Some of the homeless humpies who returned to Port Valdez this year/Facebook

Ocean pastures are not limitless

An Oregon State University professor studying the levels of dissolved oxygen in the offshore waters of the Pacific Northwest has described almost perfectly what Alaska’s free-range salmon farmers refuse to accept.

“On land, we know where the grassland is, where the forests are, where the rivers run so we can sustainably use those resources,” Oregon State oceanographer Jack Bart observed. “If we don’t have that kind of understanding of the ocean, how do we make plans for sustainable use of the ocean?

“When we think about all the different uses of the ocean, from fisheries to marine reserves, and impacts such as heat waves and renewable energy development, we can manage all of those things better if we understand the environmental situation.”

Barth’s comments came in the wake of a peer-reviewed study that found a troubling lack of oxygen in near-bottom waters of nearly half the continent shelf off the coasts of Oregon and Washington in 2021. But his observations apply to a far wider issue of ocean ecology.

In the sea as on land, the grasslands, forests and rivers dictate survival. Moose, to use Alaska’s most visible big-game animal as an example, can’t survive on glaciers because there is no food. They can’t survive on tundra either, so in Arctic Alaska they are concentrated along the rivers where some willows grow.

Beneath the waves, the ocean is the same. There are places where life can thrive and where it can’t. And this dictates the fisheries carrying capacity of the oceans.

When considering open-ocean salmon farming in the 1990s, the Alaska Legislature recognized this, but somehow in the decades that followed the reality was lost as salmon processors pushed the state to produce ever more pink salmon, the small of the salmon species and the cheapest and easiest to farm on the North Pacific Ocean range.

But more on that below because some are no doubt wondering about these areas of hypoxia – basically dead zones – off the Oregon-Washington state coast.

Ocean rivers

The problem there is linked to the rivers that run everywhere within the ocean. In this case, their currents bring to the surface deep-ocean waters isolated from the atmosphere for decades.

Over those decades, the oxygen in this water diminished as dead marine life settled into the water column and decayed as part of a natural process driven by oxygen-consuming bacteria and fungi. 

Barth and colleagues, reporting in Nature, said they found a mid-shelf ribbon of hypoxic water extending for nearly 300 miles off the north-central Oregon coast and Washington state.

They estimated “the volume of the hypoxic region varies between 645 and 1612 cubic kilometers (155 to 387 cubic miles). This is five to 10 times larger than the near-bottom, hypoxic volume associated with the Mississippi River outflow.”

The Mississippi outflow has been linked to the so-called “Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone” off the mouth of the river. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has blamed this phenomenon on industrial agriculture in middle America.

“This ‘dead zone’ begins innocently enough,” according to the agency. “Farmers use fertilizers and manure to increase the output of their crops so that we can have more food on our tables and more food to sell to the rest of the world.

“But it is this excess agricultural nutrient pollution combined with urban runoff and wastewater that brings excessive amounts of nutrients into waterways that feed the Mississippi River.

“The nutrients fuel large algal blooms that then sink, decompose, and deplete the water of oxygen. This is hypoxia, when oxygen in the water is so low it can no longer sustain marine life in bottom or near bottom water.”

Runoff from the major urban area that has developed between Portland and Seattle, and from the heavily farmed Columbia River basin, is certainly not helping to minimize the problem now discovered off the coast of the two Pacific Northwest states, but the hypoxic conditions there appear mainly driven by oxygen-short, deep water currents driving inshore along the West Coast.

NOAA in November 2022 linked hypoxic waters to massive die-offs of Dungeness crabs off the Washington coast.

Dead crabs along Washington state’s Kalaloch Beach/NOAA

Alaska’s luck

Alaska is lucky to have so far avoided such deadly events as ocean waters warm. But Barth’s comments on the sustainable use of wild resources is something the state must confront because sustainability goes directly to the issue of ecological carrying capacity.

The Alaska Legislature recognized this in 1992 when it commissioned an exhaustive “Legislative Review of the Alaska Salmon Enhancement Program.”

Lawmakers admitted at that time that Alaska hatchery “development was primarily driven by concern about the economic decline of the fishing industry” and that the success of the program was driving increasing concerns about the “detrimental biological impacts of large-scale hatchery development on wild stocks, particularly from the interaction between hatchery and wild fish.”

