The Wally Noerenberg hatchery in Prince William Sound still waiting for the bulks of its ocean-ranched salmon to return/Wikimedia Commons
Hatchery failures lead the way
With the commercial salmon season in the far north drawing to a close, Alaska is today on track to post the lowest, all-species harvest of the new millennium.
The harvest last year topped 225 million. The state hasn’t witnessed a harvest under 100 million for 37 years. That came in 1987 when the catch near 96.5 million. The 2024 harvest is likely to top this number, but is equally likely to fall short of the 1988 harvest of 100.4 million.
Such an all-species, 2024 catch falling between those two years would rank this season as the seventh worst in the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s ranking of harvests back to 1975, a year that is tagged as the beginning of serious, science-based management of Alaska fisheries.
Annual harvests dropped as low as 22 million salmon per year in the early 1970s because of poor management and cold ocean waters. Having banned fish traps, a publicly perceived evil, at Statehood, Alaska fishery managers in the state’s early years thought they could overlook the need to get adequate numbers of spawners into streams and rivers to ensure future production.
They eventually recognized the reality of the need for bigger “escapements” – the count of fish escaping the nets and hooks of humans – and began to grow the state’s fishery with great success.
There were 152.4 million pinks in the harvest of 230.2 million salmon in Alaska last year, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. The pink harvest so far this year stands at less than 36.5 million and it would be expected to increase, in the best-case scenario, by about 10 million before the season ends.
If it tracks with 2022, another even-numbered year, the harvest from here on would add fewer than 5 million.
Biggest loser
The pink salmon fishery in Prince William Sound – the pride and joy of Alaska’s ocean-farming salmon ranchers – can already be declared a disaster.
The agency noted that “compares to a 10-year, even-year average (2004-2022) of 33.61 million fish for the same date.”
No significant increase in harvest was expected though there was another fishing period opened on Wednesday. “Effort and harvest are minimal and at least one major processor has quit buying for the season,” Fish and Game said.
The agency did not mention that the biggest, late-season fisheries – those conducted by the Prince William Sound Aquaculture Corporation (PSWAC) in front of their hatcheries – have been closed for the year.
On its website, the corporation Friday reported that its state-sanctioned, cost-recovery fisheries intended to finance hatchery operations were shut down.
So few pinks have returned to PWSAC’s Wally Noerenberg Hatchery that it is in negotiations with the state as to whether it can use eggs from pinks returning to other PWSAC hatcheries to meet the egg-take goal for Noerenberg.
A state-financed hatchery built in 1985 on state lands, Noerenberg has been billed as “one of the largest salmon production hatcheries in the world. The hatchery was named for the late Alaska Commissioner of Fish and Game Wallace Noerenberg, an early hatchery advocate.
Following the crash in Alaska commercial salmon production in the early 1970s, Noerenberg joined those convinced that the state could largely buffer the commercial salmon fishery from the vagaries of nature through the use of hatcheries.
Their goal was to grow state harvests to “nearly 143 million fish for harvest annually, of which 51 million are to be produced by enhancement and rehabilitation techniques. Included within this harvest of 51 million are 25 million chum, 8 million sockeye, 1.5 million coho, and
300,000 chinook salmon; the remainder will be made up of pink salmon.”
The hatchery goals for high-value sockeye, chum and Chinook, the fish Alaskans call king salmon, were never met, and the goal for coho was met only twice in the decades after 1983, but overall the ocean-farming via hatcheries has been a huge success.
No more. The harvest in the Sound this year is something of a return to the pre-hatchery days of old.
Unexpected calamity
The Royal Society study sought to determine whether wild pink salmon were being threatened by hatchery strays finning their way into nearly all of the creeks and rivers draining into the Sound. The study was considered a big win for hatcheries in that it concluded there appeared to be little to no harm in this.
“In our model, while hatchery fish may produce fewer offspring on average than wild fish, their enhanced reproductive contribution” leads to a net gain in salmon numbers in the Sound, the study concluded.
And this, it said, helped boost 2010 to 2019, harvests “to approximately 50 million annually, over 80 percent of which was of hatchery-produced salmon.”
It is more than a little ironic that Sound returns crashed in the same year the study was published, and though there are often big debates heavily focused on freshwater problems when salmon returns falter, the hatcheries do in this case make one thing clear.
This catastrophe happened in the marine environment after humans protected young salmon from all those freshwater dangers that can kill them in the wild. Interestingly enough, a Japanese scientist 20 years ago warned of sort of occurrence.
