Houston, British Columbia, Canada’s tribute to the ocean-going steelhead and the fly fishermen who worship the most uncommon of the North American anadromous fishes/Craig Medred photo
How America stole Canada’s fish
HOUSTON, British Columbia, Canada – Here in the “Steelhead Capital of the World” along the banks of the Bulkley River, the fish still come back from the sea each year, but the vast Skeena River drainage into which the Buckley drains has become but a shadow of its old self.
“An abundance of fish was once taken for granted in the Skeena River system. First
Nations across the watershed relied heavily on the salmon that they both managed and used for thousands of years,’ ‘the Skeena Fisheries Commission observed more than two decades ago. “Many populations of the six salmon species living in the Skeena basin, declined in the early part of the twentieth century. Some have continued to decline in the past few decades. Population declines are a concern for many chinook, coho, chum, steelhead, and sockeye stocks.”
What was then underway on the Skeena and has continued to this day is part of one of the greatest transfers of wild fishery resources between nations since the 200-mile exclusive economic zones (EEZs) established off the coasts of the United States and Canada shut down Japanese and high seas, foreign fisheries that had for decades taken advantage of the bounty of the North Pacific Ocean.
For years after those fisheries were closed late in the last century, both Alaska and Canada saw a jump in salmon harvests. But by the 2000s, as Alaska harvests exploded, the boom was over in Canada with the returns of Canadian salmon beginning what would be a decades-long decline that has continued to this day.
There were large annual variations and some significant decadal differences, but Canada’s share of the catch never fell below the 17 percent in the 10 years from 1925 to 1934. And the average held steady all the way through the 1980s which ended with a right on the average 22 percent Canadian share.
Since then?
- 12 percent in the 1990s
- 6 percent in the 2000s
- 4 percent in the 2010s.
And this was not just a percentage loss. As Alaska salmon harvests exploded from an average catch of 84.8 million per year in the 1960s to an average catch per year of 187.2 million in the 2010s, according to NPAFC data, Canadian decadal, average harvests that peaked at 34.5 million salmon per year in the 1980s went in the opposite direction.
The harvest in the last decade averaged a mere 7.6 million salmon per year, and the situation has only grown worse in Canada since the end of the 2010s.
Self-criticism
The Canadians have largely blamed themselves for this, as they did in the Skeena plan which pointed the finger at overfishing, “environmental challenges from high rates of logging, highway and other transportation development, and to a minor extent…mining, farming and urban development,’ and, of course, “climate change.”
In the years after the plan was written in 2001, the federal and provincial governments reacted by pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into habitat improvements for the Skeena and other rivers all along the country’s West Coast.
On a river-by-stream basis, the latter statement is true, but in the big picture, there have been no measurable benefits. Despite all the habitat restoration efforts, Canadian salmon returns have continued crashing since they peaked with the North Pacific Ocean warming and the high-seas salmon fleets of foreign nations being pushed out of U.S. and Canadian waters.
It has been a frighteningly downhill slide.
Canada hasn’t seen a salmon harvest of more than 20 million salmon – something that happened at least five times in every decadal period from 1925 to 1995 – since 1997. And there is no hint of one in the future given that the great salmon bust that began in the late 1990s has become Canada’s future.
The ceiling for Canadian salmon harvests dropped from 20 million to 15 million in 2003. And in the more than two decades since then, Canada hasn’t had an annual catch close to that big.
The year 2014 was, in fact, the last time Canada witnessed a single-season harvest of more than 10 million salmon, and the past decade ended with an average annual harvest of but 7.6 million per year – about a fifth of what the Canadian harvests had been in the 1990s and about 35 percent of the average decadal harvest from 1925 to 1975.
Upset fishermen
Canadian commercial fishermen, and Canadians in general, have a right to be upset about this, and those who think the problem is that Alaskans are intercepting too many Canada-bound salmon are getting angry.
The only problem is that Alaska interceptions don’t begin to account for Canada’s loss of somewhere between 12 million and 28 million salmon per year. Alaska might, at worst, intercept a million or slightly more.
The Vancouver-based Watershed Watch Salmon Society and the Skeena Wild Conservation Trust last year claimed the number was more than 3 million, but the data to back that up is weak.
And the “maybe 200,000 Chinook,” or what Alaskans commonly call “king salmon,” might be a stretch.
Kings born in British Columbia, Washington state, Oregon and northern California are sometimes picked up in Alaska commercial fisheries in Bristol Bay, around Kodiak Island, in Cook Inlet, off the mouth of the Copper River but primarily in the historic Southeast troll fishery which harvested 184,083 Chinook in 2023, according to Alaska Department of Fish and Game data.
