The crosses mark this year’s tanking commercial salmon harvest/ADF&G graphic

The up-down cycle of AK salmon

Alaska’s ironic commercial salmon fishing business appears to be inching ever closer to a replay of the great crash of 2020.

The catch that year slumped to 116.8 million fish, and fishery scientists a year later reported that the decline in salmon numbers from the banner harvest the year before appeared to mark the greatest drop in salmon productivity in human history. 

This is ironic in that the philosophy behind modern fish and wildlife management is that humans can moderate the wild swings in production common in nature to increase annual productivity and stabilize the economics of harvest.

As the late marine biologist Martin David Burkenroad put it in 1953 in the Theory and Practice of Marine Fishery Management, “public management of fisheries aims toward stabilization, with equitably distributed benefits for all.”

Alaska salmon managers have, however, managed to increasingly destabilize production with harvests now swinging wildly between even-number and odd-numbered years. This year’s collapse should come as no surprise to them although it looks like its going to be way bigger than the forecast drop to 135.7 million after a 2023 season that saw catch of 232.4 million.

Projecting on the five-year average harvests from the end of last week to the end of the season, this catch might actually come in short of that of 2020, but big swings in harvests are not the norm.

Alaska Department of Fish and Game records stretching back to 1975 show the year 2016 produced the 10th lowest harvest on record in the past 49 years. It came in the wake of a 2015 harvest that still stands as the second largest in state history.

The 2015 harvest of more than 265 million salmon was significantly more than double the 2016 harvest of barely more than 111 million, but the 2017 harvest bounced back to nearly 223 million salmon and again doubled the previous even-year harvest.

Twenty-eighteen, however, saw another big drop to a harvest of under 114 million or about two million shy of the 2020 harvest of about 116 million which was part of the North Pacific-wide salmon collapse scientists described as the greatest ever.

“We hypothesize that a tipping point was reached in the North Pacific Ocean, leading to the substantial decline of all five species of Pacific salmon in 2020. We infer that the tipping point was caused by the combined effects of unusually frequent marine heatwaves since 2014 and exceptional back-to-back year abundances of pink salmon in 2018/2019,” they told the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission, a treaty organization.

“Unexpectedly, the high abundance of Pacific salmon came to an abrupt end in 2020. Preliminary commercial catch statistics for all salmon species indicate Pacific salmon harvests, which provide an index of abundance, declined more in 2020 than in any other period on record since 1930.”

Subsidized chaos

After the crash of 2020, Alaska commercial salmon fishermen turned to the federal government for “disaster relief” as they have so many times before. Nearly $66 million was provided to about 2,500 commercial fishermen, primarily in Southeast Alaska, according to state records. 

Another nearly $9 million went to the approximately 1,300 commercial fishermen in Upper Cook Inlet to compensate for the bad returns of both 2018 and 2020. Approximately 800 permit holders in Prince William Sound split nearly $50 million provided to make up for the fish they didn’t catch in those two years, the state reported. 

This was in keeping with national norms and a national irony William Royce of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) described in the “Historical Development of Fisheries Science and Management.”

Sport fishermen, he wrote, pay the costs of managing and enhancing their fisheries while the government props up commercial operations.

“The difference in public costs between recreational and commercial fisheries is surprising,” he wrote, “because 1) there are more than 200 times as many anglers in northern America as commercial fishermen, and 2) the overall economic value of the recreational fisheries, with all of their supporting activities, is much greater than the value of the commercial fisheries.

“One might expect that general revenues rather than special revenues would be used for an activity popular among about 20 percent of our people, and that special services to less than 1 percent of our people would require some special taxes on them. But no, the commercial activity of a few is deemed important enough to require continuing transfer payments from the rest of the people; whereas, the recreation for many largely pays its own way.”

Alaska is unique in this subsidization only to the degree to which the state has joined in to support the commercial fishery in ways unseen in other states. An Alaska taxpayer-funded hatchery system began in the 1970s when Alaskans paid income taxes was eventually turned over to associations run by commercial fishermen who now lease the hatcheries at extremely low rates and are allowed a priority on the harvest of returning salmon to ensure hatchery production costs are covered.

This is what the state calls “cost recovery.” The Cook Inlet Aquaculture Association (CIAA) –  one of the “private, non-profit” businesses overseen by commercial fishermen and former commercial fishermen – this year harvested all of the sockeye salmon returning to Kachemak Bay in an effort to meet its cost-recovery needs.

For years, CIAA has been falling short of the number of fish it needs to catch and sell to cover operating costs. As a result, the state has stepped in with low-cost loans and the association is now in debt to the state to the tune of more than $16 million, and that debt is likely to grow even larger given the faltering returns of 2024. 

Cook Inlet has been one of the areas hard hit by faltering salmon returns this year. Almost 5 million salmon were harvested in the Inlet last year, according to state data. The harvest for 2024 stands at not quite 2.1 million and is falling fast.

