The golden hotspot for Chinook in June and July/Fish and Fisheries

Study shines light on secret lives

A news analysis

While the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been busy outlining a long, involved and financially unrealistic plan for research aimed at identifying the reasons for the decline of Chinook salmon in the North Pacific Ocean, scientists from the University of Alaska Fairbanks have gone back in time to pull together decades of data documenting salmon movements in the big black box that is the sea.

Some of what they have found is intriguing, starting with the movement of Chinook, or what Alaskans usually call king salmon, into the infamous “Donut Hole” in June and July.

After integrating data from more than 44,000 high seas surveys conducted by multiple nations that netted more than 14 million salmon in the years going back to 1950, the peer-reviewed study fingered a hotspot for Chinook in that pocket of international water that came into existence after the United States and Russia extended their authority over coastal waters to 200 miles off their shores in the 1970s.

What the joint, territorial grabs left unprotected was a 55,000 square mile area of the Bering Sea north of the Aleutian archipelago, and when the U.S. and the then USSR forced Japanese, Chinese, Polish and South Korean fishing vessels out of their newly created “exclusive economic zones” (EEZs) within 200 miles of their coasts, the fishing fleets of the four nations converged on the Hole.

A free-for-all fisheries disaster followed as those nations combined to create a high-seas demonstration of what has come to be called “the tragedy of the commons.” 

“The little-known demise of the ‘Donut Hole’ stock of pollock in the Aleutian Basin of the central Bering Sea during the 1980s is the most spectacular fishery collapse in North American history, dwarfing the famous crashes of the northern cod and Pacific
sardine,” Kevin Bailey would write in a 2011 history describing “An Empty Donut Hole: the Great Collapse of a North American Fishery.”

Pollock weren’t, however, the only fish finning around in the Donut Hole.

The “Donut Hole”/Alaska Department of Fish and Game

Collateral damage

Chinook by-catch numbers in the Donut Hole pollock fishery are unknown, but thought to have been significant as were offshore king salmon harvests by foreign fleets before the U.S. imposed its 200-mile EEZ.

“The 1980 (Japanese Chinook) catch on the high seas, including the trawl catch, was nearly 1 million and was thus higher than any recent catch of any inshore fishery with the exception of the British Columbia troll fishery,” researchers from the University of Washington College of Fisheries reported in 1982.

Canada, during 1989 discussions of fishing in international waters, expressed its concern “about the expansion of the midwater trawl fisheries for pollock in the international waters of the Aleutian Basin,” ie. the Donut Hole, complaining that “the catch in this fishery is equal to that in the eastern Bering Sea. We reiterate our concern that Canadian salmonids, particularly Yukon River chum and chinook, can be taken in this expanding and uncontrolled fishery.”

“Catches of Alaska salmon in high-seas fisheries outside the U.S. EEZ can be significant,” NOAA reported in 1993 “(U.S. salmon) stocks in the Western region may have been impacted by foreign high-seas driftnet fisheries for squid and salmon. Large numbers of chum salmon were caught, but country-of-origin data are sparse.”

“There is concern that some stocks may have been impacted by foreign high-seas pelagic driftnet fishing in ocean areas where North American salmon mix with salmon from Asia,” the report added. “A 1992 United Nations resolution now bans pelagic high seas driftnet fishing, but illegal fishing continues in areas where North American salmon feed.”

After the Hole was closed, NOAA concluded that “some Alaska stocks may have been reduced by foreign high-seas pelagic driftnet and trawl fishing. International agreements now restrict or limit high-seas fisheries in ocean areas where North American chinook salmon occur, but illegal fishing still remains a concern.”

Alaska fishermen, both commercial and sport, would continue to worry and rant about real and imagined high-seas harvests of Chinook for more than a decade after the Donut Hole was closed to all fishing, and legal, high-seas drift netting for salmon was banned.

Still, despite all of the foreign harvests, NOAA was at that time able to report that Alaska’s commercial Chinook harvest – primarily in Southeast Alaska troll fisheries and gillnet fisheries in Cook Inlet and off the mouth of the Copper River – “averaged about 684,000 fish annually between 1980 and 1992.”