Around 90 percent of those Southeast kings – or approximately 167,500 – could be linked to origins in Canadian and lower 48 streams and rivers, according to state studies, with maybe about 40 percent of that number – or around 67,000 Chinook – likely to have been of Canadian origin in 2023. The number of Chinook added by harvests in the other Alaska fisheries, however, appears to be measured in the thousands rather than the tens of thousands with catches of coho, chums and steelhead likely to be measured in the tens of thousands at most.
Pinks might be more abundant, but given their low value and the flood of pinks Alaska and Russia have poured into the market in recent years, nobody is really very interested in those fish. Even if Canada got a million, it is doubtful they’d be worth $1 million.
What is of interest to Canadians, especially Canadian commercial fishermen, is the higher value salmon, and there is no way to crunch the numbers on Alaska salmon harvests to arrive at the conclusion that Alaska is intercepting much more than 1 million of those fish per year let alone three million or 12 million or 24 million.
But this doesn’t necessarily mean Alaska hasn’t stolen Canada’s salmon because there is more than one way to do this. Taking fish out of the ocean is the most obvious way.
But by overloading the North Pacific with Alaska salmon, it might be possible to displace Canadian and Lower 48 salmon and take over the North American salmon fishery in a different way.
The takeover
Since Alaska went into farming the ocean with hatchery salmon on an industrial scale in the late 1970s, the data would indicate its hatchery and wild fish have combined to do exactly this.
Hatchery pinks in particular have helped drive the all-species salmon harvest up, up, up in Alaska while Canadian salmon harvests have gone down, down, down.
That Alaska fishermen have been the biggest salmon catchers in North America has been a given almost since the beginning of the Alaska commercial fishery. Even in what are considered the dismal years of the Alaska salmon business – the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s – most of the North American catch was taken in Alaska.
In the 1960s, when the annual harvests in Alaska averaged 84.8 million salmon per year – a mere 36 percent of the average for the state in the 2010s – NPAFC records show that about two-thirds of the North American catch was still being landed in the new American state.
The North Pacific was then rather cold and unproductive, and both Canadian and Alaskan catches were relatively low. Both would increase as the ocean warmed into the 1970s.
By the end of that decade, despite the bad early years, Alaska would be able to post an average catch per year of 111.7 million salmon with the Canadian catch having risen above its longtime historic norm to a then-high of 25.6 million salmon per year for the decade.
By then, though, changes destined to radically alter the distribution of salmon between Alaska and Canada were already afoot in the north. Political pressure to produce more salmon in Alaska began growing at the end of the 1960s and took off as the ’70s began.
“In 1973, the United Fisherman’s Association (UFA) was formed (in Alaska), organizing commercial fishermen at the state level for the first time. Fishermen’s groups such as UFA were a driving force behind Alaska’s salmon hatchery programs. This group, along with others, believed it would take artificial propagation as well as some restrictive regulations to bring the commercial harvest level back up from 23 million fish (of 1972) to 83 million fish” per year.”
In 1974, the state’s Private Nonprofit Hatchery Program came into play.
Legislators, according to the FRED history, had by then begun “to accept that nongovernmental hatcheries had much to recommend them from the perspective of public finance issues: the operation of private hatcheries could be funded from the harvest of returning fish….Thus, fisheries organizations and other’ Private Non-Profit (PNP) groups were encouraged to build and operate PNP hatchery facilities.”
Financing was, however, an impediment because the “cost of developing viable salmon hatcheries was far greater than was initially expected,” the history says. “(So) in 1974 funds became available through the Renewable Resources Development Fund that was established that year. Additional state loans for construction of PNP hatcheries became available in 1975 when the commercial fisheries loan program was expanded to include hatcheries. The following year, a separate fisheries enhancement loan program was established.”
Still, hatchery programs were not expanding as fast as the state hoped. So the lawmakers turned to Alaska voters for funding and “in 1976, voters approved a $28 million ($156.5 million when inflation corrected to 2024) hatchery bond issue in the general election. Additional capital appropriations and bond issues of 1978 and 1980 included funds for hatcheries and brought the total to nearly $80 million (approximately $360 million today),” the history records.
Government funding jump-started the Alaska hatchery business.
“All of this legislation and funding set the stage for the development of the public and
private hatchery programs that developed during the 70s and 80s,” the history says. The hatcheries grew quickly from five hatcheries – “none of them operating at a production level” – in 1971 to 10 by 1974 but the business overall remained small. The egg take of those 10 hatcheries was but 25 million eggs in 1974.
