King salmon going down as pinks go up

An eight- to nine-fold increase in Prince William Sound pink salmon now credited to the open-ocean farming of the North Pacific Ocean has profited some Alaskans, but scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Western Alaskans have fears it could be hurting others.

A just-released “Alaska Salmon Research Task Report” from NOAA says the “top specific hypothesis” of scientists trying to determine the cause of the collapse of Chinook salmon runs in the Yukon River and the struggles of Chinook in the Kuskokwim River is “focused on competition between AYK salmon and hatchery pink and chum salmon, and with high abundances of sockeye salmon from Bristol Bay.”

The numbers of pinks and Bay sockeye have exploded in the new millennium. The sockeye increase has been linked to a warmer Bering Sea. The pink boom, however, is due to more than just warmer water.

Open-ocean fish farming pushed by money-driven fishing interests in both Alaska and Russia has played a significant role in the pink salmon increase, or at least U.S. hatchery operators and scientists studying the U.S. boom are making that claim.

“From 1960 to 1976, before enhancement, Prince William Sound (PWS) produced approximately 6–7 million pink salmon, with harvests of approximately 4 million,” a new Sound study proclaimed. “In contrast, between 2010 and 2019, harvest rose to approximately 50 million annually, over 80 percent of which was of hatchery-produced salmon. While fisheries are managed to target a high harvest rate of hatchery-origin fish, large numbers of hatchery fish stray to wild spawning grounds, prompting concerns about repercussions for wild populations.”

The study was conducted primarily to refute concerns that the hundreds of thousands of pinks that miss the hatcheries upon their return from the sea and elect instead to spawn among their wild cousins could compromise the genetics of wild fish.

The study found that shifts in the return timing of some of these fish appeared to be linked to hatchery crossbreeds, but concluded that hatchery fish spawning in the wild mainly served to produce a greater abundance of salmon in general.

That feral hatchery fish weren’t lighting a fuse on a genetic time bomb that could one day threaten wild pink salmon spawning in the northeast corner of the Gulf of Alaska was good news to many living in Alaska’s urban core just north of the Sound.

But it would appear this might not be such good news for rural Alaskans, many of them living in or near poverty, hundreds of miles to the west.

“Research on marine food limitation for Arctic Yukon Kuskokwim (AYK) chum salmon and Chinook salmon was identified as another top priority research theme by the working group (WG),” the NOAA report said. “The highest score for all individual research questions and hypotheses was in this theme.

“The AYK WG expressed particular support for
research understanding competition between AYK salmon
and increasing pink salmon, chum salmon, and sockeye
salmon abundance from other regions, and especially in consideration of hatchery-produced competitors.”

The working group rated “competition with hatchery pinks & chum, Bristol Bay sockeye” and “food quality for smolts (climate change and food webs), its two highest research priorities, but when the scoring was “weighted,” “marine harvest and marine
food limitation were ranked equally as the two top research
priorities,” the NOAA report says.

The weighting largely reflected the views of the 27 “public members” of the 42-person working group. A majority of the public members are residents of Southwest Alaska where it has become a widespread belief that the king salmon decline is attributable to Chinook bycatch in Bering Sea trawl fisheries for pollock.

The bogeyman

The data does not support such a conclusion, but the idea has been championed by Rep. Mary Peltola, D-Alaska.

Alaska’s lone member of the House of Representatives, Peltola is from Bethel on the banks of the Kuskokwim, and the idea that bycatch has caused the Chinook decline is entrenched in the rural community about 400 miles west of Anchorage.

With a population of about 6,300, Bethel is the regional hub and largest community in Southwest Alaska. Peltola has played to the home crowd there by pushing the idea that bycatch – the harvest of non-target species in commercial harvests – is what is driving Chinook numbers down.

She pushed a poll conducted by Data for Progress – the self-proclaimed “think tank for the future of progressivism” – claiming that “70 percent of Alaskans would approve a total ban on industrial pollock trawlers off the state’s coasts,” according to USA Today.

“In line with this overwhelming support, U.S. Representative Mary Sattler Peltola, D-Alaska, introduced legislation last week that spurred reactions from leaders of industrial trawler fleets that would be affected by the federal legislation if it were to become law,” the publication reported in May.

The story ran beneath a headline claiming “most Alaskans support banning them: poll,” but that isn’t quite what the poll said. It found 42 percent of Alaska strongly supported the idea with another 25 percent saying they would “somewhat support” a ban, whatever that means.