At that time, the lawmakers also concluded that a state-initiated hatchery program begun in 1974 to “contribute to the rehabilitation of the state’s depleted and depressed salmon fisheries” had proven wildly successful in “rehabilitating” Alaska’s once depressed salmon runs.

“Except for some specific regions of the state and gear groups in those regions, this goal has been met,” the report said. “The numbers of Alaska’s wild and hatchery fish are at an all-time high. Other than the problems of marketing and price, most of the state’s salmon fisheries are no longer depressed.”

About 1.7 billion salmon eggs were at the time being pumped into Alaska salmon hatcheries and the report suggested that it might be time to cap hatchery production.

“Production-related, density-dependent growth leading to smaller-than-average sizes of
maturing (salmon) is a concern for several reasons,” Ted Cooney, then a professor of fisheries oceanography at the University of Alaska Fairbanks wrote in the report’s section on “Ocean Carrying Capacity. Japanese ocean-ranched chum salmon have been declining in size and increasing in age at maturity over the past decade in concert with increasing hatchery production.”

“Pushed to the limit,” he warned, “unregulated hatchery production could theoretically produce very small fish with greatly reduced reproductive and market potential. Of perhaps greater concern is the effect that international ocean ranching practices may have on all salmon stocks (wild and hatchery) that use the northern Pacific Ocean as a feeding ground.

“Because there is competition for food and overlapping ocean distributions, greatly
increased production by one or two countries could conceivably affect the growth conditions for all stocks using the region. Moreover, it is not known what effect the increase in salmon production could have on the overall structure and function of coastal, shelf, and oceanic ecosystems. Salmon share forage resources with other consumers (fishes, marine mammals, and seabirds), some of which may be seriously disadvantaged by increased salmon abundance.”

Cooney’s warnings would be quickly forgotten along with the conclusions of lawmakers at the time, and Alaska hatchery production would continue to grow.

By 2018, at a hearing during which then-Board of Fisheries member Israel Payton asked the leaders of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game when they expected the still-expanding hatchery production of salmon to reach the point they could declare the state’s salmon fisheries ‘rehabilitated’, the 26-year-old words of state lawmakers would have been so long forgotten that Payton’s question would go unanswered.

And in the years since the point of “rehabilitation” was reached, hatchery egg takes have increased by nearly another half billion eggs to 2.1 billion per year.

 The ever-growing hatchery program has helped Alaska, which banned net-pen fish farming in 1990, become a world leader in free-range ocean farming conducted with little regard to anything that happens at sea other than the production of more hatchery salmon.

When asked about the ocean’s carrying capacity for salmon in 2018, Bill Templin, the state’s chief commercial fisheries scientist conceded that there is a theoretical limit to how many salmon the ocean can produce. But he dismissed the suggestions of other scientists that North Pacific salmon production is now at or near that limit and warned, though he was testifying as a biologist not an economist, that there would be economic costs to limiting hatchery production.

“Private, no-profit (PNP) hatcheries account for a third of the commercial harvest,” Templin told the Board. 

That this third of the harvest is almost entirely comprised of low-value pinks and chums went undiscussed. So, too, the indications that food competition driven by the hatchery-boosted production of these lower-value salmon is reducing catches of higher-value sockeye, coho and Chinook salmon.

Not to mention the real-world evidence that hatcheries can, indeed, overload the ocean with fish.

Japan’s experience

When Alaska lawmakers were reviewing hatcheries and considering ocean carrying capacity in 1992, the Japanese, who pioneered open-ocean farming and were once the world leaders in hatchery production, were nearing peak success.

“As the number of fish released increased, the total number of fish returned increased significantly until 1996, when the historical maximum of 88 million fish was reached,” Japanese researchers reported last year. “Despite the relatively stable trend in the number of fish released (after 1996), the number of fish returned has continued to decline since 2004 and will reach the four-decade minimum of 19 million in 2021.”

The Japanese produce primarily chum salmon, a species that weighs eight to as much as 15-pounds at maturity. Unfortunately, along with the declines of Japanese hatchery returns in the years since 1996, the Japanese have also witnessed a steady decrease in the size of their fish blamed on a warmer ocean and competition with other salmon, including the huge abundance of pinks.

As Japanese researchers noted, “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.”

Most of these pinks are wild fish from Russia and Alaska, which have witnessed big boosts in production tied to climate warming in the North Pacific, but both Russia and Alaska are now big players in the free-range, salmon farming business as well.

