The home beehive model of fish farming/Ken Roberson, Ecotrust
Grow your own wild salmon
Wild and crazy legislators in Alaska – a state that banned net-pen fish farming in 1989 in part because of fears some of the fish might escape the pens and interfere with wild fish – now want to allow Alaskans to start their own salmon farms or what some in Alaska prefer to call “ranches.”
State Reps. Mike Cronk, Sarah Vance and George Rauscher have proposed a law that would allow “a qualified person” to obtain a “fisheries rehabilitation permit” from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game authorizing him or her to “remove anadromous or freshwater finfish from water of the state, collect gametes and fertilize and incubate eggs taken from the fish, and place the fertilized or incubated eggs, larvae, or unfed fry in the same water of the state.”
Part of this appears to be due to warming Pacific waters that have left much of Alaska awash in pink and chum salmon while British Columbia, Canada, and Lower 48 states have suffered. But it appears the desire for evermore – and for the nature tampering that has defined the human species throughout its existence – runs deep.
As for kings (Chinook), silvers (coho) and reds (sockeye), there has been a massive boom in Bristol Bay, where the sockeye face no competition from pinks and chums, while Gulf of Alaska runs have slumped. Chinook, meanwhile, are in such bad shape that the Wild Fish Conservancy has petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the fish as endangered in the 49th state.
And yet the newly proposed legislation says the Commissioner of Fish and Game should help add more salmon to the sea by issuing permits to put salmon in streams where “there are no established escapement goals and local stakeholders have identified a decline in the number of the species of fish, or the population of the species of fish is limited.”
Never enough
This would make just about every stream in the state eligible for a new salmon farm given that there isn’t a stream in the state where someone doesn’t remember, or claim to remember, when “this creek used to have 10 times as many salmon as it does now.”
Not to mention that the number of fish is always “limited” because the human desire for fish is unlimited. The number of desired salmon is invariably N + 1 until the salmon are packed so thick they suck all of the oxygen out of a stream and suffocate themselves.
With human demand what it is, some will always make the argument that no matter how high the production at point X, 1.5X or 2X or 3X would be better. This is written in the history of fish hatcheries in America.
The federal agency now contends that “over the years, the system has evolved to meet the changing needs of conservation,” but admits that “some national fish hatcheries still raise fish for food and to support commercial fishing.”
Unlike the federal system, Alaska’s system of hatcheries – by far the biggest in the country and one of the largest in the world – never “evolved” to begin fretting about conservation. Alaska hatcheries started as an effort to support commercial fishing, have never wavered from that task, and have succeeded brilliantly in producing salmon for those commercial fishermen who make their money by killing pinks and chums.
Commercial fishermen dependent on Gulf of Alaska Chinook, coho and sockeye salmon might have paid a price, but it’s been a relatively small price. Overall, Alaska commercial salmon harvests have exploded in the hatchery era.
Fish, fish and more fish
- 157.5 million per year in the 1990s.
- 167.4 million per year in the 2000s.
- And 181 million per year in the 2010s.
Existing hatcheries now crank out so many pink salmon that commercial fishermen can’t catch them all and have some fishery researchers arguing that the volume of prey they consume is one of the reasons for the decades-long decline in the size and number of the Gulf of Alaska Chinook, sockeye and coho salmon with which pinks compete for food.
Those two species now make up the bulk of the annual harvest. Seventy-six percent of last season’s harvest was comprised of pinks and chums, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
Pinks and chums are the most farmed Alaska salmon for a simple reason: they are the cheapest and easiest to produce. They require none of the rearing time in freshwater needed by king, red and silver salmon. Those fish are raised in very limited numbers because it is expensive to hold them in freshwater ponds and feed them until they grow to a size that allows them to be released into the ocean.
Legislation allowing for backyard farmers to start growing salmon in the 49th state is unlikely to increase the number of these species because of these costs.
Alaska’s private, nonprofit, commercial-fishermen-controlled hatcheries – which are allowed to harvest tens of millions of salmon each year to cover their costs in raising fish – don’t even raise many kings, reds or silvers, and in some cases where they do, they do so only because the state pays them to raise the fish for release in places where the fish support sport fisheries.
The state itself still runs two hatcheries that raise fish for rod and reel fishermen, but it largely got out of the hatchery business in 1995 when it did away with the Division of Fisheries Rehabilitation, Enhancement and Development (FRED) because state hatcheries were too costly to operate. For that reason, the state turned the FRED hatcheries that had been funded by bonds approved by Alaska voters over to private, nonprofit business associations run by commercial fishermen.
