The late Les Anderson with the world record Alaska king salmon of yesteryear/Aalska Sports Hall of Fame
Alaska’s incredibly shrunken salmon
Why is it that an Alaska Congressional delegation that almost never objects to federal dollars flowing north is in a tizzy about a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) decision to spend money in the 49th state to investigate whether the state’s Chinook salmon belong on the endangered species list?
Could it have anything to do with the millions of dollars Seattle-based salmon processors and some Alaska fishermen have pumped into the coffers of these politicians over the years, and the fears of the aforementioned entities that there might be a hint of truth to the claims of the Wild Fish Conservancy that started this investigation?
When I arrived in this state long ago, Alaska Department of Fish and Game records reflect that the average size of a Chinook salmon harvested in the commercial fishery was 19.86 pounds.
Were this some sort of weird, one-year phenomenon, it could be written off as an anomaly. But it’s not a one-year phenomenon.
The average since the start of the 2020s is but 10.9 pounds, and the average for the 2010s was 12.3 pounds, down from 15.8 pounds in the 2000s.
There is a trend here that is not a good one.
If Alaska Chinook continue to lose weight at the rate of 11 to 22 percent per decade as they have been losing weight for the last 25 years, Alaska’s biggest salmon will be down to an average weight of 9.7 to 8.5 pounds by the end of this decade.
Maybe while the feds are considering listing Alaska Chinook as threatened or endangered under the terms of the Endangered Species Act (ESA), Alaskans should start thinking about delisting the king salmon as the state fish.
“The giant king salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) was designated the state fish of Alaska in 1962,” according to the website State Symbols USA, but the “giant” kings are no more. They have joined the legends of yesteryear.
And given the way kings have been downsizing over the course of the last several decades, they might be chum size sooner than we think.
Why, why, why?
Some believe – the Wild Fish Conservancy among the believers – that this shrinkage can be attributed to what you might call “the humpy diet.” This is the diet wherein someone stuffs the pantry with voracious pink salmon – humpies as Alaskans have long called them – that gobble up most of the available food.
Basically, the argument is that kings are shrinking because they are on the edge of starvation, and starvation is the world’s best diet. All animals need calories to put on weight, even humans despite all the nonsense about obesity being about “genetics, environmental factors, certain medical conditions, and more…outside of a person’s control.”
Obesity for us is about the difficult task of taking control of eating and exercise in the comfortable world in which we live. Taking control can be hard, painfully hard, but in that regard, we are way luckier than the Chinook. They are on a no-choice diet, though there may also be some environmental factors involved.
The North Pacific Ocean has been getting warmer. There is some evidence smaller fish do better in warmer water than bigger fish, although historically the largest of all fish has been found in the tropics, which confounds this theory somewhat.
Waters in the Gulf of Alaska are warming, but even during the warmest part of the year, daily averages seldom reach 60 degrees.
That said, one cannot wholly dismiss the possibility some of the weight loss Alaska kings have experienced is linked to altered metabolism in warmer water. But there is no doubt that they are now also swimming in an ocean where there are more salmon than ever competing for food.
The hatchery issue
Some scientists have blamed hatchery pinks for creating this situation, but some credit must go to the Alaska Board of Fisheries and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game which have now been managing humpies for maximum sustained yield of humpies for 50 years with great success.
This has created some interesting correlations that parallel the findings of a group of scientists looking for the aftereffects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in the late 2010s. One of the things they discovered was that big returns of pink salmon to Prince William Sound (PWS), where most pinks are hatchery fish, were depressing returns of sockeye salmon to the nearby Copper River.
“Pink salmon have been found to negatively affect sockeye salmon productivity and growth from British Columbia and Southeast Alaska, Bristol Bay, Kodiak, and Russia. Pink and sockeye salmon compete in the marine environment due to a high degree of similarity in diets, including similarities in diets of adult pink salmon and juvenile sockeye salmon.