“…Biological interaction between wild and hatchery population should be an important consideration in the sustainable management of Pacific salmon production based on the ecosystem level,” Masahide Kaeriyama from Hokkaido University told the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission, a treaty organization, in 2004.
“The following issues are extremely important: (1) harmonization with the ecosystem and (2) coexistence of wild and hatchery populations in the North Pacific. To address these issues, the ecosystem-based sustainable conservation management should be adopted and implemented. A management plan should incorporate the following activities: (1) climatic and oceanic monitoring (e.g. long-term climate change, ecosystem structure), (2) biological monitoring (e.g. carrying capacity, individual somatic growth and age composition of a population, genetic and reproductive characters), and (3) sustainable management of Pacific salmon production (e.g. biological interaction between hatchery and wild populations, rehabilitation and conservation of wild salmon and riparian ecosystem) should be very important considerations.”
No attempt has ever been made to implement such a plan, and the Alaska Board of Fisheries has in the past shown it doesn’t care about such issues.
Armin F Koernig’s (father of pwsac) famous euphemism in late ‘70s, was “let them eat pinks”!
Lets start growing and releasing tens of billions of grasshoppers onto the prairie and see if the buffalo are less abundant and smaller.
I think the huge hatchery production of pinks has thrown the eco system off balance.
That is one theory, George. It’s hard to prove, but I think we can fairly say that the hatchery production of pinks has not stabilized annual harvests. The data clearly shows it exacerbating the differences between odd-year and even-year returns. These differences have always existed, but the difference was in the thousands or low ten thousands.
We’re now in the high ten thousands. The swing between last year’s 148 million pink salmon boom and this year’s pink salmon bust looks like it’s going to be on the order of 100 million fish, maybe more.
Haven’t we yet learned that “You just can’t fool Mother Nature”???
Um is there in comment on the outrageous kings salmon hatchery fish from south east and Washington o British Columbia and California having best season in 40 years. Numbers aren’t finalized yet because there still coming in. But it looks like one of best ever and those fish were in gulf of Alaska feeding last 4-7 years. That’s wat blows this theory outta water along with climate change theory and trawler theory. There were 80 plus pound king caught in south east Alaska this year.
This was a very informative article. Thank You!
Of course, the commercial fisherman will get their disaster money. On the good years, they go to Hawaii. Such a deal.
Thanks for writing this. Google suggested this page “based on my interests” and, although it happens only occasionally, I’m glad it did.
Do people know enough to understand whether the 2024 pink decline is associated with an equal decline of both the hatchery and wild pinks (and/or any hybrids), or is it different between the different stocks?
Good questions. Given the large-scale failure of hatchery fish in the Sound – VFDA was projecting that hatchery alone would get 15.5 M (nearly twice what the total harvest for the Sound came in at) in a range with 7.8M at the bottom (only about a million less than the entire Sound harvest as it turned out) – and indications of healthy escapements for wild stocks, which, of course, have a fair number of hybrids among them, it would seem the obvious conclusion is that hatchery fish took the big hit.
Hybrids? Who knows. They’re not really monitored, but given what is known about their reproductive success or lack thereof, one might take a guess at performance somewhere between wild and hatchery fish and problaby edging toward that of hatchery fish.
Southeast, which is dominated by wild fish, does look to have done OK. The forecast was for 19M, and the harvest looks as if it’s going to be pretty close to that number. Kodiak looks like its going to come up a million or two short of the 9M forecast, but it’s the Sound, and particuarly Sound hatcheries, which took the big hit.
That would appear to point to a problem in the nearshore environment of the NE corner of the GOA when it was flooded with all those little hatchery fish. Big question to be would be why the wild fish did better. Maybe those fat little, net-pen fed hatchery fish were more attractive to predators and took the pressure of the little wild fish?
Not a hypothesis, just a thought.
Interesting comment, thanks.
Re “it would seem the obvious conclusion is that hatchery fish took the big hit.” Seems like an interesting exercise for those that know the fisheries data (and its limitations) to look across the regions with different proportions of hatchery fish and to check how much of the difference between target and actual harvest might be explained by different proportions of hatchery fish. “Big question to be would be why the wild fish did better.” Yep!