It didn’t stay that low for long.
“During the next six years, the public and private hatchery programs expanded at a rapid
pace and by 1980, there were 25 hatcheries in operation, taking a total of 290 million eggs,” according to the history. Those 290 million eggs would be but the first baby step on the way to an annual take of about 2 billion eggs.
“The expansion rate of hatcheries between 1980 and 1985 was almost as fast as 1974 to
1980,” the history says. “During this period, 13 more facilities were built, bringing the total
to 37…. In 1985, these 37 state and PNP hatcheries took a total of 987 million eggs.
Alaska was only halfway toward its goal, but already things were changing quickly in the North Pacific. By the end of the 1980s, the annual Alaska harvest of salmon would be up to an average of 158.3 million per year for the decade with the Canadians still doing well.
Canada hit its peak harvest in numbers then and still accounted for 22 percent of the growing North American take for the decade or about the same as its share in the 1970s, according to NPAFC data. Alaska claimed 73 percent of the harvest. The other 5 percent went to the states of Washington, Oregon and California, which had taken a 7 percent share on average in the ’60s and ’70s.
Big changes were on the horizon, however, as the Alaska hatcheries kept pumping out ever more fish and the state of Alaska’s “maximum sustained yield (MSY)” management of pink salmon – the smallest and shortest-lived of the Pacific salmon species – continued to drive North American salmon harvests ever higher.
Alaska’s harvest of pink salmon in the 1970s averaged 31.6 million per year and accounted for 28 percent or slightly more than a quarter of the state’s annual salmon catch. By the end of the 1980s, the pink catch averaged about 105.2 million fish per year – just short of the average annual all-species catch for the prior decade – and comprised almost 67 percent or about two-thirds of the state’s all-species salmon harvest.
Fishermen in charge
A good share of the credit went to the state hatcheries by then cranking out salmon, but the state was getting tired of funding those facilities almost solely to benefit commercial fishermen and Seattle-based processors.
State support for the hatcheries took an especially big hit in 1993 when a cost-benefit analysis produced for the Legislature concluded the hatcheries provided the state little or no benefit.
“Regionally, the enhancement program is estimated to have a dramatically positive effect only in Prince William Sound, where elimination of the pink salmon program is estimated
to reduce net benefits to approximately 20 percent of their current levels,” the analysis said. “However, this appears to be more than offset by gains made elsewhere in the state. For sockeye salmon, Western Alaska (Bristol Bay) gains from sockeye enhancement reductions are greater than losses occurring to Prince William Sound and Cook Inlet.”
Largely as a result of that study, FRED was eliminated, and the state-funded hatcheries were turned over to the PNPs – most of them run by “associations” of commercial fishermen – in the belief the private sector could run them more efficiently and pay the expenses with the new “cost-recovery” fisheries approved by the state.
Putting the hatcheries in the fishing business via cost recovery solved the hatchery-funding problem, and the cost-benefit analysis concluded that there might be arguments to be made for keeping the hatcheries going despite their costs.
The study cited “strategic reasons for maintaining hatchery production. For example, it appears that hatchery exports of Russian pink salmon may be expanding as are farmed salmon exports from Chile. By maintaining some Alaska hatchery production, prices may remain sufficiently depressed to prevent expansion in those areas.
“As long as the price is not driven down to the level that it would reach if these other producers entered the market, the hatchery dollars may be well spent. However, this is not a strategy which can remain viable over the long run.”
The latter prediction was destined to prove all too true.
The data tracking website Statista reported Chile’s production topped 1 billion tons for the first time in 2022. Alaska’s statewide, all-species harvest for 2023 – the fourth highest on record dating back to 1900 – weighed in at less than half that at 417.2 tonnes ( 919.7 million pounds).
Thirty years on from the report to the Legislature, the hatcheries have shown no record of reducing competition, which was largely predictable given that most of the Alaska hatchery production is in low-value pink salmon destined for cans, pouches or fish meal while the Chileans are focused on producing larger salmon that produce high-value filets.
Chilean salmon is at this time reported to be wholesaling at a price of $1.69 to $2.46 per pound. Wholesale prices for Alaska pinks are hard to find, but the wholesale price in Alaska is usually two to three times that of the price paid fishermen for their catch or what is called “ex-vessel value.”
