[Water_news] 3. DWR'S CALIFORNIA WATER NEWS: WATERSHEDS - 6/16/08

Department of Water Resources

California Water News

A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment

 

June 16, 2008

 

3. Watersheds –

 

Halibut a boon to S.F. bay-delta fisheries

The San Francisco Chronicle- 6/15/08

 

Alaska salmon may bear scars of global warming

The Los Angeles Times- 6/15/08

 

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Halibut a boon to S.F. bay-delta fisheries

The San Francisco Chronicle- 6/15/08

Brian Hoffman, Staff Writer

 

There are days when charter-boat captain James Smith can look out from the wheelhouse of the California Dawn and see 40, sometimes 70, other boats on the water around him.

 

"And that's on a weekday," he said. "By Saturday, there will be 150, maybe 200 of them (fishing) out here."

 

Smith and many others - including commercial and recreational anglers - are taking part in what has become one of the greatest halibut seasons in memory within San Francisco Bay. Since March, when the bays cleared from winter rains, anglers have landed thousands of the sought-after flatfish.

 

For some, the fishing has provided a timely and much-needed opportunity in a year that started with few options for saltwater anglers. For others, like Smith, who fish for a living, the halibut are a financial savior in an increasingly difficult business.

 

But while the fish is a boon for some, conservationists worry about overharvesting and are calling for the state Fish and Game Commission to consider recommending tighter restrictions to preserve the halibut population.

 

"The fishery is getting hammered," said Phil Havlicek, a fisherman out of San Francisco. "It's like the old days. There are places you can hardly launch on weekends because of the crowds."

 

Part of the problem, Havlicek and others say, is that halibut have been one of the few options for saltwater anglers this year.

 

The salmon season, which would have opened in April, was closed indefinitely because of the precariously low return of fall-run chinook in 2007. The season for rockfish and lingcod has been shortened by several months to protect low stocks of some species and did not open this year until June 1 in waters above San Mateo County's Pigeon Point.

 

More boats

With little else to pursue and with no other means of generating business, San Francisco Bay has attracted private and charter fishing boats from as far away as Sacramento and Monterey.

 

Dennis Baxter, who owns and operates the charter boat New Capt. Pete, moved his business from Half Moon Bay's Pillar Point to South San Francisco's Oyster Point Marina the first week of April.

 

He said he had no choice but to seek a new location.

 

"If I stayed on the coast, my business was going to die," said Baxter, who has run a charter boat since 1985. "It's as simple as that."

 

Starting from a new marina and in an unfamiliar fishery, the New Capt. Pete did not have much business. Barely enough to pay for fuel, Baxter said. But as the days went on and the halibut fishing picked up, so did his business.

 

"We fished, and we made a little money," said Baxter, who recently moved the New Capt. Pete back to Pillar Point for the rockfish and lingcod season that opened June 1. "I don't think you can ask for much more."

 

Bountiful catches

Smith, 33, who grew up fishing the bays on his father's charter boat and earned his first paycheck as a deckhand at age 10, said the halibut fishing is the best he's seen. Three weeks ago, his charter boat followed up catches of 40, 50 and 69 halibut with a 72-fish day.

 

"We found (the halibut) above the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, and they bit on every drift," he said.

 

But as fishermen see the halibut as perhaps the lone highlight of a bleak season, some question whether anglers are having a detrimental impact.

 

Most of the fishermen taking advantage of this season are recreational, not commercial, and the Department of Fish and Game, which oversees game-fish species, says it is too early to judge their impact. The agency has yet to compile a population estimate or develop a management plan for halibut.

 

Travis Tanaka, an associate marine biologist with Fish and Game's Finfish Management Project in Monterey, said the department just began collecting data for a stock assessment last year.

 

In the meantime, Tanaka has received several e-mails from anglers concerned that too many halibut are being caught.

 

"The fact is we don't have a whole lot of data (on halibut)," Tanaka said. "We're trying to boost our biological knowledge of the fish."

 

Conservationists concerned

Until Fish and Game has even a preliminary understanding of the halibut population and can manage the resource accordingly, some conservationists believe the fish are in trouble.