Aside from the unusually strong El Nino that occurred in the pacific last year, the whale population in PWS have greatly improved with many wintering in the sound. Maybe someday you’ll consider all data when picking and choosing your anti hatchery bias. Yes I’m a PWS seiner, and I’m proud that much like a large scale farmer, I have been able to help feed millions of people, as well as pets, during my career. No matter how you slant your OPINION, I remain very proud of how I have contributed to society through my 40 career as a commercial fisherman. I remain a firm believer that our hatchery programs benefit to the Alaska economy far out weigh your speculated concerns for the marine ecosystem. This article has to be one of your most outlandish, in my opinion.
Ryan: I commend your abilities to rationalize and agree that whale predation could be an issue here, although that raises the question of why hatchery pinks would seem to have been so much harder hit than wild pinks.
As for my alleged anti-hatchery bias, I have none. I do, however, have a wild-fish bias. We shouldn’t be producing hatchery fish at the cost of wild fish, which is pretty clearly what we’re doing, or trying to do, when we put those hatchery fish in net pens to fatten them up before going to sea so they can out compete wild fish in the war of survival beneath the waves.
At least you’re honest about this in comparing yourself to “a large-scale farmer.” Large scale farmers have put the plow to a lot of wildlife habitat in the Lower 48 rendering it unusable by wildlife. This is the cost of large-scale farming. These losses are pretty easily documented. The losses to wild fish in Alaska are harder to pin down.
In a perfect world, the issue would have been studied before the hatcheries went into business. But somehow hatcheries have always escaped the EIS requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which is odd in that any other business dumping a similar volume of organic matter into the ocean would be governed by NEPA.
In fact, as I’m sure you are aware, Alaska salmon processors are now struggling to meet NEPA requirements for the salmon waste their processing plants generate. The Norwegian net-pen farmers (as opposed to our ocean farmers) years ago solved this problem by utilizing their waste – “Except for blood, the total amount of trimmings and offal from salmon slaughtered in Norway is used for animal feed or processed to products for human consumption (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235251341930256X) – and are now working on turning the waste that drops out of their net pens into commercial products (https://newsroom.ragnsells.com/posts/pressreleases/norwegian-fish-poo-can-power-600000-household) while the Alaska hatcheries (DIPAC being a big exception) are fighting the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation over requirements they clean up the shitty seabed beneath their net pens (https://craigmedred.news/2024/04/07/dirty-bottoms/)
These are not opinions. These are facts as was most of what you read in this story although there was some analysis done, and that is always speculative.
The key facts, however, are pretty clear: 1.) The oscillations between even- and odd-year salmon returns have grown greater every year since the pink salmon hatcheries reached full production; 2.) The size of salmon species other than pink salmon has been in decline since the hatcheries (ours and the Russians) started helping to fill the Pacific with humpies); 3.) Salmon biomass in the Pacific, driven by a huge number of pink salmon, has reached a volume never seen in human history; and 4.) Eastern Gulf of Alaska salmon other than pinks have declined in number.
You believe that this has been a benefit to the Alaska economy. I, unfortunately, am more into data than belief. The data would indicate this has been a big benefit to Prince William Sound seiners like yourself and a benefit to the Sound in general. The state wide benefits and costs have not been studied.
We know that chum hatcheries pretty much destroyed the commercial fishery for chum along the Yukon River, which is one of the poorest parts of the state and where the chum fishery was the only real economy. We don’t know what hatchery fish have cost other fisheries in terms of the number or the weight of fish, which matters when it comes to value.
And we really don’t know the effect on the image of Alaska fish that might have come from processors deciding they could make money by heading and gutting fish here and shipping them off of to China where they could be fileted and “plumped” before being shipped back to the U.S. for sale. Unfortunately as the fishery business website Trade-X notes, “the flesh is significantly compromised” by plumping (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI2uX0cH_tw).
This can sometimes cause filets to turn to mush when cooked and lead to headlines saying “Do Yourself A Favor And Avoid Walmart’s Wild-Caught Frozen Salmon.” (https://www.thedailymeal.com/1558999/why-avoid-salmon-at-walmart/) The story below that headline, it should be noted, is wrong in blaming the low quality on sodium tripolyphosphate, something else often injected into shrimp, scallops, lobster and particularly salmom that is to be frozen to keep the natural water in the filets.
