Halibut Deck Sorting on Track to Deliver Substantial Mortality Improvements This Season

By John Sackton, Seafoodnews.com, December 3, 2015 —

Release of halibut with accelerometer tag, Port Frederick, AK courtesy of Page Drobny

Halibut deck sorting has helped flatfish catcher-processors reduce halibut bycatch this season. The fleet also used halibut excluders and changed locations to avoid halibut hotspots.  The net result is that the flatfish trawl fleet is making progress on its commitment to achieve halibut bycatch reductions.

With the season winding down, it appears that the fleet is on track to meet its target of a 218 ton (480,000 pound) round weight reduction in halibut bycatch in area 4CDE, the central Bering Sea.

Halibut deck sorting is done with a special permit from NMFS called an Exempted Fishing Permit, or EFP. The permit allowed fishermen to remove halibut from the codend on deck as the catch is dumped into the fish tank rather than sending them into the tank along with everything else. Fish sorted on deck are rapidly moved on a chute to on-board scientists who document the length and condition of the fish before returning them to the sea.

Preliminary data from scientists monitoring the program show that deck sorting reduced the mortality rate of the halibut in the EFP to an average of 48%. The rate for halibut without deck sorting averages approximately 80%. The 48% mortality rate included the halibut that were missed during deck sorting (about 5% by number) and recovered in the factory. For those missed fish, a mortality rate of 90% was applied in the EFP.

In addition, this year the program was expanded to the yellowfin sole fisheries, which involves a wider set of vessels than those who participated in previous years. There also, sorting in the first 20 minutes on deck resulted in lower mortalities than the 83% mortality currently expected in the yellowfin sole fishery.

The latest totals for the nine catcher processors who participated in the deck sorting program this year show a savings of about 150 tons of halibut, all in the 4CDE area.

The efforts to reduce mortality rates for halibut came with a cost in lost target fish (with excluders) and lost fishing time (with deck sorting). Operating with deck sorting typically meant that the participating vessels had to forfeit one tow per day due to the time taken to sort through each tow during the day.

Future projects include new tagging studies with an accelerometer tag that will accurately measure the survival of halibut once released. Funded by the North Pacific Research Board and NOAA’s Saltonstall-Kennedy Grant Program, the project was developed by Paige Drobny, the fisheries biologist consultant for the tribal members of the Chaninik Qaluyat Nunivak (CQN) Working Group along with Dr. Craig Rose of Fish Next Research. The working group is a collaboration between the Bering Sea Elders Group, the Association of Village Council Presidents, and the bottom trawl fleet represented by the Alaska Seafood Cooperative.

The accelerometer tags will be used to determine actual survivability which will then allow for comparison to of viability assessments by observers using the long-standing methods. If deck sorting becomes a permanent aspect of handling halibut bycatch, the results of this study will be useful for both verifying whether current viability sampling methods are accurate as well as helping establish a better set of indicators than the ones in use today.

The idea of deck sorting did not come out of nowhere in 2015 when bycatch reductions were needed. The Alaska Seafood Cooperative first started working on deck sorting in a preliminary 2009 EFP and a follow up study in 2012 that expanded to a wider set of fisheries and vessels. Using what was learned in these first two trials, the program was expanded in 2015 as one of the tools used to meet the bycatch reduction targets.

North Pacific Council to Talk Halibut Rules, Groundfish Quotas

By DJ Summer, Alaska Journal of Commerce, December 2, 2015 —

Photo – Rashah McChesney/Peninsula Clarion

Dave Jacobs, left, and Steve Curl watch as Anthony Ballam lowers a halibut into the hold of the Independence in Cook Inlet. Cook Inlet, which is in Area 3A for charter halibut removals, has a recommended cut in harvest from 2015 according to the scientists at the International Pacific Halibut Commission. The North Pacific Fishery Management Council meets this month in Anchorage to set charter harvest rules for 2016.

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council will meet in Anchorage Dec. 9-15 at the Hilton to hash out sport halibut measures for 2016 in addition to setting groundfish harvest limits.

Groundfish — which includes pollock, Pacific cod and flatfish — makes the bulk of the volume pulled from the federal waters off Alaska’s coast. Harvest quotas totaling two million metric tons of those species are set each year in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands fisheries.

The council also will adopt charter halibut rules for 2016, which can include size, bag and annual limits for sport anglers to keep them within their overall allocation.

The bottom trawlers who prosecute the groundfish fisheries will be on the lookout for restrictive total allowable catch, or TAC, having taken some cuts last year and taken bycatch cap reductions earlier in 2015. Halibut avoidance is a high priority for council, and groundfish trawlers take the vast majority of halibut that is bycatch.

To start off the meeting, the Amendment 80 cooperatives of bottom trawl catcher-processors will report on what progress they’ve made reducing halibut bycatch on their own. Lori Swanson, executive director of industry group Groundfish Forum, said her fleet has managed to cut its overall bycatch by several hundred tons in 2015 using voluntary measure like intrafleet communication, deck sorting, and halibut excluder devices.