The latest research published in Marine Ecology Progress Series last fall estimated that large-scale hatchery production accounts for 40 percent of the total adult and immature salmon biomass in the North Pacific.

Thanks to Alaska hatcheries, America is the biggest player in the game, and American hatcheries have produced big benefits for about 3,800 Alaskans involved in hatchery production and salmon management, just less than 600 commercial fishermen who hold permits to seine the smallest of the Pacific salmon and Seattle-based processors who have demanded ever more pink salmon.

In 2010 the then three largest processors along with the Pacific Seafood Processors Associaton, which has watched the Alaska commercial fishing business evolve into such a mess that it is now behind a push for state assistance, wrote an “Open Letter to Alaska Hatcheries” stating this:

“From 2000-2009 the average statewide hatchery pink returns were 32.6 million in even years and 55.9 million in odd years – in both cases about 40 percent of total pink returns.  We would like production to increase to 70 million in both even and odds years over the next five years, which would bring hatchery production to roughly 50 percent of that total.”

The state has yet to reach the goal but is continuing to move toward it. The 2021 return of hatchery pinks crept past 57 million, but the approximately 54 million pinks harvested that year still only accounted for 35 percent of the statewide catch of pinks.

Still, state commercial fishery officials were able to proclaim that “recent commercial salmon harvests (2012–2021) annually averaged 182 million fish – an increase of 469 percent from the 10 years of harvests before hatchery contribution (1967–1976).”

That sounds good on paper, but the problem that Alaska faces is that while its open-ocean farming has helped to produce lots of small, low-value pinks, the net-pen salmon farmers of the world have been even more proficient in increasing their production of big, high-value Atlantic salmon that now provide for 80 percent of global salmon consumption.

Pinks, commonly known in Alaska as “humpies”  or “humpback salmon” due to the shape of the backs of the males on the spawning grounds, weigh three and half to five pounds, and because of their small size are destined for use in low-value products – canned salmon, pouched salmon, pet food and fish meal.

Canned or pouched salmon was reported to account for 16 percent of the average U.S. consumption of 2.41 pounds of salmon in 2017, meaning the average American was then eating less than four-tenths of a pound per year. 

U.S. salmon consumption has in general increased in the years since, but U.S. consumption of salmon canned for humans has not. Pets are another story. A variety of companies now offer salmon-based food for dogs and cats, and the 2020 pet food report from the Pet Food Institute showed that in the pet food market, canned salmon is to canned tuna as canned tuna is to salmon in the human food market, where canned tuna is third on the top-10 list of seafood products consumed by Americans.

The 87,495 tons of salmon valued at nearly $430 million that went into pet food in 2020 was more than six times greater than tuna in volume. It was also significantly cheaper for manufacturers at a cost of about $5,000 per ton compared to approximately $7,000 per ton for tuna, according to the report.

The sale of pink salmon eggs, a still valuable product in Asia; the high-grading of pinks to find bigger fish that can produce filets now preferred by Western consumers; the canning of salmon for humans and pets; the grinding of smaller fish and carcasses into fish meal that can be used for animal food or fertilizer; and the squashing of salmon remains to create fish oil have helped ensure the boom in Alaska pinks has been financially good for some fishermen and some fishing communities, but the story is not the same for all.

The losers

The majority of Alaska commercial fishermen – drift gillnetters, setnetters, and trollers – have all lost potential income due to the smaller number of fish they harvest and the shrinking size of those fish since the 1990s.

Some commercial fisheries, like that for king salmon in Cook Inlet, have simply disappeared. Commercial fishermen there used to fight with anglers to see who would get to harvest some of the biggest salmon the North Pacific has ever produced.

Now there are so few fish a once multimillion-dollar sport fishery is shut down and the Board of Fisheries is trying to find some way to limit the small bycatch of kings by setnetters so they can continue to fish the sockeye that put money in their pockets. The Board in March decided to open a three-day-a-week dipnet fishery for commercial permit holders this summer to see if they can economically harvest sockeye using a gear type that allows them to release relatively unharmed any Chinook they catch.

Thanks in large part to global warming, Bristol Bay, home to the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery has not witnessed the declines in salmon numbers seen in Cook Inlet or other Alaska commercial salmon fisheries, but the latest research points to financial losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars there due to competition with pinks as well.