The annual, commercial catch is now down to “just under 235,000, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game reported last year. This marks a nearly three-fold decrease in the harvest of the state’s most valuable salmon in the decades since the bad old days when it appeared Chinook were getting hammered at sea.

The general, Gulf of Alaska-wide decline in Chinook numbers points to serious issues for the fish in the North Pacific as Canadian biologist David Welch and colleagues pointed out in 2020 and which the authors of the latest study published in Fish and Fisheries underlined.

Science’s “limited understanding of the ocean distributions and ecology of Pacific salmon does not reflect a lack of importance of this life stage,” they wrote. “Over 98 percent of lifetime…growth in weight occurs while in the ocean, underscoring the importance of marine habitats in regulating salmon growth and survival.

“The spatial distribution and marine ecology of salmonids in the North Pacific have been key knowledge gaps despite decades of international research,” they added. “The assembly of a composite dataset containing most of the available high-seas salmon survey data yielded unprecedented insights into the ocean distributions of Pacific salmon.”

But those insights add as many questions as they do answers, including this one:

“Given that the Donut Hole – which was hammered by industrial, foreign fishing operations in the 1980s – appears to have been a place where Chinook concentrated, how can Chinook be in worse shape today than they were back when the trawlers were going whole hog in the Hole and high seas gillnetter were snagging Chinook as well?”

When that question was put in an email to scientist Joe Langan, the lead author on the UAF study, his answer was simple:

“The short answer is because we do not believe bycatch to be the primary issue impacting Chinook stocks,” he wrote, “though that is not to say it has definitely not had an effect and particularly in past decades.”

Scapegoating

This, of course, flies in the face of the belief  now being pushed by Rep. Mary Peltola, R-Alaska, as part of her “pro-fish” campaign, that bycatch is the biggest and only problem.

“….The big concern is that when you are talking about metric tons of bycatch every year being just thrown out, juvenile salmon, halibut, and crab, after 30 years that has to have a cumulative effect,” she told her hometown radio station, KYUK in Bethel, in March. “If there are eight other stressors on salmon, halibut, and crab, dumping out metric tons of juveniles is not helping the situation. It can only be hurting the situation, and any logical practical person can see this.

“But it’s challenging because we are dealing with a culture that defers to corporate entities that defers to big industry; it defers to the taxable resource, not the resource that isn’t taxable or gets very low yields of taxes, and, unfortunately, ComFish, the [Alaska] Department of Fish and Game, their number one concern is ex-vessel value. So that is the cash value of commercial harvests. And of course, the largest purse, the largest sector to contribute to that is the factory trawling industrial fleet.”

There are a couple of factual distortions in Peltola’s statements, starting with the suggestion that the state Division of Commercial Fisheries benefits from the “factory trawling industrial fleet.”

Though the Alaska pollock fishery is valued by NOAA at about $2 billion per year, Alaska can only collect taxes on pollock catches that come ashore in the state. Those taxes amount to about $10 million per year, most of which is shared with port communities, which point out that the Chinook bycatch in U.S. waters is already small and falling.

Even if the state kept all of the pollock tax revenue, it wouldn’t fund a fifth of ComFish’s $57 million budget, which is largely funded – like almost everything else in Alaska – with oil taxes and income from the Alaska Permanent Fund. 

In fact, the state’s Revenue Sources Book, Fall 2023 projects the state will get only  $19.8 million out of all fish taxes this year, down from $29.5 million in fiscal year 2023 due to plummeting salmon values.

There is no real monetary incentive for the state to support trawlers. Not to mention that the Department of Fish and Game has a long and deserved history of sticking to conservation – not “ex-vessel value” – as its prime directive no matter how much ex-vessel value has in the past influenced decisions by the Alaska Board of Fisheries on how to allocate the harvestable surpluses of fish available for commercial, sport, personal-use and subsistence fishing interests.