The catch last week dropped to 14,000, down from 77,000 a week before. The comparable catches from last year were 985,000 followed by 600,000. Even if harvests this year were to pick up to match the weekly catches of a year ago – this being a hugely optimistic suggestion – the year’s harvest would only reach 2.8 million or about 58 percent of last year.

It is more likely to fall short of half, given the absence of coho salmon that usually boost the late-season catch. Coho, or what Alaskans more commonly call “silver” salmon, have proven a bust all around the northern rim of the Gulf of Alaska.

The Inlet catch at this time is slightly over 24,000 or about 18 percent of the five-year-average catch of 133,000. And fish and Game has ordered the closure of the Northern District coho fishery as of 7 a.m. today because of low returns. It has also restricted drift gillnet fishermen to state waters along the west shore of the Inlet south of Kalgin Island to minimize the harvest of coho bound for the Kenain Peninsula streams and the tributaries of the Susitna River to the north.

Fishing guide Andy Couch has called Susitna coho returns catastrophic, noting that the Little Susitna River has seen “less than 900 coho for the entire year to date through August 8. On a decent year, that number of fish could be recorded this time of year in a single day.   On a really good year, returns there have seen multiple days of coho weir passage in excess of 1,000 fish.

The bag limit for Little Suanglers was reduced to one fish more than a week ago and bait was banned. With a weir count still only half the escapement goal as of this writing, a closure of the sport fishery is to be expected any day.

Missing Chinook

For anglers, the coho bust comes on top of a Kenai River Chinook disaster. The fish Alaskans commonly call “king salmon” are this year returning in record low numbers to a river once famous for its abundance of monster-size Chinook.

The run appears to have peaked on Tuesday when 417 big fish – those 34 inches in length or longer – passed the in-river sonar counter. The number has fallen every day since and was down to 91 on Saturday with but 6,008 fish in-river. Sunday’s count was even smaller at 62.

The worst year on record for Kenai kings came in 2020 when the season ended with fewer than 11,500 spawners past the sonar. That was more than 3,500 fish short of the minimum goal. As of August 11 that year, there were 9,867 kings past the sonar; the number this year is 6,070.

If the Kenai fails to meet the minimum escapement goal, it will mark the fifth straight year that it has been missed.

The fabled Kenai king salmon fishery that once attracted anglers from around the world is now dead. It has been years since there were enough fish to permit a sport fishery, and the commercial setnet fishery on the east side of the Inlet has basically been shut down for the past several years because of the inability of commercial gillnet fishermen to solve their king salmon bycatch problem.

They were this summer experimenting with beach seines, which could permit the harvest of plentiful sockeye salmon while allowing for the release of unharmed kings. Sockeye are the backbone of the fishery, having provided more than 90 percent of the commercial fishing revenue for decades.

But commercial setnet fishermen long refused to accept that Chinook were bycatch, insisted they had a traditional “right” to catch and sell those fish, and because of this thinking refused to work on ways to eliminate bycatch. They are now paying a huge price for taking that view.

The largest, post-Aug. 10 return of big Chinook to the Kenai came last year when 2,548 fish arrived after that date. If the late part of this year’s run were to come in that strong, the total 2024 return could climb to 8,556, or about 57 percent of the minimum goal.

But no one expects this to happen. The latest computer projection based on a late return puts the escapement at 7,400 or just short of half the goal. The explanation for the shrunken return is poor ocean survival which has affected all Inlet kings this year.

Of the state-monitored Chinook streams draining into Cook Inlet, only the Anchor River met its minimum Chinook escapement goal, but by less than 100 fish. The Little Susitna and Deshka rivers – two Matanuska-Susitna Borough streams once hugely popular with king salmon anglers – were both busts. The Little Su was at slightly less than half the minimum goal, while the Deshka crept past a third of the minimum goal.

NOAA is now reviewing whether Alaska Chinook should be put on the endangered species list due to a slump in numbers along the Gulf Coast and into the Bering Sea where populations of Yukon River Chinook salmon have hit rock bottom.

Region-wide, multi-species collapses like this point to food shortages or predation in the North Pacific Ocean where tens of millions of salmon compete for food. But some pretend to be baffled by what is going on other than that something is happening in the ocean.

“There’s not really anything I can point to,” Katie Howard, a state Fish and Game biologist told the Nothern Journal, which declared the net-yet-finished season a “Huge Disaster” and described the Prince William Sound harvest in particular as “historically weak.”

Given that Sound seiners dependent on pink salmon appear to be the biggest losers this year, “huge disaster” and “historically weak” depend on exactly what part of history you view.

The harvest in the Sound as of today stands at just over 7.5 million pink, or humpback, salmon, the dominant species there, according to Fish and Game. 

The historic humpy harvest in the Sound from 1960 to 1976 averaged less than 55 percent of that or around 4 million fish, according to state data. Then commercial fishermen in the Sound got into the business of farming the seas with the aid of hatcheries, and returns exploded. 