The average ex-vessel value of an Alaska pink was 24 cents per pound last year, according to Alaska Fish and Game. This would translate into a wholesale price of 48 to 72 cents per pound. That value is likely to drop this year given rumors pink prices paid fishermen could be as low as 10 cents a pound due to a global glut of low-value salmon, which are now the norm in the Alaska fisheries.
Since the start of the 1990s, pinks have annually comprised about two-thirds of the annual harvests which grew to an annual average of 189.2 million in the 1990s, according to the NPAFC numbers which differ slightly from those kept by the state, before slipping back slightly to 181.3 million per year in the 2000s and climbing back to 187.2 million per year in the 2010s.
The pink harvest of 152.4 million salmon last season “comprised approximately 66 percent of the harvest” of 230.2 salmon of all species, Alaska Fish and Game reported. The harvest was at the high end of a now widely oscillating range of harvests because odd-numbered years produce far more pink salmon than even-numbered years.
Consequences
One prevailing theory to explain these oscillations is that odd-year pinks – which one state fisheries biologist once described as the vacuum cleaners of the sea – consume so much of the ocean’s food base for salmon that even-year pinks face a struggle to find enough food to survive when they leave their freshwater birthing waters and enter the ocean.
Sockeye salmon compete with pinks for food, but not as directly as pinks compete with each other for food. And reduced growth is linked to reduced survival, given that fitter, healthier fish have a better chance of avoiding predators and disease than underfed and unhealthy fish.
The association between general health and survival is a norm with all the planet’s animals as the human species was reminded of during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. The death rate among the fit and healthy was quite low while the death rate among the unfit and unhealthy, or those now referred to as the “comorbid,” was very high.
To what degree sockeye population numbers have been reduced by competition for food is the subject of some debate, but the increased difficulty in obtaining food would be certain to create downward pressure on the population size. A study published in the peer-reviewed Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences in 2020 reported that this coupled with a warmer ocean accounted for significant declines in sockeye numbers.
“From 2005 to 2015, the approximately 82 million adult pink salmon produced annually from hatcheries were estimated to have reduced the productivity of southern sockeye salmon by approximately 15 percent on average,” those researchers concluded. “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 approximately 50 percent. 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.”
The study highlighted the effect of the warming of the ocean late in the 1970s with “abundances of both pink and sockeye salmon in the North Pacific double(ing) after the 1977 ocean regime shift, and greater productivity of Bristol Bay sockeye salmon…associated with greater early marine growth.”
Sockeye populations in the Bay have continued to boom in part because Bay sockeye interact with relatively few pink salmon during early marine life, and only later in life have to deal with competition from the booming number of pinks.
The situation is far different, however, in the Gulf of Alaska where sockeye compete not just with wild pink salmon but Alaska hatchery pink salmon as well. The Canadian researchers said their data “suggests that hatchery production has contributed to the depressed productivity of sockeye salmon in British Columbia, some of which have recently been assessed as at risk of extinction.”
The Canadians do not, however, appear to have been the only losers here. Sockeye salmon harvests in Alaska’s Cook Inlet, the big waterway at the doorstep of Anchorage, peaked at more than 9 million fish in 1987 and the decade of the 1980s ended with the data showing an annual average catch of 4.4 million sockeye per year.
As humpies boomed, the average fell to 3.5 million per year in the 1990s, and Fish and Game is now reporting the lastest 10-year average harvest as 2.5 million per year. Hooked on hatcheries, the Inlet’s commercial fishermen have tried to blame this on an “over escapement” of sockeye into the Kenai River, but state records show the increased number of sockeye now being allowed to escape their nets to enter the Kenai is only about 750,000 more fish per year than escaped on average per year in the 1980s.
This would account for less than 40 percent of the decline of 1.9 million sockeye per year from the 1980 annual average harvest of 4.4 million per year to 2.5 million per year now.
“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.”
“Pink salmon are amazing species,” said a state biologist involved in that study. “They need to eat almost anything that swims” and because of that “they have the potential to compete against a lot of other species.”
It is hard to ignore the likelihood that these vacuum cleaners of the sea have played a role – big, small or somewhere in between – in the decimation of a Canadian commercial salmon fishing business that has watched its percentage of the North American salmon catch go down, down, down from that 23 percent in the 1970s to:
- 22 percent in the 1980s
- 12 percent in the 1990s
- 6 percent in the 20002
- 4 percent in the 2010s
- And who knows how small a percentage this decade with Canadian salmon fisheries now shut down more than they are open.
Fisheries and Oceans Canada is, however, still blaming “threats like climate change, habitat degradation, pollution, land and water use, acute events like toxic spills and landslides, and fishing pressures. ” It appears to have missed the elephantine mass of Alaska salmon upping competition with Canadian fish in the ocean.
