Another big bust in the Pacific salmon fisheries

For the second time in four years, a huge decline in North Pacific salmon numbers is being reported in the wake of a big boom.

In 2021, scientists told the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission (NPAFC) that the previous year – 2020 – had witnessed the greatest reduction in salmon abundance in human history.

“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,” Seattle-based fisheries consultant Greg Ruggerone and colleagues James Irvine and Brendan Connors with Fisheries and Oceans Canada said at that time.

The scientists have yet to weigh in on this year’s replay of 2020, but global markets have noticed.

Tradex Foods, a major supplier of global seafood based in Canada, has already reported a global catch of wild salmon well less than half that of last year and estimates “that this year’s global wild salmon harvest could reach approximately 475,000 metric tonnes after the fall fisheries, marking it as the lowest since 1944.

“This would translate to over 600,000 metric tonnes less salmon than the global harvest last year.”

Before the 2024 season began, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game forecast a weak 2024 harvest of just under 136 million salmon, about 60 percent of the massive 2023 catch of more than 232 million.

But the actual harvest turned out to be only about 75 percent of that. The state’s official report on preliminary harvest and value figures isn’t expected until the end of the month, but the state’s harvest tracker is still short of 100 million with the fishing season for all intents and purposes over.

Alaska hasn’t seen a harvest below 100 million in 37 years. Back-to-back poor years in 1987 and 1988 saw a harvest of about 96.5 million salmon followed by a catch of approximately 100.5 million.

This year is expected to rank between those two, putting it on record in terms of the number of fish caught as the 43rd worst harvest on a state tracker going back to 1975, the year Alaska began to get heavily involved in the free-range, ocean farming of salmon.

The decline in catch is, however, only part of the story. A corresponding drop in the poundage caught – which is what matters since commercial fishermen get paid by the pound – looks to push the harvest weight to the lowest since the 1970s when cold water in the Gulf of Alaska and foreign fisheries were blamed for making a shambles of the Alaska salmon fishery.

In the years that followed, the Magnuson-Stevens Act of 1976 drove foreign fishermen more than 200 miles off the Alaska coast, the waters of the North Pacific began to warm, the state invested heavily in farming the sea, and Alaska witnessed an unprecedented and steady, stairstep increase in salmon harvests.

Catches grew incrementally from an average of 49 million per year in the 1970s to more than 180 million per year on average in the 2010s but with increasingly wide oscillations between even-numbered years and odd-numbered years. 

Still, the average for the 2020s, despite the wide swings in harvest numbers between those odd and even years, was twice the average for the highest previous decade, that being in the 1930s after which harvests began a steady, decade-by-decade decline that lasted through the 1970s.

Farming the sea

State-funded, free-range salmon farming – “ranching,” as advocates of Alaska’s chosen method for farming salmon preferred to call it – began in the grim, salmon-short year of the 1970s and was sold to Alaskans who voted to tax themselves to build the hatcheries as a means to stabilize state salmon harvests at somewhere around 150 million salmon per year.

State officials in 1983 declared “the long-term plan for salmon in Alaska calls for 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.”

Up to this point, the plan has been successful beyond all expectations for pink salmon, the smallest and least valuable of Alaska salmon. But efforts to ocean-farm the more valuable species have largely proven a bust.

The 1983 goals have been met once for coho, but never for chum, sockeye and Chinook, the big fish Alaskans simply call “kings.” .There are, as well, indications that the ocean farming of chums in the state’s Panhandle has led to hatchery chum salmon replacing wild chum salmon.

Worse yet, as hatchery production of Alaska salmon has gone steadily up, the average size of the Pacific’s most valuable salmon – Chinook, sockeye and coho – has gone steadily down, costing not only Alaska commercial fishermen but commercial fishermen all along the coast. 

And now comes a hatchery bust in Prince William Sound, home to the world’s biggest pink salmon ranches and the ranchers who believe that spawning fish in factories and raising their young in bins before dumping them in the ocean is a better way to produce fish for profit than having them spawn in the streams of their birth.

There is no doubt, either, that this industrial production of salmon has been effective most of the time to date.

More than 60 million pinks, or humpies as Alaskans often call them, were caught in the waters of the Sound in 2023 with 13.6 million fish, or 21 percent of that harvest “attributed to hatchery cost recovery fisheries and broodstock collection,” according to state reports.

And that was just a tiny part of the success of artificial propagation. Another 34 million or so hatchery pinks were in the mix of salmon intercepted on their way back to the ranches in what the state calls “wild-caught” salmon fisheries. Those fish brought the farmed portion of the catch to about 48 million or about 80 percent of the Sound harvest.

Unfortunately, this being an even-numbered year when pink salmon historically are less abundant, the pre-season prediction for 2024 was that harvest would fall to about 33 million humpies with the hatcheries again providing about 80 percent of the catch or just under 26.5 million fish.

