WDFW seeks feedback on plan to distribute $40 million in relief funding to commercial fishing, charter fishing, seafood processing and shellfish aquaculture industry members

Industry members invited to attend June 8 virtual meeting

WDFW NEWS RELEASE
Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife
1111 Washington St. SE, Olympia, WA 98501
wdfw.wa.gov
May 27, 2021
Contact:Fish Program, 360-902-2700   
Media Contact: Eryn Couch, 360-890-6604

OLYMPIA – The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) is looking for feedback from commercial fishers, shellfish growers, charter boat owners, seafood processors, and members of the public as it develops a spending plan for $40 million in federal relief funding for industry members impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The funding is part of an additional $255 million in federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act funding approved by the U.S. Congress that followed an initial $300 appropriation, of which Washington state received $50 million, last summer. The current allocation includes $30 million for all federally recognized tribes in coastal states and the Great Lakes and $15 million for Great Lakes states.

“We’re thrilled to be able to begin the process to provide another round of relief funding distributed to support commercial seafood, charter and shellfish aquaculture industry members here in Washington state,” said Ron Warren, WDFW fish policy director. “We applaud our federal leaders for relentlessly championing this funding. As we develop a fair and balanced plan to distribute this funding, it’s critical that we hear from industry members most impacted by the pandemic.”

In coordination with the Governor’s Office, WDFW will be working with the state departments of Agriculture and Commerce to develop criteria for receiving funding assistance based on National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) guidance.

Once developed, Washington will submit its plan to NOAA fisheries for approval and then to the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission to manage the application process and distribute funds. 

To learn more and provide feedback, industry members are invited to tune in to an online public meeting at 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, June 8: https://zoom.us/j/96045781724

For more information on how to participate and to find call-in details, visit wdfw.wa.gov/licenses/commercial/federal-disaster-assistance/cares-act. The meeting will be recorded and posted online so people can also watch the meetings afterwards at their convenience.

The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife works to preserve, protect and perpetuate fish, wildlife and ecosystems while providing sustainable fish, wildlife, and recreational and commercial opportunities.

Ad Hoc Southern Oregon/Northern California Coast Coho Workgroup to hold online meeting July 7, 2021

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Thirty Thousand Feet, Episode 1: Kerry Griffin on coastal pelagic species management

Transcription:

Jennifer:  Hi everyone, and welcome to the first edition of Thirty Thousand Feet, the new Pacific Fishery Management Council podcast. I’m Jennifer Gilden, your host today, and today on our inaugural episode we are talking to Kerry Griffin, the staff officer for coastal pelagic species for the Council, about how CPS species are managed. Kerry, can you give me an overview?

Kerry: Yes, one of our four fishery management plans is the coastal pelagic species, CPS, fishery management plan. You should think of CPS as the forage fish, the bait fish sometimes they’re called —- the small fish like anchovies and sardines and mackerels and things like that. And some of those are under Federal management; some are not under Federal management, like herring, but a lot of them are: anchovies and mackerel and also market squid.

Jennifer: Do we set management measures for market squid?

Kerry: We do not set annual management measures because it’s primarily—or at least historically has been primarily—a California fishery. The Federal management defers to a California total allowable catch each year, and we monitor that.

Squid are a very odd species. Their life cycle is less than one year; it averages something like seven months. They’re a boom-and-bust type of species, like a lot of the CPS stocks are, so they are under Federal management and we have a standing allowable harvest that is based on California’s management. We just take that and apply it as the Federal limit as well.

Jennifer: Can you tell me a little about krill? I know we prohibited harvest of krill species a while back.

Kerry: Yeah, that’s right, that’s another really good topic. Krill species, which are these little shrimp-like euphausiids, they are called, are also managed under the Federal CPS FMP, and they were included for the specific purpose of prohibiting harvest, as you mentioned. Krill really does form the basis of the food web, so we want to make sure that fisheries don’t develop on krill species.

We also have ecosystem components (EC) species that are part of that CPS FMP.  There’s a couple that are specifically listed that are Pacific herring and also Jack smelt. EC species are typically not highly targeted. We kind of keep an eye on them, watch them, but we don’t set harvest specifications; they don’t have essential fish habitat designated for them.