“We do not know if possible deleterious interactions between hatchery pink salmon and wild sockeye salmon in this study are from predation or competition, or whether they occur in nearshore or offshore areas,” they added. “Pink salmon feeding may cause a general depletion of prey availability that could impact sockeye salmon without tight spatial overlap of these two species. In this regard, the apparent impact to sockeye productivity may reflect a general increase in pink salmon abundance across the northeast Pacific rather than the increased abundance of hatchery pink salmon to PWS (Prince William Sound) in particular.”
The consequences of this “general increase in pink salmon abundance across the Northeast Pacific” applies to king salmon, as well as sockeye, and king salmon seem to have hit a breaking point when humpy abundance increased to the point that Alaska commercial fishermen began harvesting 100 million pinks or more per year.
Correlation is not necessarily causation, but the relationship between humpy abundance and king salmon size as recorded in state data is interesting:
- In the 1970s, Alaska’s average, annual pink salmon harvest was 28.3 million per year and the average commercially caught king weighed 18.9 pounds.
- By the end of the 1980s, the average, annual pink harvest was up to 67.9 million per year with the weight of the average king holding steady at 19 pounds.
- By the end of the 1990s, with Alaska hatcheries starting to come fully online to boost pink numbers, the annual harvest of humpies was up to 98.9 million per year and kings were starting to shrink, ending the decade with a 16.1 pound average.
- By the end of the 2000s, Alaska’s annual humpy harvest for the decade had hit a record 170.35 million per year, and kings had shrunk to 15.8 pounds on average.
- By the 2010s, with the pink harvest holding steady above 100 million – average 114.75 million per year – kings were tanking with the average size for the decade then down to 12.3 pounds.
- Since then, the trend has only continued. The pink average for the first four seasons of the 2020s is 110.47 million per year – or just a tad under four times the average annual harvest of the 1970s – and kings are now down to 10.9 pounds on average or about 58 percent of their average weight in the 1970s.
The weight loss is dramatic and though there may be any variety of factors involved, it is hard to imagine that competition for food is not among those factors.
MSY
As mentioned above, this is not wholly a hatchery issue. Pink numbers aren’t at these record levels solely because of hatcheries. The state’s role in managing pinks for “maximum sustained yeild” (MSY) with no regard for the broader ecological consequences plays a role as well.
MSY is the holy grail of fisheries management, but a fundamental rule of ecology – whether managing fish or wildlife – is that you can’t have maximum numbers of everything. This is best illustrated by the 49th state’s long-running battle over predator control.
The reason for this is that if you manage for maximum numbers of wolves and bears, they can reduce predator populations to levels that leave no harvestable surplus for humans and sometimes push them into what has been termed a “predator pit,” which leaves prey rare.
Meanwhile, if you try to manage for maximum numbers of moose, deer or caribou, you have to kill off most bears and wolves.
The impossibility of maximum numbers of bears, wolves, caribou, moose and deer all at the same time is what drives what has become the state’s never-ending and inevitable debate over predator control. Some want to manage ecosystems for the maximum benefit of bears and wolves; some want to manage for the maximum benefit of people and wolves and bears be damned; and some struggling to find an acceptable compromise between these two endpoints.
Somehow, however, the ecological impossibility of having maximum everything gets overlooked in the fisheries sector.
The state’s formerly “giant” king salmon might be paying the price now with a badly misguided Rep. Mary Peltola, D-Alaska, instead trying to blame this on trawling and bycatch, which she suggests should be eliminated before doing anything to further protect kings.
The problem is that bycatch harvests might lead to some reduction in king salmon numbers, but they do nothing to explain the incredible shrinkage in the size of Alaska Chinook,
Peltola fears an ESA classification could lead to stronger restrictions on the harvests of kings in Southwest Alaska where she grew up, and she said in an online statement that “subsistence fishermen who rely on these salmon to feed their families and communities throughout the winter shouldn’t be left in the cold while this administration and Lower 48 environmentalists take another resource away from Alaskans.”
She apparently fails to understand that without conservation efforts in the here and now to protect the fish there will be no subsistence – or any other fishing for kings – tomorrow because the fish will be all gone.
