Back to King County

So what have I been up to last week, since returning from Vancouver.  As my time in Seattle is nearing to a close I am trying to meet as many people as possible before I leave.  Last week, I went to Fishermen's Terminal to meet Joesph Sullivan, a lawyer who has written some of the fishing cooperative agreements. Joe is a law partner at Mundt MacGregor L.L.P and specialises in fisheries-related law and represents fishing vessel owners and fishermen's associations in both business and administrative matters.  It was a pleasure to meet with Joe,  he helped clear up my understanding of fishing cooperatives.  Fisheries management is complicated at the best of times, but trying to get a handle on how fisheries management is structured in the States whilst trying to review fishing closures has been challenging, to say the least.

Fishermen's Terminal

Fishermen's Terminal can be found on Salmon Bay in the Interbay neighbourhood of Seattle.  Many fishing vessels moor at Fishermen's Terminal, including some of the vessels that have featured on Deadliest Catch.


Next I spoke to Jason Didden, who works for the Mid-Atlantic Fisheries Management Council,  about the longfin squid and Atlantic herring and mackerel fisheries on the east coast.  Jason explained the voluntary bycatch avoidance programmes adopted by the fishing industry in these fisheries. From my understanding there is definitely seems to be a difference between the west and east coast in respect to fisheries managment and relationships between the industry and scientists.

My next port of call was to meet Jim Ianelli to ask him about the eastern Bering Sea pollock fishery.  I was lucky enough to get some of Jim's time before a pollock management meeting at the University.  Jim works for the Alaska Fisheries Science Centre and is an University of Washington faculty member.  In addition, Jim chairs the North Pacific Fishery Management Council’s Gulf of Alaska Groundfish Plan Team and is a member of the Advisory Panel for the Commission for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna. Jim performs North Pacific groundfish stock assessments and was at the University to present a preview of the pollock stock assessment results  The public meeting takes place annually and this year had an incredible turn out, with attendance from the fishing industry, research scientists, faculty members and students.

Bering Sea pollock

My office mate, Carey McGilliard, recommended I speak to Anne Beaudreau.  Carey kindly put me in touch with Anne who works at the School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences at the University Alaska, Fairbanks.  Anne shared her experiences of working with fishermen and different approaches she used to contact them. During her post-doc, Anne spent time building-up relationships with Puget Sound fishers and used their knowledge of rockfish stocks to help reconstruct rockfish trends, for which there was no historical data.  Anne's work demonstrated that fishers' knowledge is a very valuable resource which we must try and incorporate into scientific advice more often.

I rounded off the week by attending the Friday lunchtime quantitative seminar given by Prof. André Punt, the Director of the School of Aquatic and Fisheries Science. André talk was titled "BMSY & BMEY: Introducding pretty good profit". André explained the challenges in estimating maximum sustainable yeild (MSY) without a good stock-recruitment relationship.  In the past proxies of MSY have achieved pretty good yield, so André explained the challenges in identifying maximum economic yield (MEY) proxies to estimate pretty good profit.

I ended my week by sampling my first coffee since arriving in Seattle, and for as long as I can remember.  I have always been a tea drinker so I didn't expect to enjoy the coffee, but I was pleasantly surprised, perhaps all the sugar helped.  I now consider myself a fully fledged Seattleite :-)  Maybe I will try another this weekend,

I hope you are having a good week!  Good-bye until next time :-)