Once the hatcheries were fully up and running, the returns rose to an average of about 50 million per year, but with huge swings between even and odd years. The pink harvest in the Sound at this time last year was near 40 million pinks, or nearly six times what it is now.

The 2023 season ended with a Sound catch of 55.5 million pinks. But it now appears possible, if not probable, that the 2024, season-long catch for the Sound could end up smaller than the more than 18 million pinks fishermen caught in the last weeks of the season last year.

Carrying capacity

There has long been a hypothesis offered to explain these big swings in abundance for pink salmon. It holds that the bountiful, odd-year fish put such a dent in the food base of the North Pacific ecosystem that the even-year fish struggle to find enough food to survive and thus a lot of them never grow to return as adults.

The strongest evidence for this theory came this year in a study of sockeye salmon published in the peer-reviewed ICES Journal of Marine Science. Scientists there reported that scale samples taken from sockeyes showed a “consistent pattern of lower growth in odd years” when pinks are at maximum abundance.

“Peak pink salmon abundances reduced growth of sockeye salmon from seven to 14 percent during the second year in the ocean compared with growth when pink salmon abundance was low, while third-year growth was reduced up to 17 percent,” they wrote.

These reductions would be expected to vary significantly up and down year to year with ocean productivity and the number of young salmon at sea the most important variables. Low-ocean productivity coupled with large numbers of young salmon could lead to big losses of the latter as a farmer might expect if trying to feed 1,000 head of cattle on a pasture only capable of supporting 100.

A farmer in this situation would have a couple of choices: buy feed for the cattle or slaughter a bunch of them while still young and take whatever loss comes from the sale of a whole lot less beef.

The Alaskans who farm the sea – or “ranch” it as they prefer to say – have no such choice. The little,  0.5-gram salmon they’ve hatched and paid to feed in net pens just like those used by net-pen farmers around the world aren’t worth anything.

If ocean conditions make survival look difficult for salmon at sea, all the Alaska farmers can hope is that the hatchery fish they’ve fed to be bigger and stronger will enjoy a competitive advantage over wild fish and thus return in good numbers.

What exactly happens when these ranched fish go to sea is hard to predict. The state’s director of commercial fisheries research has described the ocean environment as a “black box” so full of interactions between so many species of fish that it is impossible to untangle what happens there.

But a few things are known.

Scientists have, in the past, documented large nearshore losses of young salmon both due to predation and lack of food. NOAA scientists studying the nearshore environment of Puget Sound, an environment radically altered by human activities, have reported massive losses of young fish there greatly contribute to the fact that “fewer than one percent of Puget Sound Chinook salmon juveniles that migrate to the ocean each year survive to return as adults.”

Far less, however, is known about the losses of young salmon on the high seas although it is known they range long distances.

Chinook from the Columbia River, which forms the boundary between the states of Washington and Oregon, are regularly caught in the Bering Sea, and California Chinook even sometimes show up in catches there, according to NOAA data.

Exactly how Lower 48 fish interact with the huge numbers of Alaska wild and hatchery salmon that now go to sea is another big unknown, but what is known that Alaska has been putting billions more young fish to see in the new millennium than it did in the past as is well reflected in the salmon returning to the 49th state.

Alaska salmon harvests have grown from an average of 84.8 million per year in the 1960s to 187.2 million in the 2010s due to a warmer ocean environment, better management of wild stocks, and hatcheries.

How all these Alaska fish interact with each other when they go to sea is another big unknown, but the timing of their ocean arrival is, no doubt, a big factor. While the run of Chinook to Cook Inlet this year is badly depressed, the return of Chinook to the Copper River not far to the southeast looks to be near the 10-year average.

When those Copper kings went to sea as juveniles could potentially explain the differences.

The Alaska Coastal Current sweeps west past the mouth of the Copper like a giant conveyor belt that pushes young salmon along the rim of the Sound before turning southwest to follow the Kenai Peninsula coast to the mouth of Cook Inlet and head ever further southwest toward Kodiak Island.

These currents, the rivers of the sea, dictate the movements of young salmon and play a significant role in whether they live or die. Young fish could be swept into areas where previous waves of young salmon have consumed much of the food, or they could find themselves riding toward the waiting jaws of masses of predators attracted by the first wave of young salmon on the current – predators now strong, well-fed and waiting to gorge themselves on the next wave of young fish.

The ocean might appear on the surface a safer place for life than the land, but beneath the surface rages an even bigger war of survival than confronts wild, terrestrial species of life.  And there, the ocean currents – much like mountains and valleys on land – control and confine movements that play an important role in dictating the winners and losers in the struggle.

This is also, for better or worse, something over which humans, at least to date, have no control. As soon as Alaskan hatchery operators open the gates to their pens and turn a couple billion young salmon loose on the environment, they lose control.

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