Not to mention that if kings keep shrinking the way they have been going, subsistence fishermen might turn their attention to giant chums bigger than shrunken kings.
Meanwhile, processors and some commercial fishermen, primarily a small group of Alaska seiners, fear the ESA investigation could put an even more intense spotlight on the state’s industrial-scale farming of hatchery pinks.
Though hatchery humpies aren’t worth much individually – statewide they last year brought an average 24 cents per pound or 75 cents per fish, according to state data – they are of value to processors for their eggs, which the farmed salmon now dominating the world market don’t produce – and their low-cost carcasses, which can be turned into cheap canned salmon and fish meal.
The market for canned salmon is pretty well owned by Alaska and Russian pinks and the smallest Alaska sockeye because the world’s biggest producers of salmon – the farmers of Norway, Chile and elsewhere – have discovered there is much more money to be made in producing filet-size Atlantic salmon rather than little humpies.
I took that picture so many decades ago. Can’t believe I didn’t get a credit.
Sorry. I will add. It was one great photo.
Thank you. I think there is lots more to targeting North American salmon stocks over the years. Some of us helped w securing passage of the High Seas Moratorium Enforcement Act.
I understand there are fishing efforts in Russian still going on directly targeting NA kings and chums.
And perhaps lower average weight reflects the challenges for fish to survive longer, and larger, during their years at sea.
if you have anywhere found anything online or elsewhere as to Russian harvests of Chinook, i’d love to see it. that information is hard to find.
and the science now is pretty clear that lower average weight/sizes is pretty much linked to the ability to obtain food at sea.
Sorry I think you might be missing a big part of the puzzle. Food for kings. You briefly mentioned pink salmon gobbling up all over the king salmon food. Then you talked about Peletolas misguided view on trawling. It’s not misguided. Trawling has been proven to kill fisheries. Trawlers eliminate billions of tons of biomass from the ocean where kings eat. Large kings were found to spend up to 2 years longer foraging before returning to rivers to spawn. Making them more susceptible to trawlers. There is a reason many countries have banned trawling all together. Just for some sh*#y imitation crab meat and nasty roe for Asian countries. Oh don’t forget the filet o fish from the fast food restaurants. What would we do without those… Look deeper friend. Follow the money.
Josh: The great thing about America is that it is a free country where you can believe anything you want to believe. Unfortunately, in this case, you’re wrong on the data. And, just so you know, a.) kings spend two to four years foraging at sea and the big ones may spend up to eight. b.) the estimated bycatch of Chinook for Western Alaska rivers is less than 3 percent of the estimated returns to those rivers and most of the bycatch (about 50 percent) comes from those rivers. The harvests from rivers to the east is so small – 4,850 or less for British Columbia, 4,200 or less for the North Alaska Peninsula and 2,260 or less for the U.S. West Coast are so small as to be lost in the mathematical noise here. https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/alaska/science-data/faster-turnaround-times-and-integrated-new-data-shed-light-salmon-bycatch-dynamics
There are, at times, almost as many B.C. Chinook taken as bycatch in the Copper River drift gillnet fishery – 3,100 in 2015 (https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/FedAidPDFs/FMS17-09.pdf) – as are caught in the pollock trawl fishery. As a simple fact, the pollock trawl fish is, on a percentage bais, among the cleaner of Alaska fisheries.
Now, as to your conerns about “biomass,” things get very complicated in that there is considerable overlap in diet between salmon and groundfishes in the North Pacific with pollock both competing with salmon for food and becoming prey for salmon. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0967064518300754
This makes it hard to sort out what size pollock populations would create the net benefit for salmon.
It could be that by ending trawling and allowing for an even larger than existing pollock population would increase the prey ability for salmon and boost their numbers, at least temporarily, or it could be that allowing for an even larger than existing pollock population could increase food competition with salmon and do just the oppoiste, ie. lower salmon numbers.
It is a complex situation, and then there are the Russians. They have a North Pacific trawl harvest of pollock about the same as ours. And the fish move between U.S. and Russian waters, (https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/study-shows-pollock-stocks-are-mixing-more-due-changing-ocean-conditions-and-weather) which raises questions of how much any U.S. reduction in pollock harvests would be offset by the Russians increasing pollock harvets.