We also have what we call “common EC species” across all FMPs, and that was part of the forage fish initiative a few years ago that stemmed from our fishery ecosystem plan efforts. The Council came up with a whole list of currently unmanaged and generally untargeted forage fish and put them all in this forage fish management plan that says “you can’t fish on these unless you really prove up that it can be done sustainably, safely.” A bunch of the species are included as EC species across all four of our FMPs. So it’s a way to protect forage fish and the ecosystem.

Jennifer: So what are some of the major challenges in the CPS world right now?

Kerry: CPS stocks are tricky to manage because they tend to have this boom-and-bust cycle, and anyone who pays attention to this kind of stuff knows that species like anchovy and sardines, their populations grow really high, you know, exponentially. They’ll become very common all up and down the coast, and then they will wane, and follow this boom-and-bust cycle. Some people theorize that they’re on about a 60-year cycle for Pacific sardine, it’s a little less clear with anchovies, but they’re pretty short-lived species, and when the environmental conditions are right, the populations will just explode. And when environmental conditions are poor, then they will not do so well.

Jennifer: So that sardines you’re talking about?

Kerry: Yeah that was sardines, but they pretty much all have these boom and bust cycles. They’re short-lived, really just a few years. A good kind of counterpoint is something like a rockfish that might live to be 50 or 80 or 100 years old, and they’re very predictable, and you know how many offspring they’re going to produce, and it’s easier in a way to plan for things like proper harvest levels or recovery plans or rebuilding plans. But with CPS species you just don’t know what you’re gonna get from year to year. so it’s a little tricky. You gotta manage conservatively, but also allow a reasonable amount of fishing when the fish are around. 

Jennifer: Right. And so what’s going on anchovies now?

Kerry: Yeah, anchovies—right now we appear to be in one of the boom cycles. Really just a few years ago, four or so years ago, the anchovy population had apparently declined quite a bit. There was a lot of attention to it and a lot of concern that we were still allowing fishing on anchovies, but we do allow a certain amount of fishing on these stocks, recognizing that they are prone to these wide swings in population, even aside or not resulting from fishing pressure. So what’s going on right now is there is an abundance of anchovies, something like 1.5 million metric tons is the estimated biomass. We’re not sure how long it’ll stay that way, because you just don’t know about these fish. Sardines have declined in population, conversely, over the last several years; really more like 10 or 15 years, they’ve been on the decline. There’s still a lot in the Southern California Bight, but overall that population is a little bit declined. 

Jennifer: So would someone who’s fishing for sardines switch over to anchovies when anchovies are doing well and vice versa?

Kerry: That’s a great question, and yes, what you’ll hear from the CPS fleets is that they really depend on an array of different species to target, because sometimes they’re there, and sometimes they’re not. So if there’s no sardine, they’ll be turning to other things like anchovies, mackerel and squid. Squid is highly desirable, so they would prefer to go after that, especially where they’re most prevalent down in California, but then they need to have these other opportunities available to them.

Jennifer: Right, that makes sense. So where do all those anchovies end up?

Kerry: A lot of them are packed and shipped overseas. I don’t think it’s a majority of the harvest, but they’re often block frozen. Markets really determine whether and how much the fleet is able to go out and fish for these stocks. Some of it is used for things like tuna net pens or longline fishing for maybe albacore tuna, that kind of thing. So they’re used as bait or to produce other higher-end products. Some do go to the canned market. I think a little bit goes to the fresh market.

Sardines, when they’re around, there is a niche market for them. They can get big enough to be sort of dinner-plate size, and so sometimes you’ll see them in white tablecloth restaurants when they’re around. Back in the day the anchovy fishing was really targeted or really aimed at the reduction fishery, where they took these fish and reduced them and made them into paste for fertilizer and things like that. But that is really prohibited. [Cat meows]. There’s no reduction fishing anymore for anchovies or sardines.

Jennifer: How long ago did they stop doing that?

Kerry: [cat meows again]. He wants an anchovy. [Laughs.] Using anchovies for reduction purposes stopped I think by the nineties. By the time we had the advent of Federal fisheries management for the CPS group, it was recognized that reduction fishing was not an optimal use for these stocks. They were catching huge amounts of fish and using it for purposes that weren’t viewed as the optimal use, not in the best interest of the nation’s fishery management. 

Jennifer: So tell me what happened at the April council meeting in terms of CPS. 