In a lengthy question-and-answer interview attached to the story, Peltola criticized the way fishery biologists forecast salmon returns to the Kuskokwim and said they should follow the advice of “Canadian geese:”

“…How the Canadian geese come back is how the Chinook salmon come back, and there is a 100 percent correlation that I’ve witnessed personally since 2017,” she said. “So, if the Canadian geese are early, the Chinook are early; if they are abundant, the Chinook are abundant. A couple of years ago, I … noticed the Canadian geese migration came back home, and then it tapered way off, and a lot more Canadian geese came back in another wave, and that is exactly what the Chinook salmon did.”

She described this salmon forecasting technique as a means to compensate for the “complete lack of understanding in salmon management right now, about run timing, run strength, there’s just so many gaps, and (this) traditional knowledge can help fill the gap.”

Peltola last year convinced Politico to write a disjointed story headlined “Alaska’s Fisheries Are Collapsing. This Congresswoman Is Taking on the Industry She Says Is to Blame.”

The story confused bottom trawling with midwater trawling and suggested the difficulty “young people” face in getting into the Alaska fishing industry – where some fisheries are booming and others are faltering – was somehow linked to the issue of trawling.

That is not the case. The problem for anyone trying to get into the fishing industry is the high, upfront capital cost in part due to the expense of exclusive “limited entry” permits needed to fish salmon and expensive “catch shares” needed to fish halibut in what were once considered the state’s entry-level fisheries.

Real overfishing possibility

Overharvest of  AYK Chinook could, however, be a problem given that the U.S. has no idea what happens just across the international dateline from Alaska in the Bering Sea waters of Russia.

The AYK Working Group noted how little is known about the migratory paths of salmon in the Bering Sea, the mixing of various salmon stocks there, and non-U.S. harvests.

The wide movements of salmon, the group said, are “evident within the eastern Bering Sea (the U.S. portion of that sea) where a majority of the prohibited species catch for chum salmon is Asian origin, much of which are produced in hatcheries.”

Asian salmon, primarily from Japan, are also heavily harvested in the state’s South Alaska Peninsula salmon fishery, according to genetics studies conducted by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. 

For all anyone knows, large numbers of Yukon and Kuskokwim Chinook could be circling back to their streams of origin via routes along the western side of the Bering Sea only to be caught in Russian fisheries, and the Russians at this time – given the war in Ukraine – have no incentive to cooperate with the U.S. in reporting any such harvests.

The AYK Working Group also cited concerns about Illegal,
Unreported, and Unregulated (IUU) fishing. A 2021 report compiled by Planet Tracker, a non-profit financial think tank funded by a variety of investment and environmental foundations, claimed that “that as much as 50 percent of the walleye pollock caught in Russia was estimated to be unreported in 2016….If correct, that would be more than the entire catch of Alaska pollock in the U.S.”

Tracker investigators were of the opinion that unreported catches had decreased in the years that followed. The evidence for that was weak, but the report noted Russia had just passed a law aimed at reducing “the share of IUU fishing for pollock catches in Russia, but not greatly, as it focuses solely on foreign vessels (in
this case, Korean vessels would be the primary targets.)

IUU fisheries have no reason to avoid catching Chinook – the most valuable of the salmon species – or report that catch. And at this time, far less is known about what is happening in Russian waters than U.S. waters.

There is no telling what could happen there next, either.

“Further stress on Russian fisheries might come from China leveraging its role as a key processor of pollock (it accounts for 60 percent of Russian exports), the Tracker report said. “China could pressure Russia to allow Chinese fleets to fish pollock in Russian waters (trawling margins are much higher than processing margins). There is a precedent in Latin America, where Chinese fleets started to target squid directly rather than importing it.”

Chinese fishing interests might well decide Chinook are valuable, marketable catch rather than bycatch. And harvests on the non-U.S. side of the Bering Sea could go up given indications that “warming waters in the Pacific are…driving a migration of pollock populations westwards and northwards to the Arctic Sea. A third of the U.S. pollock population is likely to migrate to Russian waters by 2040.”

Grim future

None of this looks particularly good for an impoverished Western Alaska that has already taken a big hit from Alaska hatcheries. They are credited with devasting the market for commercially caught chum salmon from the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers in the 1990s.

“It is clear from the data that during the 1990s there has been a substantial shift in source of supply in Alaska from wild to hatchery (chum) production, and that this has been occurring at a time of substantial increase in the already dominant hatchery production of chum salmon in Japan,” Lawrence Buklis reported in the peer-reviewed journal Arctic in 1998.