And, of course, we have on idea of the bycatch of U.S. Chinook in Russian waters or, really, of their management philosophy vis-a-vis Chinook, most of which originate from North American waters. Given the relatively small Chinook returns to Russian waters, the Russians might see a net benefit to allowing for the significant bycatches of NA Chinook that they can sell.
I think people are missing the obvious, when a huge Commercial Trawler ship drops it’s net and catches a whole school of salmon they have pretty well wiped out a lot of genetics , much of which were most likely the bigger fish.
On the Yukon it is very dismal as there has been a very pitiful return of King’s, so what happened to those fish, also quite possibly the reason that there were so few caught as Bycatch. You can talk numbers all you like but the indiscriminate method of Trawling has been a huge reason in the depletion of the salmon. NOAA is far from a trustworthy organization and it sounds like you belong there with them. Low numbers of Bycatch, yeah, but very low numbers of returning salmon as well. The number of salmon bycatch versus the number of returning fish is sickening.
Ron: You’re confusing trawlers with purse seiners that catch “a whole school of salmon.” About the only thing you got right here is that bycatch numbers decline when the overall biomass of salmon declines. This is true in all fisheries. The pollock bycatch of Chinook tracks the Cook Inlet set gillnet bycatch of Chinook.
When Chinook numbers go down, bycatch goes down and vice versa. But this doesn’t mean bycatch is necessarily driving the problem. Most often productivity is driving the problem. And the North American, coastwide productivity of Chinook salmon has crashed in recent times.
It might help your understanding if you knew the history here. The Japenese were trawling these waters in the 1950s. They were later joined by the Koreans and others. All these fleets fished dirtier than the U.S. trawlers of today. It has been estimated that those trawlers, along with the Japanese high seas gillnet fishery, were harvesting up to 80 percent of some Western Alaska stocks prior to passage and eventual implementation of the Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Conservation Act in the 1970s. https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/static/home/library/PDFs/afrb/clarv12n1_p1.pdf
Here’s some more reading you need to do so you can talk about this subject with some of the history.
https://spo.nmfs.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/pdf-content/mfr3841.pdf
https://open.library.ubc.ca/media/stream/pdf/831/1.0088950/2
The latter notes that “despite various restrictions and limitations placed upon the high-seas fleets in the Northeast and Northwest Pacific, Japan’s total salmon catches between 1955-1961 were larger than those of the United States, and in some years, larger than the combined catches of Canada and the United States.”
These high harvest didn’t full end after passage of the Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Conservation Act, either.
Alaska Department of Fish and Game researchers reported “the 1976- 1980 average catch of chinook salmon in the northern region (including high seas catches, 38 percent) was about 1.3 million.” That 38 percent would put the high-seas catch at 494,000 or several orders of magnitue above the existing take of Chinook as bycatch. https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/fedaidpdfs/Chinook.S.SEP.R.03.pdf
And yet YK salmon were doing much better then than they are today. Obviously something other than bycatch is the problem here. I hate to call bycatch a “red herring,” but it appears to be small, scaly and red.
If you want to be angry at it the pollack fishery because nearly all the money (aside from what the CDQ fleet makes) flows south to Seattle with Alaska getting almost nothing, be angry. It’s an Alaska ripoff. I’ve long been angry about that myself. But the fleet isn’t the reason Chinook are in so much trouble in Alaska these days.
Craig, thank you kindly for your wonderful article and the insight that such brings to us during these “troubled” times via the so-called greenhouse effect/global warming that have unfortunately taken place on our Earth for so long and, along with the effects of such marine pollution as from the bits and pieces of microplastics, you never know..
I’m not one to say being a commercial fisherman but I haven’t heard much talk about the feed that the salmon eat in the ocean. This is the time the salmon are in the growing stage. If there isn’t as much feed and the fish have to compete with other predators for this feed then they are under feed. Contributing to the lost in weight. Same thing with your goldfish in the bowl you don’t feed it and it doesn’t grow very big. Lol
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 basket that would be used to carry the eggs upstream to be placed into sheltered bubbling waters to reseed the salmon eggs into the spawning grounds.