Fish and Game was left with the responsibility of overseeing the newly privatized hatcheries, but that hasn’t always worked out so well.
Oops
IHN is the acronym for infectious hematopoietic necrosis, a viral disease known to deform and kill salmon. The state of Alaska links it to hatchery failures to maintain a “virus-free water supply, rigorous disinfection, isolation of egg and fish lots and “containment of diseased fish. There is an effective DNA vaccine used in Canada that is also licensed in the US but has been restricted commercially due to unlikely safety concerns regarding GMO products.”
CIAA has struggled since its inception and is now facing blowback from the commercial fishermen on which it levies a 2 percent tax on harvests that helps – along with cost-recovery fisheries and state loans – to keep the organization afloat.
“Because the loans CIAA takes out are my responsibility to repay – yes, they really are a financial burden to me – I need to stop their continuing loan debt. At $20 million dollars IN DEBT, with no viable revenue, they need to be stopped. I’m on a mission to return control to the people who LIVE IN SEWARD and depend on our local salmon.”
Buchanan charged that “the Trail Lakes Hatchery is a disaster, destroying more fry than it supplies.”
She was this fall reprimanded by the CIAA board for pointing out that when CIAA began stocking Shell and Whiskey lakes in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough with sockeye salmon declines in returns to those lakes accelerated rather than improved.
She has since appealed to the state Board of Fisheries to find out why “once CIAA manipulations begin…the populations plummet.”
The plan did not say where those parasites came from, but did add that “in 2014, 80,000 sockeye salmon smolt were released into Shell Lake as part of (a) rehabilitation effort. (And) in 2018, 46,000 smolt were stocked into Shell Lake.”
Administrative issues
Officially, the state Department of Fish and Game hasn’t taken a position on the new legislation, but privately, some with the agency say it lacks the staff to supervise yet more hatcheries run by who knows who.
The proposed legislation defines a hatchery “qualified person” as “a state resident under Alaska Statute 43.23.295 or a corporation organized under laws of this state.” The cited statute is the one that defines who qualifies for an Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD), the annual payment to Alaskans from the earnings of the oil-revenue-created Permanent Fund.
Simply stated, that requirement is that someone establish residency in the state and maintain it by spending more than half the year in-country. The statute defines no specific professional or licensing criteria as do other state laws governing more than 40 jobs from acupuncturists through lawyers and doctors to underground storage tank workers and veterinary examiners.
Determining who is qualified to run a home hatchery is largely left up to whoever happens to be in the appointed positions of the Commissioner of Fish and Game when the permits start rolling in.
The proposed law does limit egg takes to 500,000 or less, a drop in the bucket compared to the 2.6 billion eggs existing private hatcheries are permitted to take, according to Fish and Game.
And the newly proposed law does mimic the intent of the original state hatchery program in stating that “fish released into the water of the state under a permit issued under this section are available to the people for common use and are subject to applicable law in the same way as fish occurring in their natural state.”
But that doesn’t appear to rule out cost-recovery operations for a backyard salmon farm, given the cost-recovery law itself designates “terminal harvest areas” beyond the limits of “common property” fisheries.
“A hatchery permit holder may, by a majority vote of the membership of the hatchery permit holder’s board, elect to harvest surplus salmon produced at a facility in a terminal harvest area established for that facility through (ie. beyond) the common property fishery,” the law says.
Given that most commercial fisheries in Alaska take place in the marine waters of the state, and given that there is no provision for consultation on cost recovery with anyone other than commercial fishermen, it would appear that if a mom-and-pop ocean ranching business set up shop on Alaska salmon stream, it might be able to get permission to capture fish for cost-recovery at its hatchery.
Cost recovery itself gets into interesting issues of what constitutes enough revenue for operation of a private, non-profit operation in that a lot of “profit” can be hidden in the “costs” of business by, for instance, paying inflated salaries to staff, providing compensation for board members of a corporation, overpaying contractors working for the hatchery, or more.
Still, cost recovery would seem to hold the potential to ensure this a made-for-Alaska, rural business of the sort some one envisioned for net-pen salmon farming in the state where it can be said that if you can’t go farming, go ranching.