 

"All the fisheries in the bay-delta estuary are fragile and susceptible to overharvest," said John Beuttler, conservation director for the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance. "We're already seeing signs that, because you can't fish for anything else, the whole shift in fishing is toward halibut in the bay."

 

Beuttler and many other fishermen would like to see the daily recreational limit lowered from three fish to two.

 

There are recreational anglers who also would like to see a daily catch limit imposed on commercial fishermen, who are allowed to take as many halibut as they can put in their boat, provided the fish are at least 22 inches long.

 

Other anglers, though, are not yet convinced there is a problem.

 

Chris Hall is the president of Coastside Fishing Club, an Internet fishing community that boasts more than 13,000 members. Like Baxter, he moved his boat from Pillar Point to Oyster Point to fish for halibut.

 

"It's tough for me to wrap around in my mind that we're going to decimate the fishery in one year," Hall said.

 

More data needed

Hall said he would accept a two-fish limit but wants to see more information on halibut numbers before new regulations are imposed.

 

"There's always concern that a fishery will be hit too hard," said Jon Fischer, deputy executive director of the Fish and Game Commission. "What the commission is relying on is the department (of Fish and Game) to monitor the catch and let it know if that is the case."

 

The Department of Fish and Game, though, is still trying to piece together data, mainly from commercial catches.

 

The bureaucratic catch-22 has Beuttler calling for action.

 

"You have to do something," he said, "or you're just waiting for it to collapse.

 

"Once this collapses ... we'll have nothing left."

 

Halibut fishing

San Francisco Bay is home to California halibut, which are found up and down the coast. The fish caught in the bay are good for sashimi; however, they are different from what's served in most restaurants. Restaurants typically prefer Pacific halibut, which is caught primarily in Alaska.

 

The season for California halibut is year-round, with a daily three-fish limit in waters north of Point Sur (Monterey County) and five in waters south for recreational anglers. The minimum size limit for both recreationally and commercially caught halibut is 22 inches.

 

Local fishing for halibut for recreational anglers starts in spring, as the fish move into the bay. It is widely believed by fishermen that halibut spawn in the bay in late spring and early summer, though biologists with the state Department of Fish and Game say they have yet to confirm where or when the fish spawn.

 

In July, many of the halibut begin returning to the ocean, where they are caught along the Marin Coast and the shallow sand- and mud bars outside the Golden Gate.

 

Commercial fishermen using trawl nets fish outside the Golden Gate, as the halibut are moving toward shore, and again as the fish return from the bay. Within the bay, commercial fishermen are restricted to no more than six lines per boat. There is no daily catch limit for commercially caught halibut.#

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/15/MNPU115MEA.DTL

 

 

 

Alaska salmon may bear scars of global warming

The Los Angeles Times- 6/15/08

By Kenneth R. Weiss, Staff Writer

TANANA, ALASKA -- With a sickening thud, another hefty and handsome salmon lands in the waste barrel, headed for the dogs.

"See, it's all of the biggest, best-looking fish," said Pat Moore, waving a stogie at the pile of discards. "It breaks my heart. My dogs cannot eat all that. The maggots will get them first."

 

 More Alaskan salmon caught here end up in the dog pot these days, their orange-pink flesh fouled by disease that scientists have correlated with warmer water in the Yukon River.

The sorting of winners and losers at Moore's riverbank fish camp illustrates what scientists have been predicting will accompany global warming: Cold-temperature barriers are giving way, allowing parasites, bacteria and other disease-spreading organisms to move toward higher latitudes.

"Climate change isn't going to increase infectious diseases but change the disease landscape," said marine ecologist Kevin D. Lafferty, who studies parasites for the U.S. Geological Survey. "And some of these surprises are not going to be pretty."

The emergence of disease in Alaska's most prized salmon has come as a shock to fishermen and fisheries managers. Alaskan wild salmon has been an uncommon success story among over-exploited fisheries, with healthy runs and robust catches that fetch ever higher prices at fish markets and high-end restaurants in Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo and London.

Fishermen and regulators who have cooperated to save species from overfishing and local environmental hazards have been caught unprepared to deal with forces beyond their control: how to manage a fishery for climate change.

The return of the king -- or chinook -- salmon is eagerly anticipated along the Yukon. The biggest of the salmon species, these kings arrive with a muscular flash of the tail, sun glinting off a speckled palette of blues and greens fading to silver and red.

