No, this isn’t Norway; it’s a salmon “ranch” in Southeast Alaska/NSRAA

Industrial-scale, ocean farming all good – state officials

Only weeks after a Seattle biologist warned Canadians that salmon numbers in the North Pacific Ocean have reached the point where ocean-farmed fish threaten wild salmon, the chief fishery research scientist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game appeared before the state’s fishery regulatory agency to assure everyone that all is fine.

State biologist Bill Templin presented the Alaska Board of Fisheries with a 30-screen, PowerPoint presentation dismissing any significant ecological consequences to the industrial-scale hatcheries of the 49th state pumping immature pink and chum salmon into the ocean by the billions.

“Changes to Alaska hatchery production will likely not affect North Pacific-wide marine
competition,” the Board was told, “but may play a larger role nearshore with local stocks.”

Templin did not, however, attempt to quantify the potential nearshore effects of that competition, and his statement that “Alaska hatchery production will likely not affect North Pacific-wide marine competition”  appeared somewhat at odds with the pitch he made when he opened his presentation.

It began with an outline of the state’s “precautionary approach” to salmon management, which is something of the fisheries management equivalent of the medical oath of “”primum non nocere,” which has been translated from Latin to mean “first do no harm” or “above all, do no harm.”

“In general, the precautionary approach in fisheries management is about being cautious when scientific knowledge is uncertain, and not using the absence of adequate scientific information as a reason to postpone action or failure to take action to avoid serious harm to fish stocks or their ecosystem,” according to Fisheries and Oceans Canada. “This approach is widely accepted internationally as an essential part of sustainable fisheries management.”

A cautious approach to fisheries management, in the Alaska case, would have meant controls on hatchery expansion until uncertainty surrounding the salmon carrying capacity of the Pacific was resolved.

And one could argue that now ignoring the research conducted by scientists who believe the huge production of pink salmon by hatcheries in Alaska and Russia has reduced wild salmon in both size and number violates the second part of the precautionary principle, the part about “using the absence of adequate scientific information as a reason to postpone action.”

One cannot avoid the fact that “likely will not” is decidedly different from “will not.” The “likely” being an almost perfect example of “using the absence of adequate scientific information as a reason to postpone action.”

The Board had been asked to scale back hatchery production, but after listening to Templin refused to do so.

Strangely – along with no quantification of those nearshore effects of Alaska salmon hatcheries – Templin in his presentation to the Board made no mention of the differing views of scientists who’ve devoted their efforts to studying salmon at sea.

(For those interested in his entire PowerPoint presentation, it is attached below.)

A middle view

In the wake of Templin’s presentation, Alaska Commissioner of Fish and Game Doug Vincent-Lang made a more nuanced statement as to his view on the hatchery boosting of Alaska salmon numbers in which he called for more marine research in “the hope of getting more definitive science.”

But he. too, pushed back against a request from Central Alaska fishing groups to roll back hatchery production, saying this:

“When I became Commissioner six years ago, one of the numerous controversies I faced was with the issue of hatchery-wild interaction. To ensure we could sort out the science, I made a policy decision that I would not permit an increased egg take for pink salmon. And I have not permitted an increase in egg takes over the past six years.

“This past year I have spent considerable time reviewing the literature and talking with scientists and many stakeholders. What I have found is that the science is unclear. Yes, the (Greg) Ruggerone paper says one thing, but much of it is based on correlation, not cause and effect. Other papers show the opposite.

“I also reviewed the level of biomass from Alaska pink salmon hatchery releases. Alaska hatchery releases represent 2.1 percent of the total adult and immature pink biomass in the North Pacific. Also, I reviewed the preliminary data from the International Year of the Salmon marine cruises that showed little overlap in the distribution of marine-rearing pink and chinook salmon.

“Given this, I have concluded that the science regarding hatchery-wild is inconclusive at this point in time. As such, I will not be using my authority to reduce permitted pink salmon egg take levels at this time.”

The statement was a more reasonable defense of Alaska’s industrial-scale production of farmed salmon on the high seas with a couple of problems, the first being that while Vincent-Lang mentioned the overlap of marine-rearing pink and Chinook salmon, he left out the high-value sockeye and coho salmon also in the mix there.

More importantly, however, Vincent-Lang used Templin’s assessment of pink salmon as representing “2.1 percent of the total adult and immature pink biomass in the North Pacific.”