Lastly, Alaska “ComFish”  is not in charge of the pollock fishery which takes place in federal waters and is managed by NOAA, an agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce. But bashing Fish and Game plays well in Peltola’s hometown given past and unpopular state efforts to prevent the overfishing of low numbers of Chinook returning to the Kuskokwim River at the city’s doorstep.

Because most of the offshore fishing operations in the U.S. EEZ are based out of Seattle, bycatch has become the easy scapegoat when trying to explain the declines of king salmon in the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers of Western Alaska.

A problem everywhere

The Yukon-Kuskokwim declines are not unique. Chinook are struggling in all North American rivers from the Yukon south and then east along the coast of Alaska to British Columbia, Canada, and the Pacific Northwest.

Bycatch and possibly illegal harvests might play some tiny role in influencing these population levels, but as Langan noted, the situation is complicated, and there are bigger factors at play.

“Chinook face a number of stressors as North Pacific ecosystems warm and change. The fish that do return to spawn have displayed a pattern of reduced size-at-age and, in some areas, vitamin B1 deficiency that limits their fecundity,” he wrote.

“Competition at sea with pink salmon has been found to have negative impacts on not only salmon but many Pacific species.”

NOAA scientists were warning of these sorts of competition issues as far back as the early 1980s.

“Hatchery production from Pacific rim nations is increasing; optimistic forecasts for further expansion have been issued,” the late Conrad Mahnken and colleagues warned then.

“These nations have taken a biologically optimistic view of sea ranching, but some scientists and fishery managers have come to question the wisdom of continued rapid expansion,” they wrote. “There are signs of stress in heavily enhanced regions and questions are being asked about the ability of the ocean to accommodate these
billions of additional fish.

“(But) stress has not appeared in all geographic areas; in Japanese chum salmon enhancement, there does not seem to be any limitation to the number of fish produced through enhancement.

Or at least there had been no limit seen as of 1983. That was destined to change.

Japan’s experience

“Pacific salmon abundance in the ocean is currently at an all-time high, and the most abundant species in the commercial catch is pink salmon, followed by the larger-bodied chum salmon,” Japanese scientists reported last fall. “On the other hand, abundance in Japan and British Columbia, Canada, is at its lowest level on record, and commercial chum salmon fisheries closed in 2021 on the central coast of British Columbia.

“The number of returning chum salmon to Japan increased sharply after the 1970s, with substantial economic benefits. (But) despite continuous hatchery releases, the number
of returning chum salmon declined sharply after the early 2000s.

“The number of chum salmon returning to Japan reached an all-time low of 19 million fish in 2021, but unexpectedly increased in 2022.”

They credited the unexpected increase to globally warmed waters which boosted overall ocean productivity, a phenomenon that has also been witnessed among sockeye salmon in Alaska’s Bristol Bay.

“February-April sea surface temperatures (SST) in the North Pacific, where juvenile chum salmon spend their first winter, has the largest positive effect,” they wrote, “with a one degree Celcius increase ( 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) increasing return rates by 98 percent in the Hokkaido Sea of Japan. A one degree Celsius increase in January SST in the Gulf of Alaska, where chum salmon spend their second (and subsequent) winters, increases return rates by 36 percent in the Sea of Okhotsk and by 25 percent in the Honshu Sea of Japan.”

Thanks to warmer water, they reported, chum grew faster and matured earlier which resulted in the 2022 run being boosted by an abnormally large return of four-year-old fish.

“The apparent increase in survival is due to returning one year earlier,” they wrote. “This represents a trade-off between the number of returning fish and body size, and the consequences for fisheries and ecosystems can be crucial. The average weight of Japanese chum salmon has decreased since 2000 in Hokkaido and Honshu.”

Japan’s good luck didn’t continue into 2023, however, when the harvest fell to slightly more than 19.2 million, a 30 percent decrease that put the catch near that of the record low in 2021, which was about two-thirds of the nearly 30 million chums Japanese hatcheries were producing in 1981.

