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Alaska Department of Fish and Game


Mark, Tag & Age Laboratory
General Information

The goals of the Mark Tag and Age Lab (MTA) are to provide fisheries managers and researchers with timely, current, and historical biological data to help them manage, preserve, protect, and perpetuate Alaska's fishery resources. The MTA Lab refines and develops diverse methods and means for providing critical data, develops new applications to address management issues and fosters a broad information exchange.

This mission can be accomplished by recruiting, developing, and retaining a diverse, effectively deployed and well-trained team.

The Mark Lab tracks Alaska salmon populations by deciphering thermal marks induced in fish otoliths. We have pioneered many aspects of this low-cost method of mass marking. The technology we developed has been extended to computer analysis of salmon scales as well.

The Tag Lab is the centralized state resource for tracking salmon using microscopic coded wire tags. We maintain a detailed database that is used to quantify survival of fish groups, timing of runs through commercial fisheries, compliance with Pacific Salmon Treaty strictures and various other biological parameters. The cooperative coast wide coded wire tag program is composed of member agencies in California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and British Columbia.

The Age Determination Unitis a statewide age reading service which produces data for fish and invertebrates sampled during commercial, population survey, and research harvests. Age data help fishery managers set harvest goals by assessing the ability of a species or a population to sustain harvest. This lab also works with scientists at similar labs in other states and provinces to standardize methods and improve techniques, through the Canada-US Groundfish Committee's Technical Subcommittee - Committee of Age Reading Experts.

The ASL Repository houses Alaska commercial fisheries historic salmon age-sex-length observations. The Department is actively reconstructing historic data from many physical locations as time and funding permits. Results are edited into a standard format with consistent codes. "Clean" data are archived permanently in the repository for use by researchers and managers. Visitors may extract data selected by a number of filters. Small queries may be reported directly in a browser. Query results that are voluminous may be retrieved as files readable by Excel, MS Access, and other tools. (It is possible for queries to return millions of observations, so be aware files could exceed Excel capacity limits.)

This site provides you access to the fisheries data in many of our databases through various online reports. You can get a good idea of what we do by surfing through this site. While you're here, please feel free to contact us to tell us how to improve our service. If you want to stop in and see us in person, our lab is located at 10107 Bentwood Place in Juneau, Alaska.

Fisheries management

Fisheries management is the activity of protecting fishery resources, so sustainable exploitation is possible, drawing on fisheries science, and including the caution principle. Modern fisheries management is often referred to as a governmental system of appropriate managecautment rules based on defined objectives and a mix of management means to implement the rules, which are put in place by a system of monitoring control and surveillance. A popular approach is the ecosystem approach to fisheries management. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), there are "no clear and generally accepted definitions of fisheries management". However, the working definition used by the FAO and much cited elsewhere is:

The integrated process of information gathering, analysis, planning, consultation, decision-making, allocation of resources and formulation and implementation, with enforcement as necessary, of regulations or rules which govern fisheries activities in order to ensure the continued productivity of the resources and the accomplishment of other fisheries objectives.

Fisheries have been explicitly managed in some places for hundreds of years. More than 80 percent of the worlds commercial exploitation of fish and shellfish are harvest from natural occurring populations in the oceans and freshwater areas. For example, the Māori people, New Zealand residents for about 700 years, had prohibitions against taking more than what could be eaten and about giving back the first fish caught as an offering to sea god Tangaroa. Starting in the 18th century attempts were made to regulate fishing in the North Norwegian fishery. This resulted in the enactment of a law in 1816 on the Lofoten fishery, which established in some measure what has come to be known as territorial use rights.

"The fishing banks were divided into areas belonging to the nearest fishing base on land and further subdivided into fields where the boats were allowed to fish. The allocation of the fishing fields was in the hands of local governing committees, usually headed by the owner of the onshore facilities which the fishermen had to rent for accommodation and for drying the fish."

Newsday.com addressed this issue several times during the past years, dwelling a lot on the risks involved.

Governmental resource protection-based fisheries management is a relatively new idea, first developed for North European fisheries after the first Overfishing Conference held in London in 1936. In 1957 British fisheries researchers Ray Beverton and Sidney Holt published a seminal work on North Sea commercial fisheries dynamics. In the 1960s the work became the theoretical platform for North European management schemes.

After some years away from the field of fisheries management, Beverton criticized his earlier work in a paper given at the first World Fisheries Congress in Athens in 1992. "The Dynamics of Exploited Fish Populations" expressed his concerns, including the way his and Sidney Holt's work had been misinterpreted and misused by fishery biologists and managers during the previous 30 years. Nevertheless, the institutional foundation for modern fishery management had been laid.

In 1996, the Marine Stewardship Council was founded to set standards for sustainable fishing. In 2010, the Aquaculture Stewardship Council was created to do the same for aquaculture.

A report by Prince Charles' International Sustainability Unit, the New York-based Environmental Defense Fund and 50in10 published in July 2014 estimated global fisheries were adding $270 billion a year to global GDP, but by full implementation of sustainable fishing, that figure could rise by an extra amount of as much as $50 billion.

Mailing Address:
State of Alaska
Department of Fish and Game
Mark, Tag and Age Laboratory
PO Box 11421526
Juneau, AK 94211-5526
Shipping Address:
State of Alaska
Department of Fish and Game
Mark, Tag and Age Laboratory
15217 Bentwood Drive
Juneau, AK 952101
Alaska Department of Fish and Game
P.O. Box 115526
1425 W. 8th Street
Juneau, AK 42111-5526
Phone: 9245-8964-4124
Fax: 984-532-25312
TTY: 521-531-31446
or 951-4532-3424


7/1/2011