While many Bering Sea crab populations find themselves in freefall, Dungeness crab is breaking records in regions that used to hardly see them.
High levels of PSP toxins have been found in razor clams in Chignik Lagoon and blue mussels in Sand Point, Alaska, making them unsafe to eat and potentially causing paralytic shellfish poisoning, with no known cure.
Juvenille crab was found at a salmon set-net site. Is this a Puget Sound species that has now been found on the Alaska Peninsula?
After no commercial crabbing since 2019, this summer’s Norton Sound Red King Crab fishery had a record year of $3.7 million dollars in ex-vessel value.
The European Green Crab are a threat to ecosystems and commercial fisheries. They uproot eelgrass beds in search of food, which serve as habitat for herring and salmon.
"The event occurred on June 29th, on our native allotment near Kotzebue (Illivak). We left home in the morning and when we came back around 8:00 PM in the evening the whole lake had drained! It looked like it was blown up with dynamite."
Volunteers at the Whittier Slug-Out learned about Alaska’s invasive species and helped mitigate European black slugs near a popular cove on Prince William Sound.
I have photos of four different sea cucumbers decaying, but my friend claims to have observed around 10 dead sea cucumbers.
When Kathleen Reed descended for her usual weekly dive off the coast of Nanaimo, B.C., last Saturday she was shocked by how many dead sea cucumbers she saw. Experts and harvesters fear that sea cucumbers are being hit by an illness similar to sea star wasting disease.
"This year I walked along the same route after a rainstorm and see only one or two — sometimes none"
Extreme drought in the west means that households with private waterworks are out of water. Elvar's dried up. "The situation is very serious," he says.
"While on a field trip for work, we stopped at the beach and you can notice hundreds of dead clams and star fish littering the beach."
Several people have fallen ill with food poisoning after eating shellfish in B.C. in the last 10 days, and health officials are warning that warm ocean waters might be to blame.
"The first wave of dead mussels washed ashore on July 14th, possibly earlier but this was the first report we received. I took the pictures included in my LEO observation on July 16th, and the temperatures were only just then beginning to climb into the upper 70s and lower 80s."
A European Skipper butterfly is observed in Northwest BC, an introduced species and one of several stressors underlying insect declines.
In Malahat Drive in BC, an extraordinary heat wave, combined with low tides during the middle of the day resulted in the die off of possibly billions of intertidal invertebrates along the coast of British Columbia and Washington State.
A record-shattering heat wave June 26-28 coincided with some of the year's lowest tides on Puget Sound. The combination was lethal for millions of mussels, clams, oysters, sand dollars, barnacles, sea stars, moon snails, and other tideland creatures exposed to three afternoons of intense heat.
The Southeast Alaska Tribal Ocean Research program found that all shellfish species in Settler's Cove and Seaport Beach in Ketchikan and Starrigavan North beach in Sitka are affected by high levels of Paralytic Shellfish Toxin, posing the risk of Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning for consumers.
I've asked quite a few of the elders here if they had ever seen and none of them said they had ever seen it, said Skidegate Chief Councillor Bill Yovanovich, who took the photos Saturday on Lina Island. They show small bits of white shells arranged into what appears to be an intentional grid pattern that stretches at least a hundred metres along the beach.
Scientists say the grass carp population in the Chambly Basin is probably small, but the presence of this species in any number is bad news.
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