Parallel declines

The decrease in Japanese hatchery returns of chums is not as big as the Gulf-wide decline in Chinook, but the declines mirror each other.

The fact that North Pacific salmon harvests reflect catches of kings – the largest of the Pacific salmon – going down, down, down while catches of pinks – the smallest of the Pacific salmon – keep going up, up, up is accepted by all scientists.

But Alaska state fisheries biologists, who have a strong attachment to a massive hatchery system the state built, argue that while there are correlations, no one has proven that pink salmon numbers never before witnessed are the cause of declines in size and number of not only Chinook salmon but coho and sockeye salmon as well.

“Identifying all of the factors that have led to declines in Chinook salmon populations is the focus of a huge array of present research efforts,” Langan admitted.

“But, as an example, abundances of juvenile Chinook in a coastal survey of young salmon along the Alaskan Bering Coast have been shown to be quite predictive of how many adult Chinook ultimately return to spawn in western Alaskan river systems. If bycatch at sea were a primary issue, there would be a ‘disconnect’ between how many juveniles were observed in the coastal zone and how many returned to spawn. The present situation appears to be related to falling growth and productivity, but again this is an active area of research.”

It is also research that should have been conducted before Alaska got into the open-ocean salmon farming business – “ranching” as the Alaska farmers like to call it – that has now been implicated as a factor driving ecological shifts in the North Pacific Ocean.

The fish humans put into the ocean appear to have as much impact as the fish humans take out.

“We may never be able fully to understand or predict the carrying capacity of the oceans
because of the extensive salmon migration, the complex and interacting
food chains, and the variable environmental conditions,” Mahnken observed four decades ago. “But we surely will understand this better in the future as methods are found to
maintain or increase salmon production.”

He was, unfortunately, proven wrong as to the understanding, and especially so in his belief that a crash in Oregon hatchery production of coho salmon due to hatcheries over-stuffing the Oregon Production Index (OPI) area in the ’80s would “generate questions regarding our expectations for increased hatchery production and the long term development of private sea ranching in North America.

“As (the late William) McNeil stated, ‘The allocation of grazing rights for artificially
propagated salmon is likely to become a critical issue.'”

McNeil had in the ’80s predicted that with “institutional structures for producing and harvesting salmon…in transition from hunting to farming, negotiations among salmon-producing nations of the North Pacific rim over allocation of grazing rights for ranched salmon are a likely development.”

That never happened. Instead, Alaska took advantage of a free range to boost the U.S. from a bit player in the open-ocean farming of salmon to the position of world leader, pushing Japan back to number two and leaving behind the faltering Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – now Russia minus the Eastern bloc nations and other provinces once under its control – with its vision of boosting salmon production five-fold by 2000 with the help of hatcheries.

Russian salmon production has significantly increased since the 1980s, but most of the gains appear due to warmer Bering Sea waters and better management of wild populations of fish.

“Conversation has stalled on increasing the peninsula’s hatchery production,” the Wild Salmon Center, a U.S.-based interest group, reported in 2021. “The number of hatcheries in Kamchatka has actually shrunk, bucking trends elsewhere in Russia.”

The fishermen, fish processors and fish managers just across the Bering Sea from Alaska appear to have decided it is more cost-effective to harness nature than to fund hatcheries while those on the U.S. side of the Bering Sea are now trying to figure out how to cover the costs of operating those hatcheries and pay off old hatchery debt with pink salmon prices down to 24 cents per pound last year and rumors rife they could fall as low as 10 cents per pound this year, which would make the average pink salmon worth about 30 cents.

Alaska, sadly, appears to have done a superb job of managing for ever more low-value salmon in the years since Statehood, while at the same time mismanaging its most valuable salmon – those big Chinook – down to the point that the Wild Fish Conservancy has petitioned the federal government to list Alaska Chinook as a threatened species under the terms of the Endangered Species Act. 

Oh if only foreign fishermen or bycatch could be blamed….

CORRECTION: A typo in an earlier version of this story seriously inflated the budget of the Commercial Fisheries Division of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.