Update: News from elsewhere around the state as reported in the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s statewide salmon summary and fish count reports as of this morning:
- “The Karluk River Chinook salmon escapement through July 25 is 66 fish which is the lowest on record.”
- “The Ayakulik River Chinook salmon escapement through July 25 is 327 fish, which is the lowest on record.”
- “SEAK Chinook salmon stocks are currently experiencing low abundance.”
- “The Chinook salmon run in the lower Yukon River is nearly complete and passage at the Yukon River mainstem sonar by Pilot Station was 64,000 fish. Escapement goals within the Yukon River drainage will not be achieved.”
- Three-hundred-fifty-six kings passed the Kenai sonar counter over the weekend, but the return remains at only 62 percent of the lowest previous return as of this date.
- The Deshka River Chinook is the lowest on record for this date.
Late-run Kenai Chinook return at record low
As July winds toward the traditional, end-of-month closing date for the once world-famous, king salmon sport fishery on the Kenai River, a new record no one wants to see appears inevitable.
At this time, with the return of late-run Kenai kings at the midpoint, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game reports that only about 3,000 of the big fish have passed the in-river sonar counter.
The return is at 60 percent of what it was on the same date in 2021 when the end-of-season escapement into the river fell more than 3,000 fish short of the minimum goal of 15,000.
The latest projection, based on normal run timing, estimates a total, final return of but 6,012 large Kenai late-run Chinook, and fisheries biologists aren’t confident of that estimate because of that number due to the lack of precedents for tracking a run as small as now being witnessed.
The smallest return on record was of an estimated 11,584 big fish in 2014. The sonar that year tallied 17,452 kings, but the number was revised downward after the state shifted to counting only fish over 34 inches in 2020.
The shift to the 34-inch size was done for two reasons: one to ensure the sonar was counting only Chinook and not some of the Kenai’s oversized sockeye, and the other to help ensure bigger salmon carrying more eggs on the spawning grounds.
The way things stood as of Friday with the sonar count at 2,952, the best fishery managers can hope for is a surge of late-arriving kings and the augmentation of some smaller, egg-bearing kings joining their bigger cousins on the spawning grounds.
Even then, the situation looks grim.
A return of 6,000 big kings would amount to less than half of the preseason forecast of 13,639 and fall more than 5,000 fish shy off the worst-ever return for the Kenai.
Fisheries shut down
And all of this in a year when the commercial, set gillnet fishery on the east side of Cook Inlet was shut down, along with sport and personal-use harvests of late-run king salmon, and the bycatch to date in the commercial drift gillnet fishery is a 77 kings, according to state data.
The low number only serves to reinforce the accuracy of the in-river sonar count. The fish could be late, but only once in the last five years has the second half of the run been sizeably bigger than the first half.
That happened in 2021 when the run picked up significantly in early August to put the return about 1,000 fish over what it would have been at twice the midpoint. But the return still totaled only 11,832 – barely above the disastrous summer of 2014.
A projection off a run five days late this year does boosts the end-of-season tally oo 8,335. But that would push the return less than 1,000 fish over halfway to the minimum goal of 15,000.
When the Alaska Board of Fisheries met in March, there was much debate about what to do to protect the Kenai’s late-run kings while ensuring the Inlet’s commercial, eastside setnetters some fishing time this summer.
That argument now seems to have been much ado about nothing.
Settnetters, who have in the past accused state officials of using fishing closures to try to force them out of business, were not happy that the Board wasn’t buying their proposal to push the goal down to 12,000 and accept that “collateral king mortality is accepted in all other fisheries in their quest to harvest sockeye and coho salmon, but not the Eastside Setnet Fishery.”
Given what has developed, not even a goal that low would have permitted commercial setnetting with its inevitable and significant bycatch of kings – the collateral damage problem the Eastside fishery has willfully overlooked for decades.
As late as 2013, setnetters had one of their mouthpieces – then Kenai Peninsula Clarion managing editor Andrew Jensen editorializing that “legal, historic harvest is not bycatch” on the basis that the issue with setnet harvests of late-run Kenai kings was all just about public relations.
The setnetters cheered him on, and went back to killing late-run Chinook. Chinook are, after all, the most valuable fish in the state. Kings were worth $4.27 per pound in 2013, almost three times more than sockeye, according to state data, and Cook Inlet-wide more than 5,000 of them were caught in commercial nets.
The nets, however, cannot be blamed for what has happened since. There is agreement that the kings are in decline because of ocean conditions not fully understood, although there is a growing focus on interspecies food competition.
A king-unfriendly ocean
Chinook returns are weak almost everywhere around the rim of the Gulf of Alaska. A hypothesis that kings, the largest of the salmon species, could be suffering due to a boom in pinks, the smallest of the species, and a Western Alaska uptick in sockeye, another smaller species, was floated in 2018, but remains unproven.
Whatever the cause, the consequences of the downturn have come home to roost on the Kenai because of the past failure to confront and solve the bycatch issue.
The Board did give commercial setnetters the opportunity to go commercial dipnetting offshore this year, but most pooh-poohed the idea. The state is reporting a commercial dipnet catch of fewer than 20,000 sockeye to date.
The normal setnet catch at this time of year would likely be in the hundreds of thousands of sockeye. The season-long, commercial dipnet catch now looks to end up a small fraction of the personal-use dipnet catch in the Kenai River which reached nearly 326,000 last year, according to state data.
It was a big catch, but well short of the record harvest of 537,765 in 2011.
The dipnet fisheries are allowed when gillnet fisheries are closed because it is possible to release unharmed any king salmon that happen to get in the net. Kings caught in gillnets often tangle and drown before they can be released.