That prediction, however, turned out to be wildly optimistic.

The season ended in the Sound more than a month ago with the total harvest under 9 million – less than a sixth of the 2023 catch – and with the hatcheries taking a bit hit. They reported harvesting less than 4 million pinks for cost recovery and broodstock, or about 30 percent of the number of fish they in 2023 reported needing to cover their operating costs and fill their incubators.

Hatchery harvests are capped by the state at the cost-recovery level because the hatcheries are run by non-profit corporations. Theoretically, the profits from the hatchery fish are supposed to go the commercial fishermen who control the non-profit corporations producing the fish.

The Prince William Sound Aquaculture Association (PSWAC), the biggest of the Sound hatchery operations, in late August reported ending its cost-recovery fishing at less than 60 percent of its revenue goal.

It has not reported how it plans to cover the revenue loss, but the state, which decades ago turned operations of state hatcheries in the Sound over to the fishermen-controlled corporation, has long helped out PSWAC and other fishermen-controlled associations with grants and loans.

The Cook Inlet Aquaculture Association, which has rarely met its cost-recovery goals, is now somewhere between $15 million and $20 million in debt to the state and had another bad year this year despite harvesting most of the fish it produced for “cost recovery.”

Despite the size of its debt, the state has continued to loan CIAA money almost every year hoping that somehow it can one day produce its way out of debt with a bigger, better, more efficient ocean-farming operations.

When the hatchery-backed, ocean-farming business began in Alaska, the idea was that the hatcheries would produce fish for “common property” harvests by commercial, recreational and subsistence fishermen, and that commercial fishermen, who profit most from the fish, would pay the costs of running the hatcheries through taxes on their harvests.

It was quickly discovered, however, that hatcheries are costly to operate and that onerous taxes would need to be placed on commercial fishermen if they were to cover operating costs. This proved true not only for hatcheries raising sockeye, coho and Chinook, which spend part of their lives in freshwater and must for that time be provided costly feed, but also for pinks, which can be dumped in the ocean shortly after hatching although most of them are now also fed for some time.

Hatchery operators discovered that if they fattened up young hatchery pinks and chums, the fish that make up the bulk of hatchery production, the hatchery fish had better odds of survival at sea where they must compete with wild salmon. The potential losses of wild salmon in this competition for survival of the fittest have never been calculated.

But then the Alaska hatchery system – though originally billed as an effort to “enhance and rehabilitate” faltering state salmon runs – was never really aimed at enhancement and rehabilitation. It was aimed at production and profit, and until this year it has shown consistently amazing success.

Farming, Alaska-style

When the state-funded hatcheries, which proved too costly for the state to operate, were in the 1990s criticized as economically inefficient alternatives to natural salmon production with the potential to “drive out and replace production of wild-spawning salmon,” William Smoker, a professor with the School of Oceans Fisheries Science at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Tim Linley, a fishery consultant once employed by PWSAC, rushed to their defense.

“We do not accept that the PWS salmon enhancement program has been a fool’s bargain,” the wrote in the Alaska Fishery Research Bulletin. “In the quarter century before the hatchery program, the annual harvest of pink salmon was never above 8 million, and there were five years in which managers closed fisheries to conserve spawning stocks: 1954, 1955, 1959, 1972,
and 1974.

“Since 1980, when appreciable harvest of hatchery stocks began, the harvest has not been below 8 million, and there have been at least two years in which hatchery stocks sustained the harvest: 1988 and 1992. It may well be that the 25 years preceding the hatchery program were characterized by climatic conditions that produced low marine survival of pink
salmon in the northeast Pacific Ocean and that the years since have been characterized by good climatic conditions and high marine survival.

‘That is, much of the relatively high production may be attributable to a shift of the marine climate rather than to the hatchery program. However, the PWS hatchery program was not developed to ameliorate poor marine survival of pink salmon. Rather, it was developed to ameliorate limitations of the freshwater environment, specifically the extreme mortality
associated with winter dessication and freezing of incubating pink salmon embryos. Arguably, the PWS hatchery program has been successful in that goal: harvests have increased, and harvests have been possible in years when wild stocks were necessarily protected from harvest.”

The state’s cost problem was in those years solved by turning the state hatcheries over to the aforementioned non-profit corporations and allowing them to conduct those cost-recovery fisheries.

In the years that followed the 1997 publication of Smoker’s paper, hatcheries run like actual ranches turning their stock out to pasture to fatten and then bringing them in for harvest enjoyed increasing success.

The differences in success between odd-year pasturing and even-year pasturing did, however, become a problem as hatchery production increased. The 2020 season was declared a national disaster because so few fish returned to the Sound in the wake of a 2019 return that produced a catch approaching 50 million pinks, or about half as many salmon as the entire, statewide, all-species catch this year.

