Chilkat Valley News - Serving Haines and Klukwan, Alaska since 1966

Which came first, the magister squid fishery or the magister squid market?

A Juneau charter fishing operator was just awarded a $230,000 grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to find out, and area fishermen might soon have a chance to diversify in the face of declining stocks and high barriers to entry in other markets.

"It's the chicken and the egg. Do you start researching on how to catch them or if there's a market?" said Richard Yamada, who's dedicated the last several years to learning more about magister squid, a species he and some biologists speculate is preying on juvenile king salmon and herring.

Yamada thinks the squid are so abundant that a low-volume, high price commercial fishery could support Southeast Alaska commercial fishermen. He hopes the magister squid, which aren't yet a food commodity in North America, could be sold on the high-end sushi market everywhere from New York to San Francisco.

Yamada, who's been operating fishing charters for 40 years, has been looking for ways to reduce the impacts on his business as king salmon declines. About 15 years ago, while fishing for rockfish, he and his clients caught a magister squid. He's caught a hundred at a time while jigging for just a few hours.

He's since recruited a former Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist and researchers at the University of Alaska to study the species that researchers think are moving further north as the oceans warm. He's also been granted a Fish and Game "commissioner's permit" that allows him to catch and market the squid. Yamada said he's been turned down for grants that would research what a commercial fishery would look like largely because grantees worry there isn't a market. He aims to change that.

"This grant cycle, I went on the market side, to create a global market. (The squid is) unique. It's not sold commercially anywhere in North America, and in fact, my research with the Japanese, it's not even caught or sold there. The only place I've found it is in Russia."

In an effort to create a market, he'll use the grant money to, in part, attend food expos in Boston and Japan to see how it matches up with other squid species. He's already taken the squid to sushi chefs in California and Hawaii and said he's received favorable reports. The magister squid are tender, flavorful and don't have the iodine taste that the more common Humboldt squid contain, Yamada said. He also hired a San Francisco marketing company, which is aiming to brand the squid as "Alaska Ika." Ika is the Japanese word for squid.

"It's a brand name to provide some kind of exposure that this is coming from Alaska. I might be able to use this squid as a U.S.-sourced food product for the sushi market here instead of having everything imported from China and Japan."

It took about two decades for sushi to reach the average American palate in the late 1980s after the first sushi restaurant opened in Los Angeles in the late 1960s. In the intervening years, restaurants opened to cater to wealthy Japanese business people. Yamada hopes to cater not only to Japanese markets but also to the Japanese business class in the United States, the same group who ate raw fish when most Americans turned their nose at it in the late 60s. They're accustomed to paying up to $80 per plate for a squid dish. Those consumers expect a fresh squid that goes from being alive to dead but still squirming on their plate in less than a minute.

"When you pour the soy sauce on it, the tentacles still move around," Yamada said. "In a Japanese restaurant, they want to take a tentacle and have it move in their mouth."

But to get fresh squid to market, storing them will present a challenge. Yamada said he had to pump seawater from a depth of at least 30 feet to ensure the water is salty enough. Squid he stored in surface water, which contains more fresh water, quickly died. They would also need to be stored separately for a live market because they don't get along when grouped together.

"By the time we got to shore, three of them died, mostly because they ate each other," Yamada said. "We're developing techniques to keep them in a tube," Yamada said. "There's a lot of experimentation going on."

Yamada is also lobbying local chefs to use the product. The chef at his charter lodge cooked it as an entrée Sunday night.

"He cut up the tentacles and mixed them with shrimp and some binding agents, stuffed the body of the squid and then charred it on the grill and sliced it. It's excellent. We really liked that.

Juneau-based commercial gillnetter Luke Thorington said he first became interested in the squid in 2019, when he heard rumors that sport anglers were catching them in droves around Juneau.

"I started researching it, and there were tons of them in Russia, (where) they have a very well-established fishery," Thorington said. "They used to trawl from them. In some years they took more metric tons of squid out of Russia than they would take out of the California market squid fishery. That got me pretty excited."

He soon learned about Yamada and his efforts. Now they're talking about how to obtain gear that commercial boats out of Japan and South America use to jig for the squid. Thorington said the prospect of a new commercial fishery is exciting, especially in a limited-entry industry that often requires hundreds of thousands of dollars to enter.

"I think it would be really cool to have something out there for people who want to get started and have a work ethic, that there is something they could go do without having to put a quarter million into a commercial fishery just to get the ball rolling," he said. "Maybe that's where this will go. We'll see how this all plays out."

Alaska Department of Fish and Game Juneau area manager Scott Forbes said before a fishery could open, the department would have to conduct a stock assessment and create a management plan. Forbes has issued Yamada permits for catching and selling the squid commercially. He said he's intrigued by the species because they could potentially be a juvenile salmon predator.

"We're obviously in a state of low abundance, and that would be very interesting if it had a high correlation there," Forbes said. "Richard's working closely with (University of Alaska) folks with genetics and diet. He's doing some great stuff."

Fish and Game coho researcher Leon Shaul told the CVN in a previous story that salmon declines also coincided with adult herring declines that other biologists were tracking in inside waters.

"It's pointing to a predator," Shaul told the CVN last year. "Increased mortality of adult herring in inside waters across all age classes, even while their body condition factor remains high, is consistent with a predator. Across the board these inside stocks have dropped off. Two herring stocks that were still doing well were in Sitka and Craig/Kawock, which are both on the outer coast, not in (the magister squids') primary area."

Shaul said the warm waters associated with "the blob" - warming Pacific Ocean waters - could be a factor for an increased population of magister squid, which were already native to the region, but more evident further south near Ketchikan.

"The initial warming phase started in the summer of 2014," Shaul said. "It's just a hypothesis, but it was within a year of the beginning of the blob that smolt (young salmon) survival of both coho and chinook salmon smolts declined for inside stocks, similar to inside herring, and I started hearing more and more about squid, more and more people catching them up here. I suspect that the marine heat wave may have caused a jump in the squid population."

Thorington said he's grateful that Yamada is tackling an issue that could have a long-term impact on Southeast fisheries.

"I'm really happy Richard was able to secure this grant and that there's government agencies that are actually paying attention to this and not going with the status quo," he said. "We have to try to adapt to what's coming."