Kerry: Yeah, in April we have a standing agenda item to set Pacific sardine harvest specifications and management measures, and so that again was on the April agenda. We had a couple other things too, but that was the biggie. What was really interesting was because of the COVID crisis there were no Federal ship surveys that went out last year. We really depend on those coastwide surveys to get a handle on what the biomass is for Pacific sardine. So because we didn’t have any of that information, the stock assessment team did the best they could, but our Scientific and Statistical Committee ended up deferring or defaulting to last year’s stock assessment to set our management measures, just because there was so much uncertainty with this year. Because there was no data, so it was really guesswork. But we came through it, I think making a good decision, and we added some good buffers, and basically decreased the allowable harvest because of this sort of staleness of the biomass estimate. 

Jennifer: You think that stock assessment issue is gonna to be resolved in time for next year? 

Kerry: Well, the survey vessels are out now, and it’s looking pretty good that they’ve developed enough protocols and health protective measures so that they can get out and do their acoustic trawl surveys. There’s also some industry cooperative surveys that do help provide additional information, both from the biological side and also the biomass estimate side of things, so those are all up and operating right now. So I’m really hopeful that next year we’ll be able to get a good stock assessment with good fresh data. 

Jennifer: So what’s coming up in June for CPS? 

Kerry: We have a handful of CPS items on the agenda for June. Pacific mackerel also gets—well, it gets annual management measures, but we set them every two years, so this is one of the years, this June, where we will set them both for this upcoming season and for the following season after that. And then there’s some anchovy business on the June agenda. The CPS management team has worked up this flowchart to really help us determine when we do need to do a more full and robust anchovy stock assessment, because we don’t normally do those unless, you know, it’s not hardwired in. But there’s interest from the Council inn having a little more, you know, accountability maybe, or more opportunities to do assessments and reset management measures for anchovy. So we’ll be rolling that out at the June meeting. 

Jennifer: So are there any sort of big picture issues you’re looking at outside of Council management?

Kerry: The ocean is a big place, and there’s a lot of international agreements, especially for straddling stocks—things like salmon and the highly migratory fish, the tunas and the swordfish. And even in the CPS world, there are CPS stocks that range beyond our borders down into Mexico and Canada sometimes. So we’re always keeping an eye on whether stocks should be subject to some sort of international agreement, and then also there’s often criticism or concern about the management of fisheries outside the United States system, right? We have a pretty aggressive fishery management system here that is pretty protective of the environment, as well as coastal communities. There’s a lot less we can do with foreign nations and how they manage their fisheries. So we do what we can to protect the stocks, and we encourage international cooperation as much as possible for the conservation of all these species.

Jennifer: Okay, thanks. How about that CPS essential fish habitat review?

Kerry: Right, yes. Periodically we’re supposed to review and revise as necessary the essential fish habitat (EFH) designations for our managed stocks. As part of the Magnuson Act reauthorization, I think it was 1996, it said that “Hey, for all your managed stocks, you need to describe what is the essential fish habitat,” and it applies some protective measures where if there’s an activity that may adversely affect a species’ habitat, then you need to consult with the National Marine Fisheries Service or with the Councils and come up with some measures to mitigate or minimize the impacts. And so we’ve done that with CPS, but they haven’t been reviewed in several years, and so we kicked off this period review and we’re looking at both the spatial extent of where EFH is for CPS stocks. And then we’re also looking at activities that may potentially harm habitat, whether those are fishing activities or non-fishing activities like offshore energy development or harbor dredging. So we’re kind of in the middle of that review right now. We just finished Phase 1, and now we will move on to Phase 2 to look at potential actual changes to the EFH descriptions and maps and things like that. 

Jennifer: OK, thanks Kerry. Really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us about this. And thanks everyone for listening. If you need more information please go to our website, www.pcouncil.org. You can email us pfmc.comments@noaa.gov. And check out our other podcast this month talking to Robin Elke about salmon. This has been a production of Thirty Thousand Feet by the Pacific Fishery Management Council. Episode One, May 2021.

Thirty Thousand Feet, Episode 2: Robin Ehlke on salmon management

Robin Ehlke talks salmon (May 12, 2021)

Transcription:

Jennifer: Hi everyone, and welcome to Thirty Thousand Feet, the new Pacific Fishery Management Council podcast. I’m Jennifer Gilden, your host today. Today, on our second episode of this podcast, we’re talking to Robin Ehlke, who’s the staff officer for salmon for the Council, and we’re gonna be talking to her about how salmon are managed by the Council and about the 2021 salmon season. So, Robin, can you tell me about the salmon seasons this year and how they’re different from last year?