Savvy buyers from Japan converge on the docks near the river's mouth to purchase these fish that have bulked up with extra fat to swim more than 2,000 miles, across Alaska, to spawn in the stream of their birth.

As a fierce defender of the fish's reputation, Gene Sandone, a regional supervisor for Alaska's Fish and Game Department, was less than receptive to complaints from Tanana fishermen such as Moore that something was wrong.

The chinook salmon they pulled from the Yukon River about 700 miles inland didn't smell right. It wasn't an instant, gag-inducing stench. It was more subtle but grew into an unpleasant odor of fruit rotting in the hot sun.

More important, the flesh turned mealy. The salmon didn't dry right in smokehouses either. Instead of turning into rich red strips of salmon jerky, they turned black and oily like strips of greasy rotten mango.

"If you don't weed out the bad ones, it'll stink up the whole smokehouse," Moore said, wielding a knife on his cutting table. "I only want the good stuff. I don't want second-rate fish."

Salmon jerky strips are a staple among the Native Americans and subsistence fishermen in rural outposts such as Tanana, a village of 270 people. "It'll keep you warm in the winter," said Lorene Moore, Pat's wife and a native of the village. In Alaska's bigger cities, these strips are a prized delicacy, fetching $20 or more a pound.

When Bill Fliris, another Tanana fisherman, first noticed the problem in the late 1980s, he bundled up some salmon jerky strips and shipped them to a state Fish and Game biologist. A few weeks later, the biologist said it was "the damnedest thing -- they disappeared out of the freezer. You know: free strips."

The next year, Fliris shipped more samples, and this time they were tested. But the state Fish and Game lab found nothing amiss.

A friendly federal biologist advised the local fishermen to send samples, including hearts and organs that were covered with tiny pimples, to the Center for Fish Disease Research at Oregon State University.

The Oregon lab quickly identified it as "white spot disease," caused by a microscopic parasite called Ichthyophonus hoferi. Ich (pronounced "ick") is a well-known disease, harmless to humans, that was blamed for devastating losses in the herring fishery in Scandinavia. A similar parasite can infect aquarium fish.

The portion of Yukon salmon with Ich grew each year. Fishermen were throwing away as much as 30% of their catch, forcing them to catch more fish to fill their cache for the winter.

"The Alaskan Department of Fish and Game wasn't interested," Fliris said. "They said, 'There's no money to study this. It's a natural disease. There's nothing we can do about it.' "

 

So Fliris contacted an outsider: Richard M. Kocan, a fish disease expert at the University of Washington. Lining up a federal grant, Kocan began to test the fish in 2000, the same year the king salmon run suffered an unexpected temporary collapse that forced the closure of the river's commercial fishery.

At the mouth of the Yukon, where the commercial gill netters operate, 25% to 30% of the chinook salmon were infected, Kocan found. But the fish usually did not show signs of the disease.

 The same proportion were infected at midriver near Tanana, about halfway to the Canadian border. But here, nearly a third of the fish showed the salt-like flecks on their hearts and other organs, and their mealy flesh released the telltale smell of putrid fruit.

Kocan went upstream to the spawning grounds near Whitehorse, Canada, and found that the proportion of infected fish dropped dramatically. But why? It didn't seem logical that the fish were recovering during the last part of their stressful 2,200-mile swim, accomplished over many weeks without eating.

"The working hypothesis," Kocan said, "is that they died before they made it to the spawning grounds."

Tracking what happens to these fish is difficult. The Yukon turns mocha-brown in the summer, when its swift waters carry a load of rock flour released by rock-pulverizing glaciers and other sediment. Salmon that perish sink out of sight.

To test his theory, Kocan set up a laboratory experiment that compared the swimming stamina of infected rainbow trout with that of healthy trout. He used a chamber with water swift enough to exhaust a healthy fish in about 10 minutes. The infected fish lasted about two minutes. "It's like asking someone with heart disease to run a 10K race," Kocan said. "He's not going to do very well."

That left a question: Why did the previously undetected disease show up in the late 1980s and resurface every year since?