As an ADF&G Com Fish Division seasonal tech in the early 1970s based out of Glennallen, we placed the first instream egg-incubation boxes in the Gulkana drainage to determine whether such a hatchery would increase the survival of sockeye alevins. This experiment proved the concept to become Alaska’s most successful sockeye-hatchery program, albeit to what extent increased survival of alevins has affected the fitness of the populaton over the past several decades is not known.
Alaska’s salmon-ranching, aquaculture business would seem to comport with Alaska’s Alaska’s constitutional mandate that renewable resources “shall be utilized, developed and maintained on the sustained yield principle.” (No other state has such a constitutional provision).
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) was established with the statutory requirement that the “The Commissioner [of Fish and Game] shall manage, protect, maintain, improve, and extend the fish, game and aquatic plant resources of the state in the interest of the economy and general well-being of the state…through rehabilitation, enhancement, and development programs, [ADF&G must] do all things necessary to insure perpetual and increasing production and use of the food resources of state waters and continental shelf areas.”
So, this begs the question: if ocean-ranching is sanctioned — even demanded — by the state constitution, why is salmon-farming prohibited since it, too, would further maximize the use and productivity of state waters?
So, at least on its surface, banning fin fish farming does seem unconstitional. “Ostensibly, the farming of finfish in Alaska was banned in 1990 to protect wild stocks from the danger of disease and pollution as well as the possibility of escaped farmed fish displacing or breeding with wild fish. Alaska statutes currently prohibit any species of finfish farming in the waters of the state,” according the Alaska Department of Fish & Game.
This ban was painted with the broadest brush possible. Certainly, banning farming of non-native Atlantic salmon can be justified, but banning farming fish native to Alaska waters cannot be justified on the same grounds. If the rationale is “[potential] danger
of disease and pollution as well as the possibility of escaped farmed fish displacing or breeding with wild fish,” well how is it that the [potential] danger of disease and pollution as well as the possibility [actually, probability] of hatchery fish displacing or breeding with wild fish is not a rationale for banning ocean-ranching?
Jan: You know full well I can’t answer that last question. The Chilean’s raise coho in pens. We could raise Alaska native coho in pens, and the ranchers are already raising a lot of salmon in grow-out pens to make them bigger and stronger and better able to compete with wild fish when released?
And we think these hundreds of millions of fitter competitors don’t have any impact on the survival of wild fish? To throw a question back at you.
That they have no effect is pretty hard for anyone with any training in ecology to believe, but no one – or at least few – seem to care.
Craig: Whatever answers we might conjure up apparently won’t affect Commissioner Vincent-Lang, who presumably has some training in ecology:
According to the March 12 Cordova Times, appearing before the Board of Fisheries as it deliberated proposal #43 to limit hatchery production, Vincent-Lang proclaimed “the science regarding the impact of hatcheries on wild stocks is not conclusive and more study was needed.” . (so much for ADF&G’s adherence to the precautionary principle).
Then the March 18 Alaska Beacon (“Amid salmon crash, Alaska’s Yukon River residents say a new pact with Canada leaves them behind”) explains “Vincent-Lang has expressed excitement about the idea of hatcheries on the Yukon since as early as August 2021, three months into the crash in chum populations. ‘I’ll be dreaming of hatchery chinook and [chum] tonight!!!’ he wrote in an email.”
I’m not going to defend Vincent-Lang, but I suspect that “dreaming of hatchery Chinook and chum” might have been done with tongue firmly implanted in cheek. He knows full well that the many studies of hatcheries in the Columbia drainage have found even lower survival rates among hatchery fish than wild fish, and the Yukon drainage clearly has a survival problem, albeit poorly defined as to whether it is an inriver or marine issue.
My suspicion would be, given what has been seen in the Salish Sea as regards the competition between pink and Chinook salmon, that the explosion of Russian pink salmon (wild and hatchery) along with the climate-boosted boom Bristol Bay sockeye adding to the established Japanese hatchery and Russian wild chums in the Bering Sea, might well be part of what is depressing Yukon Chinook numbers. https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/21508925
A Yukon Territory Chinook hatchery would in this situation seem a huge waste of money. The return rate at the existign Whitehorse Rapids hatchery is less than 0.1 percent, and from what I know, Gale Vick pretty well reflected the general, in-house thinking of ADF&G with this: https://www.tananachiefs.org/op-ed-the-biological-and-practical-reasons-why-the-yukon-river-cannot-support-an-anadromous-salmon-hatchery/
A bit off subject, but why haven’t New England lobsters thrived in Alaskan waters? Alaskan water temperature and depth are on par with New England water. Lobsters have high economic value and cost of production is very low compared to crab. Seems like a natural fit for Alaska.