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 we are not reseeding our salmon resource, do we really have the right to call it harvesting, or are we really mining?
Man u said it.
Your the right guy
Look at the average size of ship creek kings…shrinking body size.
As they are everywhere else despite those Ship Creek kings getting a hatchery assist designed to best prepare them for life at see so they can out compete wild fish.
They should not allow catch and release. To much stress on fish and it weakens them for their spawning journey. Keep the first fish caught. Stop trophy fishing.
The lower 48 fish have been getting smaller too. Not too many pinks down there.
How come the stress of being weakened by sport fisheries doesn’t seem to apply to Russian River sockeye? If those fish were weakened as much as you believe by being hooked and played, that run would be extinct.
There’s mortality associated with those catch and release fisheries. No doubt about that. But it’s far less mortality than is involved in letting people keep the first fish caught. And it would appear to be significantly less mortality than the drop-out mortality from gillnets. So should we also largely ban the use of gillnets in Alaska as the states of Texas, California and Florida have done. There are cleaner ways to catch salmon.
Now, as to “not too many pinks down there,” by which I believe you mean Canada and the Pacific Northwest, that has nothing to do with catch and release. There are no pink salmon “catch and release” fisheries down there. From Canada south, just about anyone who catches any salmon is keeping it if it is caught in any fishery where keeping a salmon is aallowed.
And if we’re going to ban catch and release, should we be ban the commercial troll fishery or just change the existing regulation which limits those commercial fishermen to only keeping kings “at least 28 inches from tip of snout to tip of tail (in its natural open position) or 23 inches from the midpoint of the clethral arch to the tip of the tail. Undersized king salmon that are taken must be returned to the water unharmed.” https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/static/regulations/fishregulations/pdfs/commercial/cf_se_yakutat_salmon_regs_2022_2025.pdf
That 28-inch restriction, of course, mandates significant catch and release fishing in both the commercial and sport fisheries in Southeast. I can remember days when I lived down there when we shook off more 28 inch or smaller kings than we caught kings we could keep.
ADFG has done 2 catch and release studies on king salmon. The first was on the Kenai in 1991. The early run mortality was 8.8%. The late run was 5.9%. The Nushagak study happened in 2017-18. In 2017 the mortality was 7.3%. In 2018 it was 6.2%. All numbers are very low in the world of catch and release fisheries. Remember, ADFG factors in mortality in deciding whether or not to leave a fishery open. They also factor in that a released king salmon that dies is not lost to the ecosystem.
One of my most precious photos/memory is of the day in the 1980’s my Daughter caught a 24-inch, 10 lb. Dolly/Char and I landed a just under 60 lb. King. The King is bigger in weight and length than my 5-year-old Daughter. We look happy and proud in the picture; unlike conflicted emotions I have felt during the last couple of decades. At the time, I released all Rainbows and Steelheads on the Kenai Península and keeping large Kings was considered “normal”. No excuse, “Just the facts” as Friday would say. Less Kings seems somewhat fixable; however, the weight issue is troubling since one would think fewer Kings, more to eat. Oh, yes, the hungry Pinks ate their food.
I don’t suppose that wiping out the herring stocks thru mismanagement and overfishing could have anything to do with it huh? No food = no fish the last time I checked.
Herring may be one aspect of the food shortage, but I have a tendency to believe the problem might start farther down the food chain than that. It might be far enough down to also be part of the herring problem.
Just like there are subspecies in the Raven, so too were there nearly a half dozen King Salmon species that returned to Alaskan rivers each year…the larger species are already extinct, and the smaller Kings are next on the list to disappear if comm fish is not stopped from current long line and trawler operations & the billion pinks added via two dozen state funded hatcheries needs to cease.
The evidence for selective removals driving size changes in salmon is pretty weak. If it were this simple, most sockeye salmon in Cook Inlet would not be down to about three-pounds – a size that can slip through the common sockeye gillnet – because so many of the larger sockeye have been removed over time.