A key part of the plan was a buyout offered to 1,300 salmon fishermen to which the government committed $123 million. The fishermen complained that was way too little money.
No increase was announced when Fisheries and Oceans announced its new plan for 2024-25 which focused on Canada’s “Blue Economy Strategy (to) set forth a vision for Canada’s blue economy in which technology, innovation, and ecosystem restoration will drive renewed prosperity and opportunity for Canadians, and more particularly for Canada’s coastal and Indigenous communities to further advance the Department’s efforts towards reconciliation. The Department will enter into the next phase of the Blue Economy Regulatory Review with the publication of the “What We Heard” report and inclusions in the regulatory roadmaps, which will be led by the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, that will lay out the government’s plans to advance regulatory modernization in support of sustainable economic growth and innovation.”
The plan mentioned salmon 30 times, but nowhere in the plan was there any mention that the fish might be facing a crisis at sea. Instead the plan vowed to continue working to fix habitat in Canada.
“Through the Pacific Salmon Strategy Initiative (PSSI), the Department will continue to take decisive steps to conserve and restore Pacific salmon and their ecosystems across B.C. and the Yukon, in collaboration with First Nations and other partners. Over 2024-25, many projects and targeted actions will continue, including increasing Indigenous and partner capacity through investments under the renewed B.C. Salmon Restoration and Innovation Fund, modernizing DFO’s approach to salmon hatchery management, identifying potential new salmon harvest opportunities (i.e. terminal fisheries for Indigenous food-social-ceremonial harvesters and mark selective fisheries for recreational harvesters), continuing the Pacific Salmon Commercial Licence Retirement Program, delivering on key United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Action Plan commitments to advance Indigenous reconciliation, and modernizing DFO’s approach to salmon data and availability.”
It’s almost as if the Canadians haven’t recognized what has happened.
Despite all of Canada’s habitat improvement efforts, it has now gone a quarter of a century without seeing a single year with a harvest of more than 20 million salmon, something unheard of in the past.
And it has gone two decades without witnessing a harvest above 15 million. In the 63 years in the NPAFC records from 1935 to 1998, there was only one year the Canadian harvest dropped below 15 million. That was in 1969 when it came in at 11.5 million.
Since 1998, when the harvest fell to 9.4 million, the catch has crept above 11.5 million only three times, and the decade of the 2000s ended with the average annual harvest lower than that one-year bust of the past.
That was bad. What has happened since is worse.
Annual catches since the end of the 2010s when the decadal average fell to 7.6 million are, according to the NPAFC:
- 2.45 million in 2020
- Just under 692,000 in 2021
- And 2.09 million in 2022.
On July 5, 2022, according to Alaska Fish and Game data, commercial fishermen in Alaska’s Bristol Bay caught more salmon – nearly 2.3 million – than Canadian fishermen caught over the course of the entire 2022 season.
How bad it was in Canada in 2023 is still not clear although it is unlikely the 2023 catch will be much better than the 2022 harvest given that Canada in 2021 closed down about 60 percent of the B.C. salmon fisheries and has kept most of them closed since.
The NPAFC has yet to post catch numbers for Canada in 2023, and the results are impossible to find online. One can’t help but wonder if the Canadian government is too embarrassed to publish how small its harvests have become.
UFA is United Fishermen of Alaska.
I know that. I used to edit their newspaper.
You know that, but the Association reference is in a quote from the presentation by ADF&G. I don’t change quotes in such circmustances. Click the link.
Does make me wonder, given that the paper is old, if it ever was an “association.” Too bad Beaton’s dead or I’d ask him.
Excellent article
Well written.
Mr. Medred, America did not “steal” Canada’s fish. To even suggest so is terribly irresponsible. Your knowledge is sorely lacking and taking your opinions and using them to make public policy is dangerous ….. to Alaskans.
Let me disassemble your claims.
1) Canada recreational salmon fisheries harvests huge numbers of Washington origin Chinook salmon. The recreational salmon fishery in British Columbia is worth $666,000,000 CDN. British Columbia economy gets somewhere around $200,000,000 USD from salmon that spawn in Washington/Oregon. The value of the Southwest troll fishery is approximately $10,000,000 USD. Oh, it sure looks like we are ripping the Canadians off — NOT.
2) The most effective way to destroy a salmon run is to cut down every tree and run log skidders through the spawning beds. Nobody did more of this than British Columbia.
