A pink salmon production factory in Alaska’s Prince William Sound/Wikimedia Commons
Researchers find a smoking gun
The strongest evidence to date that Alaska’s industrial-scale, open-ocean farming of pink salmon has altered the North Pacific ecosystem came Thursday in a study published in the peer-reviewed ICES Journal of Marine Science.
This is a smoking gun.
“Peak pink salmon abundances reduced growth of sockeye salmon from seven to 14 percent during the second year in the ocean compared with growth when pink salmon abundance was low, while third-year growth was reduced up to 17 percent,” they wrote.
While those percentages might not seem all that high, the scientists noted that “the overall effect of pink salmon abundance on sockeye growth was over two times greater than the effect of sockeye salmon abundance.”
They also made a bold claim as to the damage hatcheries are doing to wild fish after examining an ecosystem now supporting more salmon than at any point in human history, but with pinks – or what Alaskans call “humpies” – dominant.
The smallest of the Pacific salmon and the salmon with the shortest lifespans, pinks appear to have a competitive advantage in the warmer ocean of today, and they have been exploiting that opportunity in part on their own and in part due to a big boost from industrial-scale, profit-driven hatcheries in Alaska and Russia.
Those hatcheries are pumping salmon into an ocean over-stuffed with salmon, the authors of the study concluded, and the results are what would be expected in such a situation.
“It is important to recognize that in the present era,” they wrote, “hatchery releases represent a classic ‘zero-sum’ game, where an incremental increase in hatchery releases results in some loss of growth and productivity of wild salmon through increased competition at sea. Understanding this dynamic is critical for making responsible decisions related to the management of salmon hatcheries and conservation of wild Pacific salmon.”
Wild fish pay
The study’s key finding is that in the big battle for survival in the ocean, the hatchery-inflated number of pink salmon has twice the effect as the number of sockeye on how many sockeye will return to the streams of their origin to be caught by fishermen or to spawn.
The loss of sockeye in both size and number as a result of these interactions is a significant economic issue given that sockeye now support Alaska sport fisheries that bring hundreds of millions of tourism dollars into the state each year while continuing to fill the role of the money fish for Alaska commercial fishermen.
With 43 percent of the annual Alaska harvest of pinks on average attributable to hatchery pinks, according to Fish and Game, the new study would indicate that the commercial fishermen who harvest sockeye, nearly all of which are wild, are significantly subsidizing hatcheries with lost catch.
The coastwide consequences of these hatcheries are unknown, but sockeye returns to streams in Canada and the Pacific Northwest have been declining even faster than those in Alaska.
Those findings plus the long-term issue of Alaska fishermen intercepting salmon bound for Canadian spawning grounds have stirred rising anger among Canadian fishermen forced to the beach because of weak returns of salmon, but the latest study did not seek to document why the salmon of Canada, Washington or Oregon are in trouble.
The study looked solely at what is going on with Alaska salmon. The researchers examined 24,584 sockeye scales from salmon captured in the Egegik, Black Lake, Chignik, Kenai, Coghill, Copper, Chilkat and Hugh Smith Lake rivers.
The rivers span the Gulf Coast from the southern edge of Bristol Bay in Southwest Alaska to the southern end of the Alaska Peninsula. The Copper River, midway along this stretch of coastline, is where researchers first noticed significant, documentable correlations between pink salmon abundance and sockeye declines.
Scientists looking for long-term damage from the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill (EVOS) in Prince William Sound (PWS), the site of the worst oil tanker disaster in U.S. history, stumbled on something else in 2017 – the possibility that the industrial scale pink salmon hatcheries that had been built in the Sound were doing more damage to wild salmon than an oil spill.
But, they added, they also found what they described as a “negative driver” affecting sockeye.
“Of the salmon species, the largest driver was the negative impact of adult pink salmon returns on sockeye salmon productivity,” they wrote. “These results highlight the need to better understand long-term impacts of pink salmon on food webs, as well as the interactions between nearshore species and freshwater inputs, particularly as they relate to climate change and increasing water temperatures.”
Specifically, they reported that “all sockeye salmon stocks examined exhibited a downward trend in productivity with increasing PWS hatchery pink salmon returns. While there was considerable variation in sockeye salmon productivity across the low- and mid-range of hatchery returns (0–30 million), productivity was particularly impacted at higher levels of hatchery returns.”
As a result, Alaska now finds itself the provider of a large volume of small, low-value, ocean-farmed pink salmon while the market for human-consumed salmon is dominated by big, high-value, net-pen-farmed Atlantic salmon.
Winners and losers
The sheer volume of Alaska pinks pushing annual state salmon harvests far above even the biggest year in the last millennium has drawn attention to hatcheries, which are in the business of producing salmon solely for profit unlike some Lower 48 hatcheries involved in trying to rehabilitate depressed salmon runs.
Questions have increasingly been raised as to what damage these hatcheries are doing to wild salmon not only in the 49th state but all along the West Coast of North America.
The scale evidence, according to authors of the last study, now shows that “production hatcheries and ocean heating contribute to the competitive dominance of pink salmon, underscoring the need to consider this unintended anthropogenic effect on the growth and productivity of sockeye salmon throughout the North Pacific.”
Russia added another nearly 1.3 billion and Japan, the pioneer in open-ocean farming and once the world leader in hatchery production, a little more than 1 billion. Other U.S. hatcheries, primarily those in the Pacific Northwest, accounted for about 300 million hatchery fish and Canadian hatcheries even less.