Halibut management sorely needs an overhaul, according to policy makers. Clashes between directed halibut fisheries, the groundfish trawlers who use halibut as bycatch, and the younger guided angler industry are spurring the council to review a new halibut management framework that takes a more nuanced and proactive role in the fishery.

In summary, the framework tries to identify what data the council needs to best manage halibut, and the best way to get and share it. First and foremost is how to bridge the knowledge gap between the two biggest halibut authorities.

The North Pacific council oversees all federal fisheries from three to 200 miles off the coast. It only manages the sport removals and halibut bycatch, mostly concentrated in the groundfish fisheries.

The U.S.-Canadian International Pacific Halibut Commission manages the directed halibut fisheries. Unlike the council’s stationary bycatch limits, the commission’s halibut quotas shift with legally harvestable halibut biomass.

Directed halibut limits have shrunk along with declining biomass, while bycatch limits largely remained unchanged until reductions for the Gulf of Alaska passed in 2012 and new reductions for the Bering Sea passed earlier this year.

As a result, more halibut are taken and wasted as bycatch than by the actual halibut fishery, disenfranchising small boat halibut fishermen in fishery-dependent communities. The council reduced bycatch limits in June, but the cuts were less than the Bering Sea halibut fishermen say they needed.

Learning from each other’s methodology will factor heavily into the new framework. Right now, the council’s only formal communication with the commission is a yearly management report. Informal information sharing and collaboration are common, but not required.

The proposed framework makes is clear there is no plan to merge the two bodies, but would like to create a system of recommendations from one to another, along with the possibility of regularly scheduled meetings in some kind of joint protocol board.

Along with inter-body meetings, stakeholders have requested the council create some kind of advisory system that addresses not only biological issues but also economic and social issues. As fishery-dependent communities in the Bering Sea have little other economic driver besides commercial fishing, they believe more thought should go into allocations than just what is biologically acceptable. Potentially, this could mean a new system where a stakeholder group makes recommendations prior to the regular council process.

Even arriving at what is “biologically acceptable” needs revision. The framework says the industry needs a host of new science to better inform both the North Pacific council and the international commission.

“I think everybody recognizes the need for better science,” Swanson said. “There’s a lot of conjecture about what the impact of Bering Sea bycatch is, and it drives decisions behind not-so-solid science.”

The new framework will identify council priorities, including migration studies of halibut spawned in the Bering Sea, the rate at which discarded bycatch fish die, and the disparity between U.S. and Canadian abundance survey techniques.

To get to more concrete numbers, the council will review the efficacy and frequency of tagging studies for Bering Sea halibut, deck sorting mortality rates, observer coverage rates, and environmental impact studies.

Among other research priorities, the North Pacific council will review a discussion paper on a possible abundance-based halibut bycatch management scheme similar to the commission’s. Earlier this year the council heard a presentation from Steve Martell, a fisheries biologist working for the commission regarding the possibility, and identified process as a possibility.

Halibut sportfishing captains want restructuring in their fleet as well. As biomass has declined, charter operators have seen their slice of the halibut pie shrink, too. They have no sector-wide method to purchase unused allocation from the commercial fleets who use the fish as bycatch, and are asking for a remedy.

The council will hold an initial review of Recreational Quota Entities, which would potentially hold commercial halibut quota share on behalf of guided recreational halibut anglers under a “willing seller and willing buyer” approach. This would allow looser charter restrictions while still staying within halibut allocations.

The proposed program would differ from current Guided Angler Fish system in that charter operators could purchase, rather than simply lease, quota from commercial users. The program would also be sector-wide rather than individual; purchased quota would be held in a common pool for all charter vessels to draw from as needed to stay within their allocation.

The council will review several different options on how many RQEs to establish and in which areas, what kind of transfers will be allowed, and the broader economic impacts of RQEs on the commercial and charter fleets. Halibut quota isn’t cheap, and the charter industry will have to determine how they purchase the quota in the first place.

Bycatch Accounting Disconnects

By Chris Woodley, Fishermen’s News Online [Opinion], February 2015 —

When the 2014 fishing season in the Bering Sea / Aleutian Islands wrapped up in late December, flatfish trawl fishermen within the Alaska Seafood Cooperative (AKSC) had successfully reduced their overall annual halibut bycatch by 93 metric tons (mt) over 2013 and had reduced their cumulative 3rd and 4th quarter halibut bycatch amounts by 106 mt as compared to the 5-year average for those same quarters. The action taken by AKSC was in response to a motion made in June 2014 by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council (NPFMC) that requested individual Bering Sea fishing sectors voluntary cut their halibut bycatch usage by 10 percent over their 5-year average for the 3rd and 4th quarter of 2014. The goal of the reduction was to ensure that the Bering Sea directed halibut fishery in Area 4CDE would have sufficient fish for the 2015 season. The AKSC reduction of 106 mt below the 5-year average exceeded the Council’s request and should have gone a long way to maintaining the 2015 directed halibut fishery harvest.

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