3) During the fish wars in the 80’s and 90’s, Canada set their huge fleet of commercial trollers fishing seven days a week for months trying to put pressure on American negotiators to prevent the wholesale decimation of Washington State Chinooks. What the idiots did not think of was, that they were also decimating the British Columbia Chinook stocks. The intentional fishing regime backfired horribly, and British Columbia Chinook stocks have yet to fully recover. This stupid maneuver violated every tenant of fisheries conservation, and Alaska did not retaliate. The Canadians are reaping what they sowed.
4) If you had bothered to speak with a few Canadian commercial fishermen, they would tell you that their fisheries managers are environmentalists and no longer like opening seasons, even with a harvestable surplus, so over-escapements and resulting lower harvests are more common.
Your whole writing is riddled with statistical correlations. You cannot prove causation with correlations. You are using bad science.
Let me prove this to anybody who wants to listen. There is a strong correlation between the increasing Bristol Bay sockeye returns and the decline Chinook salmon. It is a 45 year correlation which is far stronger than the 5 year pink salmon correlation that your friend Ruggerone is trying to pedal. Does this prove the sockeyes destroyed the Chinook salmon. Nope, it doesn’t prove a damn thing. Correlations do not prove a damn thing in science. Never, ever.
The Alaskan hatchery system is designed like no other in the world. The hatchery system saved the Alaska salmon industry, and shutting down would cause irreparable home for thousands of Alaskans living in coastal communities, and not fix the Chinook problem which is caused by trawlers, sport and commercial trollers primarily.
In real science you gather facts, even facts which will disprove your theory. Ignoring facts that you don’t like is not science at all.
Go catch a pink salmon and a Chinook salmon in the same general area, open up their stomachs. The contents will be different, I guarantee it. I have done it. A 4 pound pink salmon swimming in 30 feet of water, is not eating the same food as a 15 pound Chinook swimming in 90 feet of water. The 4 pound pink even if you call it a vacuuming cleaner, is not out-competing a 15 pound Chinook for food.
The reason salmon and seafood are important to Alaska, is 1,000 years from now, the oil will be long gone, but the seafood industry will still be here chugging along.
Taking one of the worst years in decades and extrapolating a dismal future is to completely ignore the last hundred years of history. We have lived through these downturns in the past, only to make adjustments and come roaring back.
You are a fine writer, but a damn poor predictor of fisheries science and seafood economics.
Doug: First off, thanks for a good chuckle, ie.:
“Go catch a pink salmon and a Chinook salmon in the same general area, open up their stomachs. The contents will be different, I guarantee it. I have done it. A 4 pound pink salmon swimming in 30 feet of water, is not eating the same food as a 15 pound Chinook swimming in 90 feet of water. The 4 pound pink even if you call it a vacuuming cleaner, is not out-competing a 15 pound Chinook for food.”
I actually have done this and have often found them eating the same food. And not only that, as someone who trolled a lot for salmon in Southeast Alaska a long time ago, I caught a lot of kings on the same trolled herring that caught pinks and cohoes. These fish were often found at different depths, I’ll give you that.
But that wasn’t true either. The biggest king I ever saw (well, not counting Kenai) came up into five or 10-feet of water to grab a herring my ex-wife had left spinning a strong tide while I was bottom-fishing for halibut over a seamount in Stephens Passage. There is little doubt kings are competing with pinks for food at times in the ocean, and they are now competing with wave after way of kings.
I’ll take the biologist’s word on their status as vacuum cleaners before from what you written here makes me question whether you know jack shit about science.
The best evidence now in hand points to pink salmon suppressing sockeye numbers for certain. One can argue how much of Canada’s salmon harvest we stole by boosting those pink numbers with hatchery fish, but there’s no question about the thievery.
And enough with the correlation is not causation bullshit as well. We declared a war on tobacco based on the same sort of strong correlations we have here. Granted, there is no evidence that tobacco DOESN’T cause cancer in ALL people. There is no evidence some people who smoke are immune to smoked-related lung cancer. https://www.einsteinmed.edu/news/4756/study-suggests-why-most-smokers-dont-get-lung-cancer/
That doesn’t mean smoking doesn’t cause cancer. It means it only causes it in some people.
Get back to me when you have some proof from hatchery advocates that they AREN’T causing declines in Canadian salmon returns which haven’t bounced back from overharvests in the ’80s and ’90s. The Canadians have put the fish in the streams since then – those damn Canadian “environmentalist” biologists – but the fish aren’t coming back.
Why? Because the survival problems now aren’t in freshwater, they’re in saltwater. The ocean has a carrying capacity, and we appear to have reached it.