Kocan and his students scrutinized all the potential variables and found only one significant change: Average river water temperatures had been rising over the last three decades. The warming began earlier each spring, following an earlier breakup of the river's ice. The June temperatures showed the greatest increase, about 6 to 8 degrees warmer, and June is when king salmon return from the ocean and begin their long upriver migration to spawn.

Unlike warm-blooded animals, the body temperature of salmon fluctuates with the temperature of surrounding waters. Laboratory studies of Ich infections in trout, a close cousin, have revealed that the incidence of disease and death rises as water warms, especially above 59 degrees.

Kocan spent five summers on the Yukon River studying the parasite, creating an uproar among fishermen by sharing his findings directly with them, rather than allowing state Fish and Game officials to review the data first.

He suddenly found his funding drying up after objections from Alaskan representatives on the committee that doles out research dollars.

"I've essentially been blackballed from working on the Yukon," said Kocan, whose work has since been accepted and published in peer-reviewed journals. "There's one fellow specifically who does not like our results: Gene Sandone. He doesn't want to hear the story and change his management practices."

Sandone denied playing any part in this: "I didn't blackball Richard Kocan. Dr. Kocan is free to put in a proposal and argue his point. He just has to get it through the technical committee."

The clash comes over the implications of Kocan's thesis. He believes that as much as 20% of king salmon are dying en route to the spawning grounds. If so, fisheries managers would have to cut back the commercial catch by at least that amount to keep the run healthy.

Sandone has an alternative theory, which has not been tested. He believes that the sick fish, weakened by the parasite, swim along the slower-moving edge of the river, where a disproportionate number get caught by fishing nets and fish wheels that line the banks.

In other words, subsistence fishermen like Pat Moore are simply catching most of the sick fish. The healthy ones swim just out of reach, deeper in the river, headed straight for Canada.

"That's my theory -- that they are not dying on the way," Sandone said. "Even if they are dying on the way, so what?" His department limits the catch based on how many fish escape all the nets and make it to the spawning grounds to reproduce.

That's been going well, he said, except for last year, when the number of fish that made it to Canada fell 50% below the minimum spelled out in a U.S.-Canadian agreement.

Sandone is retiring later this year, after 26 years as a state official. The fishermen in Tanana, who scoff at his theory, say they are delighted to see him go. They hope the state will be less hostile to studying the disease and trying to figure out what to do about it.

Besides supporting fishermen, salmon are a keystone species in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, supporting wildlife from birds to bears and orcas.

A crash could cripple dependent creatures.

 Mary Ruckelshaus, a federal biologist with the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, has been running climate models to peer into the future for Pacific Northwest salmon. Those models predict that salmon will become extinct without aggressive efforts to preserve the clear, cool streams needed for spawning, such as planting trees to shade streams and curtailing the amount of water siphoned off by farmers.

"It's sort of a time bomb," Ruckelshaus said.

"If people don't have a plan for it, it can be disastrous when it hits."

Her models didn't factor in the potential for emerging diseases, such as the one that Kocan, her former professor, has been studying.

Kocan views Ichthyophonus as a classic emerging disease. He pointed out that salmon, a lucrative catch, had been scrutinized by scientists and fishermen for decades, and the disease had never before been reported. In the last decade, it has shown up in salmon on the Yukon, Kuskokwim and Taku rivers in Alaska and on various rivers in British Columbia and Russia.

It has also been detected in recent years in rockfish and smaller noncommercial fish in Puget Sound and elsewhere off the coasts of Oregon and Washington, and in freshwater trout on Idaho farms.

It's the kind of redistribution of disease that can be expected with climate change, Kocan said: "Everything is getting warmer, and that's how climate change is going to redistribute all kinds of disease. Parasites have their optimum conditions -- upper and lower limits. We'll notice where they show up but not necessarily where they disappear."

Ichthyophonus is among a class of ancient parasitic microbes that can move fast, taking advantage of new niches using age-old tricks that have kept them around for billions of years.

None of this comforts Pat Moore, a musher with dozens of dogs, and others who rely on the bounty of the Yukon River to make their living. It's a culture that lives on the edge and cannot stomach waste.

"I don't want to kill fish for the sake of killing them," said Moore, as he expertly sliced a king into narrow strips.

"I want to use the damned things."#

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-ichfish15-2008jun15,0,2020280.story?page=1