Robin: Sure, Jennifer. Probably the first thing to remember is every salmon season is different from the year before, and you can always expect a change from year to year. It’s usually driven by how abundant one salmon stock might be in one year, you know, compared to the next, and how all of the different salmon stocks are doing, as a combination. Some of the salmon in the north might be doing better than some of the salmon in the south, but typically the salmon seasons will change every year and you never really know which one is going to pop up and be the problem child, if you will.

When you think of it big picture, we have a lot of salmon out there, a lot of different stocks of salmon, and almost every one of them has some kind of limit or constraint and something that tells the Council how to manage them: be it ESA or international agreements or tribal agreements. There’s a lot of boxes the Council has to stay in as they manage their fisheries, and all of that’s driven by conservation. Conservation is always job one, and as we put forward the conservation objectives and goals to the forecasts of salmon that we get every year, that tells us what kind of fisheries you might be able to have in any given area. Then once we’ve crunched the numbers and decided how many fish there are left that are harvestable, then we ask the sport and commercial fishermen to help structure their fisheries for that year, and of course we try to do that in a way that provides the most opportunity for each of the fishing sectors while conserving those important salmon stocks.

So I think that’s one of the greatest things about the Council — it really does involve the stakeholders, the people that are actually out there fishing. The commercial fishermen might say “I got this many fish to catch and it’s more cost effective for me to go out and catch all my fish in May, and then I can go on and do other fishing,” and a sport fisherman might say “I like to just be out on the water, and I just want the opportunity to fish, and maybe I’ll only fish three days a week, so that I can do that.” Whatever is important to them is how we structure these fisheries.

It’s a bit of a dance to get all of those things to jive and have it fit in the boxes that we need to fit in, and it takes some negotiation and cooperation between the different sectors as well, the tribal and sport and commercial fishermen. Maybe each one of them would shave a day off so that each one could have a little bit more of a certain type of fishery. It takes a lot of work on everybody’s part, but for me, I think the greatest thing is that we’re not telling the fishermen what they have to do, they’re telling us what ideal looks like. And if we can get it to fit in that box, then we do. That’s why it’s a process, and it takes days to turn the dials, if you will, to get everything to fit. 

Jennifer: So I know the process of setting salmon seasons north of Cape Falcon can be pretty complicated. Can you talk about how that with this year?

Robin: So “North of Falcon” is a geographic area in northern Oregon; there’s Cape Falcon, and kind of because of where the salmon stocks seem to be, we’ve made this line North of Falcon and South of Falcon. The tribes and the state of Washington are the co-managers of fisheries North of Falcon and certainly in the state of Washington, and they have agreements to where they will negotiate and decide what the limits are for some of their stocks.

There’s some stocks that were quite low this year, and that’s what made it really complicated. When you’re trying to divvy up and conserve a small amount of fish to meet the objectives of all the stakeholders, it just makes it really complicated, and that’s when the negotiations that I talked about earlier are so critical. It’s not easy. It’s serious business, in a sense, when we’re talking about conserving stocks of fish that are in a very low category of abundance-wise, making sure that everybody agrees the best way to handle that and structure their fisheries so that we can ensure we have those fish for future generations.

Jennifer: So tell me about coho. Were coho numbers up this year?

Robin: The coho numbers are up for the Columbia River coho, and there are a lot of different coho stocks. Some of them are in Puget Sound, some of them return to other coastal waters in Washington, and a good portion of them return to the Columbia River. And the survival of the fish as they are outmigrating as smolts is different for each river, and so how well they survive and then make it to adults to return is different. It’s not all across the board. And so for whatever reason the Columbia River coho fared pretty well in their survival, and so we’re going to have a good number of adults return. But that isn’t the case for every stream and river along the coast of Washington and in Puget Sound. That kind of goes back to trying to structure a fishery that meets all of the needs.

Usually the weakest stock is the one that you address, and so those fisheries that aren’t necessarily harvesting a lot of the Columbia River coho might have a higher impact on some of the lower abundant coho, but if there is a lot of coho from the Columbia River in the in the catch, then it kinda buffers them a bit, so it gets complicated really quick.