“In the production of frozen fish fillets, the fish fillets are soaked in a solution of sodium tripolyphosphate with a certain concentration before freezing. The level of water retention performance is closely related to the quality of fish products such as texture, tenderness, sliceability, elasticity, and taste. If without sodium tripolyphosphate, when thawed, most seafood is prone to lose weight (water) and generate a darker appearance and as well make the body fragile.” https://foodadditives.net/phosphates/sodium-tripolyphosphate/
Basically, it’s a chemical that will help make frozen salmon held in cold storage for a long time look better when it is put on sale as “fresh frozen” salmon. And, as we all witnessed with the Alaska salmon market crash last year, wild salmon sometimes sit in storage for a long, long time because of market conditions, making this sort of treatment a good idea.
Thankfully, there don’t appear to be any human health consequences. But I haven’t seen anyone study the quality aspect of holding salmon in cold storage for years although a Norwegian study concluded that a “sensory analyses showed that salmon stored for 1 year at −25 °C maintained a level of quality comparable with fresh salmon (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0140700713001230).
That has been my personal experience with wet-wrapped, vacuum-packed salmon blind taste tested on friends. Beyond a year, however, the risk of oxidation (ie. freezer burn) definitely becomes an issue. I’d expect this to be an issue in commercially frozen salmon as well, but haven’t seen any studies documenting just exactly how long these fish can be held before changes might be notable in the flesh.
There is, however, a study noting that “browning and autooxidation reactions will proceed during frozen storage to affect flavor, appearance, and nutritional quality of salmon” (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6109546/) So obviously there is some end point at which processors are deciding that their chose is to dump the fish in the market at a loss or sell it to the government cheap instead of taking an even bigger loss by trying to hang onto it until the product has to be dumped.
Greed and the rapacity of “sport” fishing
are suspects…Salmonids are not a limitless resource, but greed trumps that sentiment.
SB says: “Greed and the rapacity of “sport” fishing are suspects… ”
It’s not sportfish that has been dumping a billion and half pink fry into PWS every single year for decades.
Still, there is a solution of you commfish cheerleaders: Convert the PWS hatcheries into onshore RAS systems for pinks. Quit polluting the ecosystem with your business. Cheers –
Commercial fishing is destroying fisheries.
Not one word about pollack fishery? Of course not. Let’s blame sport fishermen and incidental by catch from commercial beach sites, but never mention the real culprit, deep water trawl by catch that has been going on for decades.
So you believe the salmon crash this year is due to trawlers bribing the observers on those boats and secretly catching more then 100 million salmon? OK. Can you explain how they move that volume of fish through the supply chain unnoticed?
It was not very long ago that catch of protected and non targeted species by the trawl fleets was counted and then discarded over the side. There had been a very few instances where local
Communities had been given some of the fish but that was quite inconvenient.
Has all that changed to the point that all catch of protected or non targeted species are kept aboard?
And not all of the trawl vessels had observers. There were many stories about the vessels making their “pulls” in bad weather or at night when the observers were not on the deck.
I would not want to be the skipper or owner of a trawler that caught so many protected species that it caused a shut down of the fishery.
A lot has changed since long ago. The biggest trawling op and the one everyone frets about, ie. the pollock fishery, is now monitored not only by observers but by cameras which record salmon bycatch of all species: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/alaska/resources-fishing/frequent-questions-bering-sea-chinook-salmon-bycatch-electronic-monitoring
It would take corruption on a massive scale to slip tens of thouands of salmon through this fishery and into the market let alone tens of millions, and the rest of the trawl fleet simply doesn’t have the harvest capacity to do that. Not to mention, that if that there are trawlers landing tens of thousands of salmon of any species, let alone tens of millions, in Dutch or Kodiak, someone would notice.
Not to mention that any trawler skipper catching large numbers of salmon would move off them for the simple reason that time is money and if you have to deal with the hassle of dumping tens of thousands of anything you’re wasting a lot of time.
Trawling is the giant red herring in the discussion of Alaska’s salmon problems.
How about repealing the state legislatures ban on fish traps?
Save us all a bunch of expense, draft fleet carbon producing Diesel fuel, need to gather salmon DNA data, inseason EOs, and anguish.
Ask everyone running for state office this fall if they would vote to lift the fish trap ban.
If we are feeding the hatcheries instead of the rivers, then we are feeding the wrong wolf. Restructure the hatcheries to feed the rivers instead of themselves. Currently they are functioning as hospice care units instead incubators to restoration resources for Alaska rivers. Listen to Fogwoman. Place the fertilized eyed eggs into sheltered bubbling water and their parent’s carcasses upstream. Feed the right wolf.
Well put.
I believe this to be totally correct feed the rivers and streams there true home