No doubt genetics play some role, as they do in people, and some rivers – such as the Kenai – have fish with genetic traits that encourage them to grow larger than in other rivers when food is availalbe. And it’s pretty hard to remove a genetic trait like that becuase many in the population would be expected to carry it.
The evidence would support the idea that here, as with people, the big issue driving size is nutrition: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4892290/
Not only do I have evidence from folks with 40 years of experience fishing in Alaska, there is also a lot of scientific evidence showing how larger species & sub species are always the first ones to go extinct.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Pleistocene_extinctions
Or at they were in the Pleistocene, but we’re not in the Pleistocene anymore. And there are some who argue those mega-mammals of the Pleistocene went extinct because there size made them easy to find which led to humans killing them all. And we certainly know from recorded history, versus prehistoric reconstructions, that humans are pretty good at hunting animals to extinction.
We would have done it with the megafauna of the ocean – ie. whales – in modern times if the idea of “conservation” hadn’t taken root.
Stephen says “there is also a lot of scientific evidence showing how larger species & sub species are always the first ones to go extinct.” I will point out that “always” is a loaded word, I will also point out that the wiki page Stephen links to does not support his statement. In fact it says, in part, “ground sloths survived on the Antilles long after North and South American ground sloths were extinct, woolly mammoths died out on remote Wrangel Island 6,000 years after their extinction on the mainland, while Steller’s sea cows persisted off the isolated and uninhabited Commander Islands for thousands of years after they had vanished from the continental shores of the north Pacific”
Regarding the “evidence from folks with 40 years of experience fishing in Alaska”, that’s a joke right? 40 years of evidence from folks with experience fishing, I have more than 40 years experience fishing in Alaska, I know plenty of people who have more than 40 years experience.
That’s exactly it Craig…You said it. Humans are good at hunting animals to extinction which is exactly what happened to the largest subspecies of King salmon.
Between the targeted comm fish, the bycatch of comm fish and the sport fishing guiding, we target the largest Kings for 3 generations in AK and now there are extinct.
You should get in touch with Mark Hem of the Copper River and interview him for a story on this…
Him and his partner have lots of data he has tried to present to the fish board over the years…
I fully agree with his observations.
To say that large king salmon spread over the entire king salmon range are a subspecies flies in the face of science. To further claim that this large subspecies spread over the entire king salmon range is extinct goes beyond flying in the face of science, it’s absolute hogwash.
Steve o-
I would agree with you on face value since you and I don’t know the facts.
There are subspecies within species worldwide.
Look at humans:
Moose
Dogs
Kodiak bears
For that matter nearly every creature.
I have no idea if stine is right but i do know
The yukon average catch was over 30# for hundreds of thousands of kings for years.
I also know when i was young it was common to see king carcasses the length of q man on sandbars.
If I remember correctly the kings in the states are different.
Considering you’re opinions regarding science tend to age poorly im going to take your statements on subspecies with a grain of salt.
DPR,
This should shed some light on the subject at hand and where large kings have historically and continue to be found all across the Western North American continent, they even have giants in South America!!! https://fishwithjd.com/2015/03/12/10-of-the-worlds-biggest-king-salmon/
Needless to say the giant kings aren’t extinct and they aren’t a subspecies of king salmon. The giants are genetically predisposed to grow large and when conditions are right they grow exceptionally large, this happens with many species and has been well documented. Craig shared a link above regarding humans and nutrition, there are many other such studies regarding other species, some of us know the facts…you could be one of those if you so choose.
As far as your continued nonsense about science, you believe what you believe, actual science be damned and facts have never been your strong suit. You prefer to follow your faith and not facts or science, good for you…I won’t attack your faith, I will let the facts and science speak for themselves.
Steve-o
You didn’t present 1 shred of evidence that large kings are not a subspecies.
Do you know what a subspecies is ?
There are like 20 subspecies of willow ptarmigan.
Most species have subspecies. Look it up .