The figure is badly misleading in that Alaska hatchery pink salmon don’t use the entire North Pacific. Their range is largely confined to the Northeast Pacific. Other estimates put Alaska pink and chum hatchery salmon in the Northeast Pacific and Gulf of Alaska way higher with some pegging the number around 50 percent of the total pink, chum and sockeye biomass.

Templin, also in his PowerPoint, suggested that nearshore competition is all about “local competition for redd (spawning) space,” which is also misleading. Scientists who were in 2017 looking for signs of long-term damage from the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill (EVOS) in Prince William Sound (PWS) instead stumbled on evidence that any harm done to wild salmon in the region was attributable not to oil but to hatcheries.

“We found no evidence supporting a negative EVOS impact on herring, sockeye salmon, or pink salmon productivity, and weak evidence of a slightly positive EVOS signal on Copper River Chinook (king) salmon productivity,” they later reported in a peer-reviewed study.

“Of the salmon species, the largest driver was the negative impact of adult pink salmon returns on sockeye salmon productivity. These results highlight the need to better understand long-term impacts of pink salmon on food webs, as well as the interactions between nearshore species and freshwater inputs, particularly as they relate to climate change and increasing water temperatures.”

They went on to observe that “all sockeye salmon stocks examined exhibited a downward trend in productivity with increasing PWS hatchery pink salmon returns. While there was considerable variation in sockeye salmon productivity across the low- and mid-range of hatchery returns (0–30 million), productivity was particularly impacted at higher levels of hatchery returns.”

Among the sockeye salmon impacted there were those of the Copper River, arguably the most coveted and highest value of Alaska salmon thanks to the most successful salmon marketing campaign in state history. 

Templin has in the past dismissed that study, which included among its researchers some fishery biologists from his own agency, along with other studies with the pronouncement that “correlation is not causation.”

Vincent-Lang echoed this view in his milder observation that Ruggerone’s “paper says one thing, but much of it is based on correlation, not cause and effect.” He did not address how hard it is to prove cause and effect in many cases, or how much of what we now consider fact is based on correlation.

Causations

Everyone, for instance, now “knows” that smoking causes cancer, but this is largely based on correlation. The U.S. Surgeon General in 2004 concluded from what was known then that “the evidence is sufficient to infer a causal relationship between smoking and cancers,” the key word there being infer, which the dictionary defines, among other things, as a “guess” or a conclusion based on premises. 

Since 2004, more has been learned about various chemicals in cigarette smoke that can be linked to cancers, but again these links are based more on correlation than proven causation given one big problem with cigarette smokers: a significant number of them never get cancer.

The latest research suggests that the situation with cigarettes is far more complicated than originally imagined and that some smokers may be genetically protected from lung cancer while others are genetically predisposed to it, which helps explain a U.S. Centers for Disease Control report that “about 10 percent to 20 percent of lung cancers, or 20,000 to 40,000 lung cancers each year, happen in people who never smoked or smoked fewer than 100 cigarettes in their lifetime.”

The agency now warns that secondhand smoke, radon, air pollution and asbestos exposure can lead to lung cancer as can a family history of lung cancer sans exposure to any of these substances.

Thus one cannot scientifically declare that “cigarettes cause cancer,” but can declare that cigarettes greatly increase the odds you will get cancer, and unless you want cancer (which no one wants) you should stay the hell away from cigarettes because of their significant health risk.

All of which pretty much defines the aforementioned “precautionary principle” in action in those situations wherein correlation cannot prove causation but clearly indicates the potential for unwanted consequences.

Farming the sea

Nobody, it must be added here,  was thinking about the precautionary principle in 1968 when then-tax-paying Alaskans were convinced to approve $3 million in bonds (about $27 million in today’s dollars) to, as a Fish and Game history recounts, “supplement the existing wild salmon stocks in the state with hatchery fish which would be available for harvest by commercial, sport and subsistence fishermen.

“The legislature planned for a long-range goal of increased commercial harvest from the 30 million fish level to a steady supply of 100 million+ salmon to provide a long-term source of employment and economic activity.”

America was at the time charging toward the nation’s environmental peak on Earth Day, but the still-new state of Alaska was very much The Last Frontier fighting to survive.

Home to 285,000 people at the time – about a thousand people fewer than the population of the Anchorage municipality today – with the Prudhoe Bay oil field only just discovered and the possibility of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System to move oil to market looking iffy, the state was trying to figure out how to avoid becoming the burden to Lower 48 taxpayers of which some in Congress had worried during the statehood debate less than a decade earlier.

