispatch News. “The total dockside value of the 2016 salmon fishery barely topped $406 million, the lowest in 14 years,” says ADN.

Pacific Northwest fishing and conservation groups have filed suit against the EPA for not doing more to protect wild sockeye salmon from rising water temperatures due in large part to climate change. The lawsuit is considered to be the first against President Trump's EPA.

The price of farmed Atlantic salmon is on the rise because of "one tiny, nefarious little creature," the sea louse, a parasitic crustacean about the size of an aspirin tablet that feeds on salmon, says Quartz. There were acute infestations in Scottish and Norwegian fish farms last year and Norwegian exports dropped 5 percent.

A bipartisan water bill that includes drought relief for California could be put to a vote in Congress before the end of this week, said House and Senate leaders after agreeing on terms of the $558 million package. California Sen. Barbara Boxer said the bill tramples on the Endangered Species Act in order to divert more water to agriculture at the expense of salmon and the imperiled Delta smelt, said The Associated Press.

In a rare bit of positive news about the U.S. diet, Americans upped their seafood intake by a pound last year to 15.5 pounds, according to the annual Fisheries of the United States Report released by NOAA last week. Even though that only amounts to about four extra seafood meals per person per year, it constitutes the “biggest biggest leap in seafood consumption in 20 years," says NPR.

California’s coastal ecosystem is in the midst of a massive “disruption” because of climate change, says the San Francisco Chronicle. For example, warmer waters have stalled the growth of kelp forests, causing sea urchins, which depend on kelp as their main food source, to mature abnormally. Their spiky shells are nearly hollow, and North Coast divers have brought in only one-tenth of their normally lucrative catch.

Federal officials are crafting an agreement to divide the steelhead and salmon catch in the Columbia River watershed between tribal, sport and commercial fishermen, says The Seattle Times. The plan would cover fishing rights in Oregon, Idaho, and Washington State, probably for the next 10 years if the length of previous agreements is any indicator.

In an about-face, federal officials will not be cutting farm water supplies from Shasta Dam, California's largest, after all, reports The Sacramento Bee. Federal fisheries officials have been in tense conversation over the last month with state and federal water regulators over how much of Shasta’s water to hold back in order to protect the endangered winter-run Chinook salmon. The National Marine Fisheries Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had seemed set to seriously limit water deliveries to Central Valley farmers.

The Columbia River sockeye run is off to a record-setting start, says The Seattle Times, despite the fact that earlier in the season fishery managers forecasted a low salmon return due to high water temperatures. As of Monday, “June 13, a total of 33,496 sockeye [had] been counted at Bonneville Dam, the highest count through that date since at least 1938 — the previous record was 24,728 sockeye last year,” reports the Times.