Your Mentioning that food effects humans size doesn’t really help your case . Every one knows that food effects size in an animal to a small extent. What percentage?
Unless its complete starvation its not a size reduction of 50% . We are not seeing emaciated
Kings . We are seeing smaller overall kings and fewer. Technical starvation isn’t appearing at catch points. A good test would be body fat/ oil to protein ratio.
The article you linked to was just click bait.
The biggest recorded kings from that article was the 1940s which disproved your point.
Larger kings have now become more rare regardless of what you want to believe Steve and regardless of how much you lie about me and my opinions it doesn’t change the fact –
Kings are the united states are more rare
Large kings are significantly more rare with the largest being caught 3/4 a century ago which matches stines opinion closer than your
( hogwash)
The Columbia hogs are no longer caught in similar size or numbers.
All stats for Alaska kings are carefully compiled and yet you keep nonsensically making misleading statements that nothing is to be worried about.
In craigs article it says Alaska king size is currently reduced by 50%
Of what it was in 70s when it may have been already decimated/ decreased since turn of century if the Columbia notation holds any relevance around 1940
You misleading statements meet the definition of young statement about others =“hogwash”
The fact remains. Neither of us knows for certain whether genetics regarding size / subspecies is an issue without scientific testing
Can current kings be induced with a better diet to grow 100# on a regular basis? Without it just being a high percentage of fat ?
Stevo you are the last person who should be commenting on others science because you’re opinions have a high probability of being proven incorrect per recent history.
Steve o it should be noted that ignoring the effects of selective breeding over 20 plus generations is fool hardy.
Our harvest systems have generally targeted the highest mass segments of of the population to a higher degree that the lower mass.
Combine that with natural selection which during times of low food availability generally favors the smaller mass segment of the population which also creates a selective breeding environment.
High mass creatures struggle to pass on genes during times of low food availability.
“Smaller” more efficient “sub species” are less stressed during times of low food availability increasing the likelihood that they grow to healthy adulthood and procreate.
Its a logical rule of thumb that usually plays out across the animal kingdom .
A competitive food environment requires some form of genetic adaptation especially over a multiple generational timeline.
Selective Breeders can significantly change a species within 3 generations. How many generations does a low food environment take to effect genes?
The more a population is reduced the faster the overall genes change because the breeding pool becomes diminished which creates an extreme selective breeding environment. There are only specific elements of the population left to breed.
The surviving elements. Which would tend to harbor individuals who have adapted to a low feed / ocean temperature environment ect .
At that point it becomes highly likely the genetics of the giants become effectively extinct without reverse selective breeding.
If there are no more kings who express the genes for gigantic growth then gigantic growth will become more recessive.
As the gene pool of large kings decreases the likelihood of this outcome becomes more likely.
Thus it becomes imperative to treat the situation as an emergency in direct correlation with the number of generations past catching larger kings both by size and population numbers.
Im assuming you are not an animal breeder so your background knowledge is probably limited.
Its a standard rule of thumb that if the desired trait is further back than grandparents then the likelihood of similar gene expression in progeny becomes exponentially less likely the further removed based on generational distance from the trait .
( becomes harder to recover/ express)
You might still be able to create the correct breeding conditions/ combination but it becomes unlikely despite the genes being in there somewhere.
Ignoring this risk and cost to rehabilitate for a valuable species or subspecies gene expression is absolutely fool hardy.
Is this the case with kings ? Idk
But it’s important to get chinook species protections so we don’t end up in a genetic corner. Which becomes more likely as the population diminishes. Which is where we currently are . Population very diminished.
Chinook body size also extremely diminished/ 50 % or more
Roused up Alaskan voters concerned with keeping all salmon species healthy could start changing out State fish politicians in office. They are easy to find from campaign contribution lists of donors. It’s public information worth sharing this fall election cycle.
Couldn’t agree more , Rod. When you look at the campaign donations to Dunleavys campaign from Mr. Penney and other of krsa, it is apparent that the governors office, which appoints the commisioner of fish and game, has in all likelihood made appointments to appease his donors.