Business/Economy

Can Cordovans resurrect Tanner crab fishery?

Cordovans hope to revive a long lost Tanner crab fishery in Prince William Sound as a step toward keeping the town's waterfront working year-round.

The crab fishery produced up to 14 million pounds a year in the early 1970s, but declined to about a half-million pounds by the time it was closed after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. State managers believe the Tanner stock remains depleted and cannot support a commercial fishery, but some locals say it's time for a closer look.

"It's largely the opinion of the people around here that the fishery could support an expanded harvest," said John Whissel, director of natural resources for the Native Village of Eyak.  "The goal here is to get away from the boom and bust cycle, where the town doubles in size in May and then shrinks when the salmon fisheries wind down."

Over the past year, residents have turned out for meetings with state commissioners and local legislators. Many support revitalizing the crab fishery.

"This is as much of a grass-roots effort as I've ever seen in terms of getting some science done. Everyone understands the benefits of having canneries and boats working year-round," Whissel said.

State biologists have conducted periodic trawl surveys in the Sound since 1991, but Cordovans believe that method does not accurately count crab densities. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game said in a memo its survey "does not reflect Tanner crab abundance outside the survey grounds" but they believe the trends "are reflective of Tanners throughout the Sound."

Starting this fall, Cordovans plan to supplement the trawl data with something different: a mark-recapture study.

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"Marking and then recapturing crab is a pretty standard measurement of densities and age structures, and much more involved than a trawl survey," Whissel said, adding the Eyak tribe is now working out the study design and readying proposals for federal matching grants to jump-start the Tanner project this winter.

State crab biologists said they will provide the Alaska Board of Fisheries with information next March "that could … allow additional harvest," according to Fish and Game Commissioner Sam Cotten.

Meanwhile, Cordovans will begin their study with Tanners pulled up in their subsistence pots this fall. Whissel hopes the project will serve as a model to evaluate other potential fisheries in the region.

"There's other opportunities around here and it would be good for our town and for our state," he said. "With oil prices being what they are and the tax rate being what it is, commercial fishing could play a larger role in the state budget if we gave them more chances to do that."

Whissel called the crab project collaboration by the state and tribal government "exciting.

"The state will find that it is able to do a lot by collaborating with tribes because we have access to different pools of federal dollars in times of tightening budgets," he said. "Coming together on projects like this instead of being territorial is going to be the way we do things in the future."

Got skates?

Giant skates is another fishery that could get underway in the Sound and other regions after more is learned about their lifestyle and habits.

A few skate fisheries have occurred on and off in the central Gulf of Alaska over the past decade. More recently, managers have put on the brakes because of how quickly they can be caught, and the fact that little is known about Alaska skates.

"There's quite a bit of skate-fishing going on in the Atlantic, both on the U.S. and European side, but here in Alaska it's hasn't been a target for very long," said Thomas Farrugia, a doctoral student at the UAF School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences. "We really don't know that much about them."

Farrugia and colleague Andrew Seitz are studying whether there can be a sustainable and profitable fishery for big and longnose skates in the Gulf of Alaska. One thing they've learned in a yearlong satellite tagging study is that skates really get around.

"It was previously thought that skates sit in one spot and look for crabs, clams and little fish to eat, but don't have much need to move a whole lot like an oceanic predator," Farrugia explained. "But it turns out big skates can move over hundreds of nautical miles, which we hadn't been sure about before. The take-away message is we have to look at the entire Gulf population as one big stock and not a bunch of subunits."

Farrugia calls skates "flat sharks" because the two are similar biologically. Both have a very slow life history and produce only two to eight offspring each time they mate. In Alaska, skates can fetch nice prices — 45 cents a pound for whole fish and $1 a pound for skate wings frozen at sea.

"Fishermen, especially bottom trawlers or halibut and cod longliners, will catch quite a few skates and retain them because the price … is fairly high, often higher than cod," Farrugia said.

Currently, skates can only can be retained as 5 percent bycatch of a targeted catch, such as cod or halibut. Some 4.5 million pounds are taken in Gulf of Alaska fisheries each year.

Fishermen in the Sound, Seward and Homer are pushing for a skate fishery, although others in Kodiak believe it would be best to leave skates as a bycatch portion in their other fisheries.

"There's a sort of geographical divide," Farrugia said. "If they do have a fishery, it would be a short season, maybe for a week, where all these boats would target skates and then not be able to fish them for the rest of the year. Others want to be able to retain skates as bycatch over a longer period of time."

The next phase of Farrugia's research is to create a Gulf-wide stock assessment that could be used by fishery managers, followed by a bioeconomic model that evaluates whether a skate fishery would be feasible.

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"Until we know more about the biomass and what the sustainable level is, it is probably not going to be possible to have a profitable directed skate fishery," Farrugia said.

Laine Welch is a Kodiak-based commercial fishing columnist. Contact her at msfish@alaskan.com.

 

Laine Welch | Fish Factor

Laine Welch is a Kodiak-based journalist who writes a weekly column, Fish Factor, that appears in newspapers and websites around Alaska and nationally. Contact her at msfish@alaskan.com.

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