An experiment is underway this summer to see if beach seines, which can be used in any number of ways, could provide both high-volume harvests of sockeye and the safe release of kings.
It is the first serious try at solving the bycatch problem, which now appears destined to plague the commercial beach fishermen for years into the future.
The failure of the Kenai to meet the late-run king salmon goal this year, which now appears probable, would mark the fifth year in a row the goal has gone unmet.
The long-running downturn in king returns, which had numbered as high as 90,000 fish, long ago killed what had been a lucrative and world-famous guided sport fishery on the river, and unless some solution to the bycatch problem is found, the setnetters could be the next element of the fishing business to go under.
The decline you see in King salmon looks very similar to what we experience with the Atlantic salmon in Europe. And here neither do we have any really good explanations for it. I have collected a lot of data. Reach out to me if you like.
Egg boxes may be a first step alternative to hatcheries. Egg boxes use wild fish that are returning naturally. They are harvested, eggs fertilized and placed in boxes in gravel in natural spawning areas. Survival rates are significantly higher (natural spawning is less than 5% of eggs making it to fry). Seems like an easy first step to supplementing the run and again, no hatchery, just wild strain.
Its long overdue to start talking about supplementing these runs (and i am talking Statewide) with Hatchery produced king salmon. As much as I don’t want it, it NEEDS to happen and its needs to happen now. with 5 years in a row of declining run sizes in nearly all rivers and lowered limits not being met, the runs is basically over. Kiss it goodbye….and watch out Silvers your next…your writing is already on the wall.
Somehow the Columbia river has managed to get back their kings (albeit via hatchery) and provide opportunity to ALL of the user groups for harvest….its not ideal, and its not Alaskan, but it is saving kings, when they are pushing numbers over the dams in the hundreds of thousands, along with all the catching along the way…..they did something right…and we should take note.
This Pink Salmon idea seems to be garnering support and is the most plausible answer i have ever heard. So many people harp about the miles long drifters, but they are even getting lower and lower numbers of fish. Are they part of the equation? I’d say yes, along with set netters, comm guys, YES us sport guys, the guides, the seals and sea lions, pinks and everything else…..we all own it, we all need to fix it instead of always pointing to the other guy saying its their fault.
Are you aware of the costs of producing hatchery Chinook, and the problems they create for wild Chinook in mixed stock fisheries? The state used to have a variety of Chinook stocking programs, such as Willow Creek, that it abandoned becuase of these issues.
It’s far cheaper to get natural systems working for you, but we seem to have made a mess of that.
The real problem is the increase of sulphuric acid in the ocean due to burning of fossil fuels. Sulphuric acid (acid rain) melts zooplankton and reduces food in thee ocean leaving king and silver salmon unable to get the food they need to survive…
That’s a nice theory. But scientists who went looking for ocean acidification as the threat to salmon couldn’t find it. Instead, they found something else:
https://craigmedred.news/2021/12/28/messing-with-nature/#:~:text=Scientists%20looking%20for%20evidence%20that,funded%2C%20ocean%2Dfarming%20business.
The only answer for sett netters is fish wheels or fish traps and massive pink reductions.
Traps would be a serious uphill battle. Traps would be a difficult sighting issue along the Kenai River. Beach seines might work in some areas or reef netting, which is something of a trap with a different name: https://news.mongabay.com/2023/11/last-of-the-reef-netters-decline-of-an-indigenous-sustainable-salmon-fishery/
Maybe if we just changed the names of traps to “Cook Inlet sockeye containment and king salmon release systems?”
The decline in the Kenai River king salmon return and the declining number of large fish (over 34 inches) in the return are significant problems — but certainly not unique to the Kenai River. The entire Susitna River drainage and the Little Susitna River in Northern Cook Inlet have experienced similar declines in king salmon abundance — however, on the Little Susitna River and most of the Susitna River drainage the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) has not recognized the problems by designating king salmon as a Stock of Concern.
At very least Little Susitna River and the entire Susitna River drainage king salmon stocks should clearly be considered as a Stock of Yield Concern as harvest in the sport fishery for both Little Susitna River and the Susitna River drainage has dropped more than 90% during the most recent 5 year-period (with ADF&G harvest data) compared to the 5-year period of 2000 – 2004.
Unlike the Kenai River, king salmon spawning escapements on Little Susitna River and most of the Susitna River drainage (including Deshka River) count king salmon of all sizes as part of the spawning escapement. Such a practice does not take. into account historical king salmon returns made up mostly of larger king salmon and with a high portion of the female return being fish larger than 28 inches (34 inches used on the Kenai). Like the Kenai, total spawning king salmon escapement have fallen dramatically in both Little Susitna River and Susitna River drainage, however the severity of this decline is partially masked on Little Susitna River and Susitna River drainage by counting small males (including jack under 20 inches) as spawning escapement. Without a significant abundance of larger females depositing eggs — what value does a spawning population consisting primarily of small male king salmon provide?
My point of emphasis being that wild king salmon stocks spawning throughout all of Upper Cook Inlet appear to be experiencing similar (or even worse) declines than late-run Kenai River king salmon. The difference being that ADF&G has at least designated late-run Kenai River king salmon as a Stock of Management Concern and helped develop an action plan to address the much narrower issue of declining late-run Kenai River king salmon.
The only attempt I am aware of to determine quality of escapement at least in AYK is the effort to sample Pilot Station sonar gill net species apportionment mortalities on the LowerYukon. Kings are sampled for age class. Genetics are applied to determine Canadian Origin and fish are inspected for several diseases.
It looks to me to be a model for all King salmon populations in the Gulf and the Berring if you don’t want escapement numbers to over estimate fecundity.