“Although climate warming has enhanced overall harvests of sockeye salmon in Bristol Bay…for example, approximately 59 million fewer sockeye salmon returned there during 1977−1997 (excluding the cyclic Kvichak population) after interacting with abundant pink
salmon in odd-numbered years,” scientists reported in September, “and those fish would
have had a value to fishermen of approximately U.S.$310 million if they had survived.”

Elsewhere, the consequences of an ocean plugged with pinks is written in more than just the loss of potential profits. Around the Gulf of Alaska, there has been a widespread loss of wild sockeye salmon.

“…A 119 million increase in pink salmon abundance was historically associated with a 9 percent decline in sockeye productivity in the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska, and a 21 percent decline in British Columbia,” scientists reported in 2022.

By then, scientists had already documented the steady decline in size of sockeye and other, longer-lived salmon which spend years at sea competing with voracious, short-lived pinks which gorge themselves to reach spawning size after only 18 months in the ocean. Scientists reporting in the peer-reviewed Nature Communications in 2020 charted steady declines in the length of sockeye, coho, chum and Chinook salmon from the late 1990s to the present as Alaska hatchery production continued to ratchet upward.

They concluded that competition with pinks for food was likely preventing the other species of salmon from getting enough to eat, thus slowing their growth. A paper published in February of this year added new evidence to strengthen this hypothesis.

Scientists who examined salmon scales stored from sockeye salmon caught as far back as 1977 said the rings in those scales documenting growth at sea for two to three years showed a “consistent pattern of lower growth in odd years” when pinks are at maximum abundance.

“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.

Fewer and smaller sockeye, Chinook, coho and chum were not what was promised when the Alaska hatchery program began. The promise made in the early 1980s as the program begun to show success was this:

“The long-term plan for salmon in Alaska calls for nearly 143 million fish for harvest annually, of which 51 million are to be produced by enhancement and rehabilitation techniques. Included within this harvest of 51 million are 25 million chum, 8 million sockeye, 1.5 million coho, and 300,000 Chinook salmon; the remainder will be made up of pink salmon.”

In the years since, the goal for coho has been met once. The goals for chum, sockeye and Chinook, the most valuable and desired of Alaska salmon have never been met, and the overall harvests of wild chum, sockeye and Chinook have trended downward everywhere but Bristol Bay where sockeye compete primarily with Russian pinks.

Meanwhile, the goal of approximately 15 million hatchery pinks has been vastly exceeded even in even-numbered years when pinks historically return in about a third the volume of odd-numbered years.

The state in 2022 reported a return of about 28.6 million hatchery pinks, or about twice the original goal. The reported 2021 hatchery return of pinks was more than 57 million, approaching four times the goal. The hatchery return in 2015, a record-setting year for pinks, was 81 million or about five and half times the original goal. 

The production of all these hatchery fish on top of the state’s management of wild pink salmon stocks for maximum sustained yield has had coastwide implications.

Independent scientists are now arguing that the best available evidence indicates that “although hatchery salmon may lead to net gains in commercial harvests in local fisheries, these gains can come at the expense of local wild populations and distant populations that co-mingle with them, including depleted and at-risk wild populations from the Pacific Northwest and Alaska.”

Those scientists admit they cannot “identify every link between pink salmon and other species, but argue that the “most parsimonious explanation for the many, widespread biennial patterns across the broad range of species and trophic levels in the North Pacific Ocean documented in this synthesis is the interaction with pink salmon.

“‘The evidence is consistent and strong that pink salmon can exert competitive dominance for common-pool prey resources shared by four forage fish species, all five species of Pacific salmon and steelhead trout, and 11 species of seabirds. It further indicates that pink salmon can have a strong influence on ecosystem structure and function by, for example, initiating pelagic trophic cascades.”

Alaska’s answer to all of this?

Let’s produce even more hatchery salmon. The state Department of Fish and Game is now lobbying the Legislature to take away from the Board of Fisheries the authority to regulate the egg take of Alaska hatcheries, and a group of hatchery-obsessed lawmakers have introduced legislation that would allow Alaskans to create their own backyard hatcheries though such operations would be hard press to produce the king, silver and sockeye salmon Alaskans want.

All of this appears to be happening because of the belief – to steal a spin on a line from the late Ed Anser in a long ago Saturday Night Live skit about nuclear reactors – you can’t put too many salmon in the North Pacific Ocean. Or so some in the 49th state believe and any environmental consequences be dammed.