As open-ocean farming of salmon – or “ranching” as hatchery proponents prefer to call it – has steadily increased from its meager beginning in the 1970s, Alaska hatcheries along with the processors and fishermen associated with them have become big business.
In 2019 the McDowell Group, a consultancy working for the Alaska Salmon Hatchery Alliance, reported the state’s 25 private, non-profit (PNP) hatcheries generated about $600 million per year in economic output.
Stutes’ political career has been funded by the state’s highly political commercial fishing industry, which has long dominated discussions of fishery management in this state. As this is written, it is busy lobbying the Alaska Board of Fisheries to reduce the spawning goal for prized Kenai River king salmon in order to allow an increase in the commercial harvest of sockeye in Cook Inlet.
King salmon bycatch in the Inlet’s commercial sockeye gillnets has in recent years forced reductions in commercial fishing to try to let enough kings escape harvest to reach the in-river spawning goal for the big fish. Despite this, state fisher managers have fallen short of the goal for four years in a row.
King salmon – or Chinook as much of the rest of the world calls them – are the biggest, most valuable and most prized of the Pacific salmon, but their numbers have been in decline all along the West Coast from Bristol Bay east to the Cook Inlet and south to Oregon.
Food competition with pinks has been suggested as one possible reason Chinook are struggling. But the data to support that hypothesis is not as strong as the data to support pink impacts on sockeye at this time.
At this point, that could be because so little is known about the secret lives of salmon in the ocean. The latest study adds another small piece to the puzzle of life there.
How should we square the results of this study with the generally strong sockeye returns that have occurred all across Alaska in recent years?
Do you mean the sockeye returns inflated by those huge Bristol Bay harvests everyone agrees are tied to global warming?
My understanding is sockeye returns state-wide have been generally strong in recent years. I am most familiar with Southeast stocks, and a couple good examples are the Situk River near Yakutat and Redoubt Lake near Sitka- both have exceeded escapement in several of the most recent years. I believe the Copper River has also met or exceeded escapement in recent years. I’m less familiar with Southcentral stocks, but clicking through the fish count information on the ADF&G suggests recent returns have been generally good.
There are often important details and nuances that can be lost when we generalize about large scale trends, but I think we can say that sockeye returns in AK have been good in recent years.
I don’t bring this up to refute the research or the assertions that were made from the results… just an observation I had when thought about this work.
The fish counts are a worthless data point in that they only tabulate escapement, not return size. ADF&G should be meeting escapement goals, and in many cases such as on the Kenai and the Copper river, they try to exceed them to provide for in-river harvest.
The best data compilation – 47 sockeye systems – is to be found here: https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.1139/cjfas-2019-0422
The conclusion in the study is this: “From 2005 to 2015, the approximately 82 million adult pink salmon (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha) produced annually from hatcheries were estimated to have reduced the productivity of southern sockeye salmon by ∼15%, on average. In contrast, for sockeye at the northwestern end of their range, the same level of hatchery production was predicted to have reduced the positive effects of a warming ocean by ∼50% (from a ∼10% to a ∼5% increase in productivity, on average). These findings reveal spatially dependent effects of climate and competition on sockeye productivity and highlight the need for international discussions about large-scale hatchery production.”
And now we have Canadians finally waking up to the consequences of overloading the north Pacific ecosystem. That translates to targeting Alaska’s district 104 fishery for harvesting too many Skeena origin sockeye and steelhead. No one wants to acknowledge that eliminating the 104 sockeye harvest does not put another sockeye or steelhead on Canadian spawning gravel. All it does is translocate the mixed stock, over harvest issue a few miles south and into the Skeena River itself. The problems are identical, independent of country of origin, species or stock. We need to stop killing potential spawners, whether by seriously downsizing pink farming or eliminating destructive mixed stock fisheries. We’ve known that for decades. When is it going to happen on a scale that makes a difference in time to avoid the predictable?
You should see how members of the board reacted when I said the exact same thing last year…deer in the headlights at this point!
The current Alaska sanctioned wildlife management system is solely responsible for creating Alaska’s expanding biosphere collapse in the name of Best Available Science (BAS). Trillions of tons of bio-nutrients created by the world’s once largest wild salmon spawn, are no longer cycling, from the Unuk to the Yukon, creating countless species collapses from one end of the spectrum to the other. No other state or region of the nation has seen the magnitude of this collapse, now becoming more and more visible to any watchful Alaskan.
“Nobody does it better” we proudly boast as Alaska holds up its Red Lantern award again, as the worst wildlife harvest state in the nation, 20 years in a row.
When the Ketchikan, the once great “Salmon Capital of the World” announces 70% of all kings and 90% of all chums harvested in Ketchikan, are from the Hatchery, that’s not success. That’s a giant hospice care unit.
As the only landowners in the nation, denied the citizen rights of wildlife management by our own state, we have no one to blame except ourselves for blindly following Alaska’s Own Council. How much more of Alaska’s precious wildlife resources have to be loss, before we stop digging this BAS hole to nowhere?
If Alaskans are not reseeding our harvests, we are not harvesting. We are mining.
You are correct in many ways. But it is not just Alaska that is not a good husband of the resources. Federal and state management of fisheries resources in about every state that borders an ocean have resulted in low to no abundance of many species we used to take for granted.
Combine the failures within this country and the countries in Asia, South America, and Europe and then add to these failures the cruelties that humans impose on one another, and it is somewhat easy to conclude that mankind is a failed experiment. One of these days we will be cast of the planet like a dog shakes off fleas. Hopefully the next life form will do better.