As with Atlantic salmon, stocks lobsters was tried repeatedly in the Pacific Ocean and never worked. No one seems to know why, but that is the way it is. This from an old NOAA report:
Attempts to transplant.–A number of at tempts have been made to
establish the American lobster on the Pacific coasr. In the years 1874,
1879, 1888, and 1899, some 104,000 adult lobsters were
planted in California waters, and 233 adults were released in Puget
Sound and off the mouth of the Columbia River in Washington . Also, two
lobsters were released in Great Salt Lake , Utah. All of these transfers
were unsuccessful. Between 1906 and 1917, efforts to transplant lobsters were intensified. A total of 24,572 lobsters were planted in
Puget Sound, Washington, and 1,532 in Yaquina Bay , Oregon. It is evident that these lobsters also failed to survive and reproduce. In 1954,
however, introductions of American lobsters to waters near Prince Rupert,
British Columbia, met with some s uccess. Several lobsters have been
caught 2 years after being released. One individual was taken 20 miles
from where it was planted . Thus, it has now bee n shown that the lobsters can be transplanted to Pacific waters, but the ultimate success
of this transplantation is yet to be determined.
This from a more up-to-date B.C. report: Several attempts to establish lobsters on the Pacific Coast of Canada have been made in the past, but so far not one has succeeded. These were:
1896–Nanaimo
1905–Second Narrows, south side of Burrard Inlet; Secret Cove, Sechelt Peninsula; Long Bay, southeast corner of Gambier Island; Snug Cove, east of Bowen Island; False Narrows Nanoose Bay
1908–Sooke Harbour
In 1946 a further lot of lobsters was brought out from Prince Edward Island through British Columbia Packers Limited. They were divided into two lots. One group was confined in a large concrete tank at the Pacific Biological Station, Departure Bay, Nanaimo, but the lobsters in this lot died before the second day.
The second lot of 1,605 individuals was released in a lagoon on Lasqueti Island, where they were kept under observation but were not confined. A trapping program was carried on in the lagoon each season, but was discontinued in 1948, when only three lobsters were taken.
In 1954 Mr. A. B. Faulkner, of the Prince Rupert Lobster and Oyster Company Limited, imported several lots of lobsters from St. Andrews, N.B., under a special licence granted by the Federal Department of Fisheries. Mr. Faulkner writes:
“Following the hatching of larva in the summer of 1955, we released about eighteen mature lobsters in the salt water lagoon behind the net. That winter the net was breached by drift logs and big tides, and these lobsters were free to leave. We have reports of two lobsters being taken in crab hoops in Prince Rupert harbour in the summer of 1956, and a sworn statement that one lobster in good condition was taken in May, 1956, at the north end of Stevens island, about 20 miles distant. No other lobsters have been released.”
“Our latest shipment was in 1956 and a number of these lobsters are still alive in our pens after moulting in this summer (1957). The principal mortality is from lobsters fighting each other; the remainder from inimical conditions in the small cages were they are confined.”
The present status of the lobster is uncertain, but since some have lived for several years in captivity, a few may still be existing in the wild state.
https://linnet.geog.ubc.ca/biodiversity/efauna/AlienSpeciesinBritishColumbiaHistoricalRecords.html
It appears that once it become obvious they couldn’t be quickly and easily turned into a commercial species, as with coho salmon in Chile or Atlantic and Chinook salmon in the South Pacific, efforts at stocking them died.
And how are things going now for king salmon trying to find an acceptable spawning bed in Alaska that will allow their eggs to hatch and get to the sea?
Well, maybe they’d be going better if I could get a permit to raise up some Chinook smolts in my home aquarium!
Wow. Also, I thought the ban on net-pen fish farming was written into to Alaska State constitution at its inception. Am I wrong? It can’t have been left till 1989?!
There was a ban on fish traps approved just before the Constitution, which some now believe was written into the Constitution. But the domestication of Atlanatic and coho salmon, and their subsequent farming was largely sci-fi in the 1950s as it was at Statehood. But like you’re smart phone, sci-fi was destined to become reality.