Jennifer: And what’s going on with the southern Oregon and northern California coho?

Robin: Yeah, we call those the SONCC coho, southern Oregon northern California coast coho. Those are pretty much represented by the coho stocks that are south of Falcon. We don’t know everything about every fish stock, that’s for sure, and when we can’t know everything, then a lot of times in fisheries management you’ll use a surrogate for how well that stock is doing. So if out in the ocean the hatchery fish have done well, you would assume that the natural fish would do equally as well, and so we use that for a number of stocks in salmon, and again in other fisheries. And for the SONCC coho, we’re looking at the exploitation rate that well we’ve been using in past years. We’ve been using it for a while. And the Council asked a small work group to take a look at that exploitation rate and do some analysis to ask if that number, that exploitation rate, that number fish that you’re allowed to take from that stock, is still appropriate. Can it be higher? Should it be lower? Or is it Goldilocks—is it just right? And so that’s the work of the SONCC Coho Workgroup right now.

Jennifer: Can you tell us a little bit about what’s going on with Klamath salmon?

Robin: Yeah, so Klamath river fall Chinook is one of the one of the two main stocks south of Falcon, and in California fisheries. Sacramento River fall Chinook is the other main stock there. Both of those stocks, Sacramento and Klamath, were classified as overfished in 2018 and the Council adopted rebuilding plans for them. The Sacramento stock is doing fairly well. In fact, this year they were reported to have overcome, if you will, the classification of “overfished,” and they appear to be back on track. That’s not true for the Klamath fall chinook. They remain in an overfished category, and the forecast for this year was again a pretty low forecast, so we’ve put in extra measures this year for Klamath that will allow some fishing, what we call de minimus fishing, so that we can have access to that healthier Sacramento stock. But again, the numbers are very low, and just designed to provide opportunity to harvest those more healthy stocks.

Jennifer: All right, thanks. And what else is going on in the Council process related to salmon?

Robin: Well, there were a couple amendments to the Salmon Fishery Management Plan, and they were kind of back-to-back, so we have Amendment 20 and Amendment 21 going on. Amendment 20 covered what was essentially a small change in two places. One of the changes was making the salmon start date for the season May 16 instead of May 1. And that just gave NMFS a little bit of extra time to get their rules through the regulation process, which takes a lot of time and is on a fast pace as it was. And the other part of Amendment 20 was moving a salmon management boundary five miles north, from Horse Mountain north five miles, the southern border of the KMZ. Both of those were fairly simple changes in concept, but there is a process that we go through to make sure that we do all of our analyses, and the good news is we got all of that work done and I think Amendment 20 has passed the final hurdle of the regulation process, so we’ll be updating the salmon FMP with that information. 

Jennifer: So what was the thinking behind moving that line at Horse Mountain?

Robin: That was brought to us by one of the stakeholders, one of the local fishermen around Horse Mountain. It was a very hard line for them to fish in, and they thought if they moved it a little bit closer to Eureka, then the fishermen would actually travel back to the port of Eureka to land their fish, which would be an economic improvement for that port. And apparently the structure of the ocean floor there, there’s an underwater canyon, and trying to make a hard turn, the currents and everything where they had the line—they’re like “if I could just maneuver my boat a little bit more north to make a U turn,” if you will, to stay in the area, they thought that it would be much safer.

That area is known for its high winds and, as in all cases obviously, you need to be a good captain and understand your ocean environment. It didn’t have any impacts on the fish stocks one way or the other, and it was a potential economic benefit, and there were some safety issues that could be avoided potentially by moving it.

Jennifer: Interesting.

Robin: Yeah. And then the second amendment that the Council adopted was Amendment 21, and that focuses on management measures designed for southern resident killer whales. Essentially the Council is putting in the salmon fishery management plan management measures to follow when the salmon abundance is forecasted to be below a certain amount, and then it will trigger a list of additional management actions that will be put in place during that year when the abundance is below the trigger point. So the Council did their work and adopted that measure, and it’s in NMFS’s hands right now going down the regulation pathway. I don’t think it’ll be too much longer before that process is complete, but those are two ongoing topics—that one just now completing and the other one near completion. 

Jennifer: All right, well thanks so much for talking to us, Robin.

Robin: Yeah, I appreciate the opportunity. Thanks, Jennifer. We’ll talk to you later.