“While the relative significance of the domestic and Japanese production on local chum salmon and chum salmon roe markets may be debated, it is clear that their combined effect has been a substantial drop in ex-vessel value in the AYK region of Alaska.

“It is not known whether ex-vessel values for salmon from
the AYK region will rebound, making the current downturn temporary, or whether the declines will persist. For
chum salmon and chum salmon roe product, given the
competition within Alaska and from Japan due to expanded hatchery production, the outlook is not good….”

It never got better. Hatchery chums pretty much put the poorest commercial fishermen in Alaska out of business.

AYK chum fisheries that reached a record value of $29.2 million in 1988 had devalued to $7.5 million by 1997, Buklis wrote. He described the real-term effect of the price collapse on rural fishermen in this way:

By “1996, with boat gas at about $2.45 per gallon and summer chum salmon selling for $0.09 per pound, about 23 summer chum salmon had to be sold to fill (a 6-gallon gas tank). Second, a new 115-hp outboard motor retailed for about $6,200 in 1996 in the
lower Yukon River. The average per fisher gross income earned for the sale of chinook and summer chum salmon in the lower Yukon River in 1996 was about 10 percent short of affording that purchase, even disregarding taxes and overhead.

“There is ongoing debate in Alaska as to whether competition from new chum salmon hatchery production in Alaska or expanded hatchery production in Japan is the primary cause of the market downturn for chum salmon and chum salmon roe in the AYK region. (But) it is clear from the data that during the 1990s there has been a substantial shift in source of supply in Alaska from wild to hatchery (chum).”

“Hatchery production, which accounted for less than 1 percent of chum salmon supply from Alaska in 1980, increased to 48 percent in 1993 and 67 percent in 1996.”

The ocean-farmed chums own an even bigger share of the market now than they did in 1996 due to a decrease in wild chum production.

Alaska statewide, “chum salmon commercial harvest was around
5 million from the late 1950s to 1980 but then increased to around 18 million through 2018,” the AYK report notes. “Commercial harvest of chum salmon has recently declined to levels seen during the mid-1980s, and subsistence harvest to lowest levels on record, with the AYK region having the largest decline.”

Hatcheries have largely taken over the production of chums in Southeast Alaska where harvests of wild fish have been declining for years. It is unclear, however, whether the increase in hatchery chums is linked to the decrease in wild chums. 

Statewide chum harvests started off this season looking strong and then faded fast but catches remain above the five-year average except on the Yukon, where the situation is once again bleak.

“The preseason projection does not meet the threshold of 550,000 chum salmon needed to allow any commercial fishing,” Fish and Game reported Friday. “While the run projection is within the drainage-wide escapement goal of 300,000 to 600,000 fall chum salmon, there is uncertainty in the current projection due to lower than expected abundance of age-4 summer chum salmon in this year’s run, indicating lower production from the parent year. Subsistence fishing is open for chum, sockeye, pink, and coho salmon to start the fall season, but Chinook salmon subsistence fishing remains closed.”

The river failed to meet the minimum spawning goal for Chinook, too, despite all fishing for that species being closed. The Kuskokwim looks like it should meet its goal, but the surplus number of fish available for harvest will be limited.

Around the Gulf of Alaska, Chinook returns to many streams are at or near record lows. The Kenai River is at 60 percent of its previous record low of late-run kings. 

The Karluk River on Kodiak Island has set a new record low for this date. The Deshka River, once the go-to king salmon fishery for anglers in the Anchorage Metro area, is lagging behind last year’s record low return with a count of fewer than 4,000 kings in a river that often used to see tens of thousands by this date. 

Returns to some other rivers draining into the Gulf of Alaska, including the Copper River and its tributaries, look better, but none would be described as robust.

NOAA is now reviewing whether the situation in total warrants putting Gulf Chinook on the endangered species list. 

The AYK Working Group took note of how the times have changed for Alaska Chinook.

“Chinook salmon commercial harvest averaged around 600,000
from the late 1950s to mid-1970s, then increased to roughly 800,000 during the early 1980s and has since gradually declined to around 250,000,” they wrote. “In general, the downward trend in
Chinook salmon commercial harvest since the mid1980s includes dramatic declines within the AYK, Central and Southeast regions and high variability in harvest within the Westward region starting around 2007.”

The state fish has clearly seen better days.