Unalaska, AK – Four Unalaska City School students performed at the All-State Music Festival, held this weekend in Anchorage. Participants included Bethany Hladick on the French horn, Michelle Fernandez on the bassoon, Noah Betzen on trumpet, and Aidan Bobbitt on trombone.

The festival is hosted by the Alaska Student Activities Association.

Unalaska, AK – For three days, over 10,000 fishermen, processors, and vendors gathered in Seattle for the annual Pacific Marine Expo - more commonly known as "FishExpo."

The trade show was lasted from Thursday to Saturday, and over 300 vendors and organizations manned 540 booths. There were companies that sold pumps, propellers, sonars, and most everything else a vessel needs to run. At the expo's Alaska Pavilion, representatives from the Port of Dutch Harbor, the Kodiak Chamber of Commerce, and the Aleutians East Borough talked about the services their communities offered to fishermen.

Unalaska, AK – A moderate earthquake hit near Adak on Saturday, early in the morning. The 5.2-magnitude quake occurred at 1:14am about 24 miles from the island, according to the Alaska Earthquake Information Center. It happened 23 miles below sea level.

No felt reports have been filed, and no injuries or damages are believed to have been caused by the earthquake.

Another 5.2-magnitude earthquake hit approximately 60 miles from Adak earlier this month.

Unalaska, AK – The last of the active North Aleutian basin natural leases have been dropped. Hewitt Mineral Corporation let go its four leases in October, two years after Shell relinquished the 33 leases it possessed.

Hewitt's leases covered over 22,000 acres on the Alaska Peninsula. The company had hoped to develop a liquefied natural gas plant on the peninsula as well as a pipeline. But a number of challenges have caused Hewitt to release its stake, says company president William Dolman.

Unalaska, AK – Last week, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council groundfish plan team met in Seattle and set the allowable biological catch for eastern Bering Sea walleye pollock at 1.276 million metrics tons. That's a 57% increase from the 2010 ABC, which was set at 813,000 metric tons.

The team acted on the recommendations made in the National Marine Fisheries Service stock assessment report, which was posted earlier this month. In addition to suggesting an ABC of 1.267 million metric tons, the assessment also determined that the projected total biomass of Bering Sea pollock more than doubled over the past year, jumping from 4.6 million metric tons to 9.6 million. Pollock has experienced a downturn since 2006, when the quota dropped from about 1.5 million metric tons to just over 800,000 in 2009 and 2010.

Unalaska, AK – The Alaska Department of Fish and Game recently set guideline harvest levels for the small open access tanner crab fishery near Unalaska. Unalaska Bay will not be open for commercial fishing this year, but Makushin and Akutan Bays will. ADF&G bases their decision on the annual trawl survey in the Eastern Aleutian District. The survey results showed that the mature male abundance of the stock in Unalaska Bay was too low to open the fishery. It was down 98 percent from last year and is at its lowest level since 1995. Assistant Area Shellfish Biologist Jeanette Alas says this does not mean that the local stock is crashing, simply that the survey results were low for this year
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"With the trawl survey, we're limited depending on the bottom where we can tow. So we can only tow in certain areas. So on that day, on that hour that we towed in the survey area, if there weren't crab there right then it reflects poorly in the survey. But these are pretty small local populations. We definitely worry about depleting local resources, so we tend to manage these fisheries fairly conservatively," she explained.

Unalaska, AK – As the weather grows colder and people gather together for the holidays, medical providers and researchers recommend people protect themselves and their children from respiratory diseases. An analysis of data from 2005 - 2007 shows that Alaska Native infants have the highest death rate from lower respiratory tract infections than any other group. Other data shows they also have higher rates of hospitalizations due to respiratory infections. The rate is the highest in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, but Center for Disease Control Arctic Investigations Program researcher Rosalyn Singleton says the high rate is likely related to conditions found in many rural areas.

Unalaska, AK – On Tuesday afternoon the sun was shining, the sky was clear, and the wind wasn't blowing. It should have been an Unalaska airplane passenger's dream conditions

"Oh we were just flying along. It was a great little flight. And the pilot actually came on and said because of high barometric pressure that effected the altimeter, we would have to divert to Cold Bay to wait for lower pressure in Dutch before we could land," recalled passenger Kris-Ann Wilcox. "I leaned up to the flight attendant and said, So what he's saying is that the weather's too nice for us to land in Dutch.' And she laughed and said, I guess you're right.'"

Unalaska, AK – This weekend, over 30 members of the Qawalangin Tribe met to set their priorities for the year and to elect a new councilmember.

The most immediate task involves sending three councilmembers to the Bureau of Indian Affairs Tribal Providers conference held in Anchorage this December.

The Qawalangin Tribe is also working to add roads to their federal inventory. The Tribe is eligible for transportation funding based on the inventory's size, which can include both roads managed by the Ounalashka Corporation and the city. Qawalangin Tribe President Denise Rankin says that they already have some infrastructure projects in the works.