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Regional council says it won’t tighten fishing regulations in Bristol Bay red king crab savings areaThe North Pacific Fishery Management Council will not move forward with a request to close the Bristol Bay red king crab savings area to all commercial fishing. At its February meeting, the regulatory council looked at the effectiveness of closing the 4,000-square-nautical-mile section of the eastern Bering Sea to commercial trawl, pot and longline fishing, but decided not to tighten regulations in the area.
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Three tribal governments and the Center for Biological Diversity plan to sue to stop the project, which they say could lead to more commercial bottom trawling.
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Alaska pollock’s “A” season opened saturday. That’s when the pollock trawlers set out into the Bering Sea to scoop up the whitefish that keeps Unalaska’s lights on.
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The claims to extended continental shelf territory, to be asserted by the U.S. State Department, include an area within the Arctic Ocean that is bigger than California.
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Annual reports for the Bering Sea, Aleutian Islands and Gulf of Alaska reveal mixed signs for fish stocks in changing conditions.
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The majority of Alaska’s Bristol Bay commercial red king crab have been caught for the season. This year’s quota was rather low, coming in at about 2.1 million pounds for the entire fleet. To compare, that’s less than half the total allowable catch, or TAC, for the 2018/2019 season. Ethan Nichols is the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s area management biologist for groundfish and shellfish in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands region. He said even just a couple million pounds was a welcome amount for harvesters during historic lows in the state’s commercial crab industry.
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Encounters with humans from 2017 to 2021 killed hundreds of Steller sea lions and other marine mammals that swim in Alaska waters, along with dozens of Alaska whales, according to a new federal report.
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When scientists estimated that more than 10 billion snow crab had disappeared from the Eastern Bering Sea between 2018 and 2021, industry stakeholders and fisheries scientists had several ideas about where they’d gone. Some thought bycatch, disease, cannibalism, or crab fishing, while others believed it could be predation from other sea animals like Pacific cod. But now, scientists say they’ve distinguished the most likely cause for the disappearance. The culprit is a marine heatwave between 2018 and 2019, according to a new study authored by a group of scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
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The Center for Biological Diversity said in a Monday statement that NOAA Fisheries needs to uphold its duty to protect the killer whales, which are protected by the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
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The Center for Biological Diversity intends to sue the federal government over a new marine highway in Alaska. The environmental group sent a notice letter on Sept. 21 to the U.S. Maritime Administration, which designated the new highway. The letter contends that the federal agency is violating the Endangered Species Act for failing to consider possible harm to endangered wildlife along Alaska’s coast.