Jennifer: And thanks everyone for listening. If you need more information, please go to our website www.pcouncil.org. And check out our other podcast this month talking to Kerry Griffin about coastal pelagic species. You can email at us at pfmc.comments@noaa.gov.

Salmon Subcommittee of the Scientific and Statistical Committee to hold online meeting June 4, 2021

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Pacific Coast Salmon Fishery Management Plan as amended through Amendment 20 now available

On April 22, 2021, NOAA Fisheries approved Amendment 20 to the Pacific Fishery Management Council’s Pacific Coast Salmon Fishery Management Plan (FMP). Amendment 20 modifies the preseason schedule for implementing annual management measures and moves the southern boundary of the Klamath Management Zone 5 nautical miles (9.3 km) north of its current location. In addition, Amendment 20 updates out-of-date language in the FMP.

The FMP as amended through Amendment 20 is available for download on our Salmon Fishery Management Plan webpage.

Pacific-wide HMS catch

Pacific-Wide Catch

The data used in the graphs and summaries below use Inter-American
Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC) public
domain data
, Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission
(WCPFC) Tuna
Fishery Yearbook annual catch estimates
, and International
Scientific Committee for Tuna and Tuna-like Species in the North Pacific
Ocean (ISC) annual catch
tables
.

Eastern Pacific Ocean Landings (IATTC Data): 2012 – 2021

Landings by Country

The plot below shows average annual landings by country for all
species recorded in IATTC data.

The Other category includes Chile, Vanuatu, Canada, Belize, Unknown,
Guatemala, El Salvador, each of which has landings less than 1% of the
total, and others not specified in the source data.

Landings by Species

During 2012-2021 Albacore accounted for 5.8% of total landings,
Bigeye tuna for 14.0%, Skipjack tuna for 44.9%, and Yellowfin tuna for
35.3%.

Landings by Gear

The Other category includes Gillnet, Recreational , Pole-and-line,
Harpoon, Trawl and others not specified in the source data.

Western and Central Pacific Ocean (WCPFC Data): 2012 – 2021

Landings by Country

PNG: Papua New Guinea, FSM: Federated States of Micronesia; the Other
category includes Spain, Ecuador, New Zealand, Fiji, Tuvalu, El
Salvador, Australia, Cook Islands, New Caledonia, Samoa, French
Polynesia, Palau, Tonga, Tokelau, Belize, Canada, Niue, each of which
has landings less than 1% of the total.

Landings by Species

During the 2012- 2021 period, Albacore accounted for 3.9% of total
landings, Bigeye Tuna accounted for 5.5%, Skipjack Tuna accounted for
66.0%, and Yellowfin Tuna accounted for 24.6%.

Landings by Gear

*Small-scale hook-and-line (Philippines and Indonesia). The Other
category from source data.

North Pacific (ISC Data): 2013 – 2022

The ISC provides member country catch data for the species
it assesses
. Of these, landings of North Pacific albacore, Pacific
bluefin tuna, and swordfish are summarized here. (The other assessed
species are blue and short-fin mako sharks, and striped and blue
marlins.). ISC catch table data provided in a suitable format for
processing by the ISC Data Manager, Kiara Nishikawa.

Landings by Country

Japan accounts for the largest proportion of these three species
landings, 66%, averaging 53,322 metric tons annually during the
2013-2022 period. U.S.landings averaged 12,238 metric tons or 15% of
total landings.

Landings by Species

As depicted below, landings of albacore, Pacific bluefin, and
swordfish have declined over this 10-year period. Albacore landings were
lowest in 2019 at 39,631 mt, Pacific bluefin landings were lowest in
2018 at 10,565 mt, and swordfish landings were lowest in 2022 at 6,661
mt. Note that Pacific bluefin is managed bu catch limits pursuant to the
WCPFC Northern Committee’s stock rebuilding plan.

Albacore Landings by Gear Type

The gear types depicted below are the three top ranked in terms of
landings and accounted for 95% of total albacore landings.

Pacific Bluefin Tuna Landings by Gear Type

The gear types depicted below are the three top ranked in terms of
landings and accounted for 85% of total Pacific bluefin landings. Setnet
landings increased markedly in 2017.

Swordfish Landings by Gear Type

The gear types depicted below are the three top ranked in terms of
landings and accounted for 97% of total swordfish landings.