Shrimp is no small matter

The Alaska Board of Fisheries (BOF) has just wrapped up its annual meeting cycle with the finish of the statewide Dungeness crab, shrimp and miscellaneous shellfish meeting in Anchorage this past weekend. Our Northern District fisheries management area really didn’t have any major issues involved in this past cycle, but I’m sure a few folks from this area were affected by various board decisions.

I stopped in to visit and observe some of the board process last Wednesday. I enjoyed the visit because I had a chance to reconnect with several people involved in the non-finfish commercial industry and to wish Capt. Al Cain, Fish and Game’s law enforcement specialist and fisheries board advisor, a happy retirement at a luncheon in his honor. I also had a chance to chat with several of the board members I had served with during my term.

Probably the biggest single issue with potential to affect residents of the Valley involved the Prince William Sound (PWS) shrimp fishery. Lots of folks from Southcentral Alaska annually get their permits from Fish and Game and go fish non-commercially for shrimp. Something like 3,300 total permits were issued in 2011. Because of the rotation of areas opened to commercial fishing, the non-commercial harvest was somewhat lower in 2011 because the commercial pots happened to be fishing in the same area commonly used by most non-commercial users. The inevitable conflict between users appeared in proposals submitted for board consideration.

A bit of history might help here. I was a member of the BOF and was on the committee that drafted the current PWS commercial shrimp fishing management plan. The commercial fishery had been closed from 1992 until 2009. Fish and Game had determined that the shrimp population could sustain a limited commercial fishery. To protect the non-commercial shrimp fishery, several things were put into the commercial management plan to serve as triggers required to either open or close the commercial fishery.

First, Fish and Game had to determine that the harvestable biomass exceeded 110,000 pounds in an area before any commercial fishing was allowed. In talking with staff biologists, I was told that the department routinely takes its harvestable biomass estimate and reduces that number by 10 percent. The new, reduced estimate is then the operative number, or total allowable harvest (TAH), for purposes of the management plan guidelines.

Second, only 40 percent of the TAH is allocated to the commercial fishery. Finally, PWS is divided into three commercial fishing areas, and fishing would only be allowed in one area per season, creating a three-year rotation in the areas opened to commercial harvest. In essence, any given area open to commercial fishing would only be fished commercially once every three years and “rested” the other two.

I was very comfortable with the fact that Fish and Game would be managing any commercial harvest of shrimp in PWS in a very conservative manner, so I supported the new management plan when it came up for a vote. From everything I could learn at the just-completed board meeting, this conservative management scheme is still very much in place and the stocks of shrimp are doing very well overall. Numbers of shrimp in any of the three areas most recently commercially fished naturally would be somewhat lower, but that area then has two years of protection in which to rebound in numbers.

As this is written, I don’t know the board’s vote on proposals to close the commercial shrimp fishery, but I would be quite surprised if that happened. Something all user groups seem to forget is that the No. 1 priority for the BOF is to protect the resource first. When Fish and Game says there is a harvestable portion of the resource available, the board’s second priority is to allocate that portion as fairly as possible between the user groups involved with that resource. In this case, I think both of those priorities are being met by not changing how the PWS commercial shrimp fishery is being managed.

On a related note, current board chairman Karl Johnstone and member Mike Smith are up for reappointment to the BOF. In my opinion, both of these board members have been excellent in looking out for the resource first and fairly allocating the harvest of the surplus resource to all user groups involved with that resource. Whether they always supported everything I thought they should is irrelevant — they did an excellent job as board members and deserve to be reappointed. By the time you read this, the decisions may already have been made in the governor’s office. Fisheries politics can be brutal in Alaska and, unfortunately, plays a very large part in the membership composition of the BOF.

The Seventh Annual Mat-Su Sportsmen’s Outdoor Show is history. If you missed it or just can’t get enough of these shows this time of year, don’t forget about the Great Alaska Sportsman’s Show in Anchorage starting Thursday afternoon and running through Sunday at the Sullivan Arena.

Howard Delo is a retired fisheries biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. You can leave him a message by emailing sports@frontiersman.com.