We do agree on one thing, tough. A thousand years from now, barring the planet becoming so hot as to be unable to support people or salmon, the seafood industry will be here still chugging along. It might even be providing more economic bang than the farriers of these times. But I wouldn’t count on that.
Some of those farriers appear to be doing pretty well for themselves. “….Working on race or show horses can get you much more than $100,000 plus per year. In some cases the wage gap can be as great as $40,000 for pleasure horses to $200,000 or more for race and show horses.An American Farriers Journal survey in 2012 found that the average annual salary for full-time farriers in the U.S. was reported to be $92,623 per year and for part-timers, $21,153.” https://www.thefarrierguide.com/p/average-farrier-salary.html
Typical commfish response: its always someone else’s fault, never yours.
You blame logging in Canada for the crash of their salmon runs. Yet no logging to speak of in Cook Inlet or PWS, and the Kings continue to crash in CI and everything other than pinks in PWS. Maybe something else is going on.
You blame overescapement, sport fish for Canadian run crashes. You blame Canadian commfish for the crash. Yet not a single word about billions of pink fry flooding PWS and the North Pacific every single year for decades.
Tough to solve a problem if you never look in your mirror. Cheers –
Doug Karlberg:
To claim that the Chinook “problem”
has been primarily caused by trollers, trawlers, and sport fishers embarrassingly ignores the impact of the commercial gill net fisheries in Cook Inlet, AND the huge release of PWS hatchery releases . Refusing to acknowledge these as significant reasons for the “problem” reduces your credibility to just an opinion of an ignorant and biased commercial Gillnet fisherman reaping the rewards ( at the expense of Chinook salmon) in PWS and perhaps in UCI.
Again you’ve done a very thorough job.
As a Canadian Fisherman I would like to make some comments.
You’re probably unaware there is a fairly strong anti-American Feeling about some individual Canadians including Fisheries scientist.
Because of that most Canadian Fisherman ignore the science or the rants from union officials against the United States.
This biased is probably stronger than the one you have against Alaska, commercial Fisherman!
Salmon management in British Columbia is totally political and was never forward thinking. Those in political favour or allowed to radically overfish. Up to 80% of the runs some years and science supported it.
You are correct department of Fisheries is too embarrassed to release embarrassing low numbers.
They don’t even walk most of the creeks in the fall anymore because they don’t want to report what is not there.
First off, I don’t have any bias against commercial fishermen. I do have a bias against people who stuff their heads in the sand. This might include some commercial fishermen.
We shouldn’t now be looking back at the environmental consequences of hatcheries. We should have treated them like ever other resource development that wants to exploit public, wild resources and public, wild lands for profit and done the studies of environmental issues beforehand. That’s why, in the U.S., there is an environmental review process for any significant industrial activity except, for some reason, fish hatcheries.
Alaska’s commercial hatcheries are nothing more and nothing less than businesses. They should have been treated like any other business – miners, oil drillers, real estate developers, what have you – who decides to alter nature for a profit. And just to be real clear, the alternation of nature is exactly what happened here.
Take it from the Alaska hatchery advocates whose support of hatcheries is based wholly on the profits they generate. These are the people who spend a lot of time trying to figure out to put their stock in the best shape to survive in the wild once released from the hatchery. What they’re doing there is trying to give their fish the best chance of winning in the ocean’s dangerous game of survival.
And who will they be going up against in this competition to survive? Other hatchery fish, of course. But also wild salmon. And this helps the wild salmon how?
The Oldest Person I once Knew. In support of HB 169.
Copyright © 2022 by Alaris (Tom Harris)
All of us know of someone we may have considered an elder. We may have known of them or remembered what they represented and important events they were part of long before we were born.
So it was that through my Grandmother I learned of an important woman of distinction, a daughter of the chief of the Nass River.
She was reported to be a most beautiful woman, who found herself courted by a most powerful individual. She was also vastly talented and skilled in many ways. Her most famous skill was the restoration (Reseeding) of salmon.
Her suitor and subsequent husband was the most powerful Raven chief, of the ancient village at the mouth of the Unuk River, who wanted this power as his own. One day Raven found her teaching the people of the village this precious skill without his permission.
Enraged he struck her. In that instance she disappeared into the ever present darkness of the fog, never to be seen or heard or touched by the Raven Chief, ever again. That day Raven lost her and her knowledge. However, to the people of the village she was beloved. They remembered her and her teachings and continued to follow them through time immemorial; that is up until this present day, an age of “Best Available Science “.