Odd-year pink salmon and even-year pink salmon are genetically distinct and the odd-year fish have been dominant in Alaska for decades. An increasing number of scientists think this odd-year dominance is tied to the hatchery boosting of odd-year fish that leads to a population of pink salmon so big that the fish take a bite out of the Pacific’s salmon carrying capacity that takes a year to heal.

The theory is that even-year fish suffer from food shortages on a pasture over-grazed by odd-year pinks. The hypothesis is enticing, but hard to prove, given the incredibly complex ecosystem that lurks beneath the Pacific waters. 

And there are indications this year’s crash is more about nearshore marine productivity in the Sound or the adjacent Gulf of Alaska rather than in the broader ocean.

Pinks in Southeast Alaska returned near their forecast abundance, and Kodiak Island pinks, though below forecast, fared better than Sound pinks. The state predicted a Kodiak harvest of close to 9 million pinks and witnessed a catch of about 7 million.

To date, the state has not reported the poundage of the pink catch there or of the poundage of the statewide, all-species harvests, the major consideration in determining the value of the catch.

But the measure of Alaska salmon by poundage this year is expected to be even worse than the measure by number.

Money lost

Bristol Bay, the site of the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery, set a record for the smallest sockeyes ever with an average size of only 4.4 pounds. That was more than three-quarters of a pound smaller than the 10-year average, and the Bay sockeye catch this year accounted for almost a third of the entire statewide catch of all salmon species.

The last time the state witnessed a salmon harvest under 100-million fish, back in 1987, sockeye, most of them Bay sockeye, comprised the bulk of a statewide harvest of almost 35.5 million sockeye weighing an average of 6.35 pounds. Those Alaska sockeye that year accounted for close to 45 percent of the weight of the statewide harvest.

The 31.2 million sockeye caught in the Bay this year account for more than 75 percent of the statewide harvest of 41.3 million sockeye, and are destined to drag down the total poundage in a year when sockeye are destined to account for more than 40 percent of the entire statewide salmon harvest.

In terms of poundage, this year’s harvest appears likely to drop significantly below the nearly 508 million pounds of 1987. Tradex is estimating the 2024 harvest at 208,000 metric tonnes or about 459 million pounds or about 90 percent of that of 1987.

This would make the 2024 harvest the worst since 1979 when the state was just beginning to recover from the cold water in the Gulf of Alaska and the offshore harvests of salmon bycatch by foreign trawl fleets and high-seas gillnet fisheries targeting salmon.

The high-seas, gillnet fisheries for salmon are now long gone and the trawl bycatch is a fraction of what it once was despite becoming a salmon-murdering boogie man with which some Alaskans have become obsessed thanks in part to Alaska Rep. Mary Peltola pushing misinformation claims of a “total ecosystem collapse” due to the relatively small volume of salmon bycatch in offshore trawl fisheries.

The politics of that claim appear to play well, but scientific panels and groups of scientists who’ve studied the issue at length have all reported that the trawl bycatch cannot account for massive declines in Western Alaska returns of chum and Chinook salmon, and particularly of king salmon to the Yukon River.

A peer-reviewed study in the ICES Journal of Marine Science estimated that bycatch impact at “approximately 2.7 percent for the period 1990 to 2000,” when bycatch levels were higher than they are now, and added that “the relative impacts rates in recent years are low for aggregate western Alaskan river systems and the upper Yukon and are less than 8 percent even in the years of highest bycatch.

“While there is continued concern regarding all sources of mortality due to low stock sizes of western Alaskan Chinook stocks, there are likely multiple causes of the declines in these stocks that may be unrelated to bycatch by the Eastern Bering Sea pollock fishery. Some of these causes include survival in the oceanic life stage due to competition for prey and the overall carrying capacity in the Pacific Ocean, as well as in-river survival.”

Competition for prey and the overall carrying capacity in the Pacific has become the issue of particular interest to many scientists due to the Pacific-wide boom in pink salmon numbers fueled in part by hatchery production in Alaska and Russia, and the huge swings in production of these salmon between odd- and even-numbered years.

Russia appears to have taken an especially big hit this year with Tradex estimating a harvest there of about 215,000 metric tonnes, “which is over 390,000 metric tonnes less than last year, and would be the lowest salmon harvest for Russia since 2004.”

This collapse of the Russian fishery on the western side of the Bering Sea and the shrunken size of Bay sockeye (which compete with very few natural runs of pink salmon) on the eastern side of the Bering has lent some fuel to the theory that the massive number of pink salmon in the Pacific in 2023 put such a dent in the ocean’s prey base that both the number and size of 2024 salmon were reduced as the scientists reported to the Anadromous Fish Commission, a treaty organization, theorized in 2021.

But again, that hypothesis is hard to prove, and both Alaska and Russia appear intent on continuing to gamble on hatchery productions and hatchery profits with minimal concern for wild salmon.