Some of the new sustainably rated or certified products posted on FishChoice.com recently include:   

 

• Eastern oysters from Connecticut 
• Rainbow trout from Wisconsin
• Tilapia from Wisconsin
• Lions-paw scallops from Mexico  

 

Please support FishChoice and mention us to the suppliers when you contact them regarding their product listings on the website.

Seafood Watch Updates: 

• Chinook, chum, coho, pink and sockeye salmon from Washington, Oregon, and California are now all covered under a single assessment and are rated "Good Alternative (yellow)."     

Chum Salmon    

Buyers looking for some relief from record high salmon prices saw their hopes dashed in April, when the winning bids were announced for the Hidden Falls hatchery in Southeast Alaska, the largest chum hatchery in the state. Ocean Beauty Seafoods, one of the state's "Big Three" salmon processors, agreed to pay the hatchery $1.40/lb. for cost recovery fish (in Alaska, salmon hatcheries sell a percentage of their returning fish directly to processors to fund their operational costs).  That's quite a bit higher than last year's winning bid of $1.10/lb., reflecting processors' bullish outlook for the salmon market. (Continued...)  

• Conservation Notes
• Buying Tips  

 

Albacore Tuna   

The West Coast MSC-certified albacore troll-and-pole fishery should get underway in June, but that depends on how far offshore the migratory fish happen to be (in some years, boats may have to go as far as 1,000 miles offshore to find schools of young albacore).  As the summer progresses, the fish move father north and peak landings occur late in the summer. (Continued...)

• Conservation Notes
• Buying Tips 

Natalie Webster has lived with the ups and downs of the tuna fishery all her life. Her father and grandfather skippered tuna boats that delivered to canneries in San Diego, which in those days was dubbed "The Tuna Capital of the World." By the time she married tuna fisherman Jack Webster, the bloom was quickly coming off the rose of San Diego's tuna industry, as cannery after cannery was forced to shut down, sunk by a rising tide of cheap imported canned tuna. 

With the canneries gone by the early 1980s, the fortunes of the West Coast albacore fleet depended largely on the needs of offshore canneries, whose need for fish varied greatly from year to year, as did the price the fishermen would get. "We never knew what price we would get until we returned to the dock, often after a month or more at sea," Natalie recalls, noting that in some years boats lost money and the fleet gradually started to shrink. 

Things got worse about 10 years ago, when a flood of bad publicity about mercury in tuna cast a pall over canned tuna sales. Never mind that the small, young albacore fished off the West Coast were low in mercury. That story wasn't getting out and by 2006 albacore fishermen were getting as low as $.60 a pound. So the Websters and a group of other West Coast albacore boats decided to join forces to ensure their fishery had a future. "We knew we had to create a future for the next generation of fishermen," says Jack. "We didn't want our pole-and-troll fishery to go the way of so many other West Coast fisheries." (Continued...)