A new Raven is now today’s chief and he has forbidden her teachings throughout the land. Not only in this village, but also in all the villages of her relations, from the Unuk to the Yukon.
This new Today’s Raven has made laws that have jailed, made homeless and orphaned her descendants, more than all other chiefs before him. Because of this, in this century, without her restoration teachings, across the vast Alaska lands salmon are following her into the fog. Without her teachings and without the salmon all her relations of all species are now beginning to also follow her into the fog.
As I write this and as you hear and read these very words , your memory of her and her story, at this very moment, is fading, following her into the fog. Even though you pass by her image daily, you no longer know of her teachings for Raven has purposely clouded your memory and her teaching fades further and further every day. You no longer recognize her nor know how to teach her history or her lessons, even to your very own next generation.
Her teachings were simply that we all must protect and nurture not only the salmon, but also protect and nurture each other as her completing interest relations; especially the precious matriarchs. If we do not, then we to, will have no choice but to follow her and the salmon into the fog.
Each day new laws are passed to separate us from these teachings and the salmon.
Whether her teachings survive into the next century is now up to us. We can choose to either follow her teachings and acknowledge the importance of what she taught, or choose to forget and wonder where have all the salmon gone, long time passing. For truly, even this ancient village site now called, Ketchikan, Alaska’s first city, would not even exist if not for her. Will you choose to remember her or will you, like the salmon, follow her into the fog?
If we are not reseeding our salmon resource, do we really have the right to call it harvesting, or are we really mining?
Fogwoman taught that when we harvest any salmon from the river, it is giving itself to feed us. In return we have multiple moral, ethical and cultural obligations to finish the journey of the salmon. That obligation is met by carefully harvesting the eggs and milt, fertilizing the eggs, placing them into a specially woven cedar basket that would be used to carry the eggs upstream to be placed into sheltered bubbling waters.
Most importantly the portion of the salmon not eaten must be taken and placed upstream from the fertilized eggs. This must be done to feed the microbes that need to be there to feed the fry when they emerge from their eggs. It is extremely important that the microbes are there to feed the fry not only to nourish them to prepare them for the ocean, but more importantly to start building the salmon’s strontium isotope signatures that are specifically unique to that stream site where they emerged from the egg and began to feed.
That stream’s unique strontium isotope signature becomes imbedded into the fry’s newly forming otolith “inner ear bone” as the fry feeds. That unique strontium isotope signature in the otolith serves as the salmon’s sole navigational tool as it finds its way back home after traveling several years in to the ocean.
Without this unique strontium isotope signature there is no other way for the salmon to find its way home, and without it there will be no returning spawn.
If the salmon carcasses are not there to feed the microbes, the microbes will not be there to feed the fry. When the fry have nothing to feed on they have no choice but to swim downstream until they find the right food. This is why salmon streams die from the headwaters down.
This is also why just planting hatchery fry fails 100% of the time. Especially king salmon fry that spend two years in the hatchery before they are released. It’s too late by then because their otolith strontium signature is already imbedded on the hatchery water and food.
It’s important to understand that absolutely no amount of habitat improvements will compensate for failing to follow Fogwoman’s teachings. Nothing we do will make up for this singular failure, if we don’t start reseeding.
Alaska can have tens of thousands of miles of pristine streams, lakes, and rivers. They are all sterile and won’t matter in the least, if those waters which serve as the salmon’s birth canal’s do not have fertilized eggs, upstream carcasses to feed the microbes that feed the fry and create the unique strontium isotope signature that guide that salmon back home to spawn.
This singular error, by Alaska’s wildlife management system, of ignoring and rejecting Fogwoman’s Traditional Knowledge teachings, is solely responsible for the statewide salmon crashes now in progress from the Yukon to the Unuk.
These statewide salmon crashes are also triggering a biosphere collapse that is directly linked to the documented 97% decrease in the historical moose harvests of the Kenai Peninsula.
No amount of escapement management will make up for loosing what is now trillions of metric tons of salmon biomass that would have otherwise annually recycled, throughout Alaska, over the last 50 years. These are the same 50 years that Alaska has ignored and rejected Fogwoman’s teachings.
It is now up to us, as Alaskans, as Natives and Non-Natives, as Subsistence, Sport, and Commercial fishers. Fogwoman’s message is clear. Reseed what you harvest, or prepare to follow her into the fog. Are we ready to begin true harvesting or do we continue mining.
Answer quickly because Alaska’s biosphere collapse has already begun.
Tom Harris
A.Tom.Harris @gmail.com
1(907)227-2755
Copyrighted