 “Alaska’s economy, tied up as it is with federal spending, is unable to support a state government at this time without extraordinary federal help,” Rep. Craig Hosmer, R-Calif., complained at the time.

Alaska commercial salmon fishing in the 1960s  remained a key part of the Alaska economy, but it was struggling badly due to a lack of fish. The state “progress report” for 1963-64 recorded a statewide, all-species salmon harvest of 47.5 million salmon, less than half this year’s harvest of 101.2 million which has state lawmakers calling for disaster relief for much of the state.

With the situation no better by ’68 than in ’63, the first bond issue passed overwhelmingly, and Alaska was soon racing toward an industrial-scale ocean farming business with Alaska voters repeatedly biting on the bill of goods they were sold.

As the state spun the hatchery plan, the long-term goal was to produce “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.”

Sockeye, coho and especially Chinook salmon are the fish coveted by Alaska anglers, but the hatchery program was from its very beginning geared toward the mass production of cheap-to-raise pink salmon wanted mainly by commercial salmon processors.

“Most hatcheries, in 1980, were producing pink salmon,” a report on “Development of Public and Private Hatcheries in Alaska” acknowledged in 1992. “This was because pink salmon
do not require fresh water rearing and they are the fastest maturing salmon with a life
cycle of just two years. Therefore, pink salmon could be added to the commercial fishery
quicker than any other species.”

The production of pinks was boosted at the start by state hatcheries, and then by the addition of private hatcheries the state allowed associations of commercial fishermen and others to start beginning in 1974.

The promised hatchery goals for Chinook and sockeye were never met; the goal for coho was reached but once; and though many hatcheries began to produce more valuable chum salmon at the behest of commercial fishermen, that goal was never met either.

On the other hand, the production of pinks – the smallest and least valuable of Pacific salmon –  exploded and in 2013 hit its peak with a harvest of 91.79 million humpies, as Alaskans commonly call pinks. This was more than five and half times the original hatchery goal for the salmon least desired by most Alaska fishermen, but much wanted by the salmon processors involved in the Pacific Seafood Processors Association.

Commercial-fishermen-controlled, private, non-profits had by the 2000s taken over the hatcheries the state found too costly to run, and the Processors trade group in 2010 appealed to them for a big boost in pink numbers.

“From 2000-2009, the average statewide hatchery pink returns were 32.6 million in even years and 55.9 million in odd years – in both cases about 40 percent of total pink returns,” the processors said in an “Open Letter to Alaska Hatcheries.”

“We would like production to increase to 70 million in both even and odds years over the next five years, which would bring hatchery production to roughly 50 percent of that total.”

State reports would later reflect that the processors got part of what they wanted – dominant, odd-year hatchery returns of pinks increased to about 60 million per year and even-year returns to 41 million.

Pinks are for the processors cheap protein, which faces no competition from the farmed salmon that now dominate the global market. The price processors paid for pink salmon last year was about 75 cents per fish.

The low price makes profitable the continued sale of low-budget canned or pouched salmon, salmon-based dog food (often found in cans more expensive than the human version), fish meal for fertilizer or animal feed, and bargain basement filets produced in Asia and sometimes “plumbed” with injections of water to make them look bigger and tastier.

The consensus of ocean scientists now leans toward the view that some wild fish have been lost to support this boom in hatchery fish, but the state is having none of that.

The bison parallel

Alaska’s ocean “ranching” almost begs for a comparison with the history of bison in North America. An estimated 30- to 60-million of those animals once roamed the country, but they were hunted almost to extinction.

Saved from that fate by early conservations, the herds were rebuilt, but the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates their number at less than 500,000 on the Great Plains today, approximately 20,500 of them in free-ranging “conservation herds” and another 420,000 in “commercial herds.” 

The wild bison herds never got a chance to recover on their traditional range because they were replaced by a domestic cousin – cattle.

“The bison’s home on the Great Plains had obvious alternative uses for cattle grazing and grain farming,” economist Dean Lueck wrote in a modern-day analysis of what happened. “In the U.S., total cattle numbers (were) 15.3 million in 1870 but jump to 36.8 million by 1890. Almost all of this increase can be attributed to the rapid stocking of the Great Plains after the bison are gone.

“Consider Kansas and Montana, two of the most important states in bison history. In 1860,
Kansas had just 107,000 people, 10,400 farms comprising just 3.4 percent of the state’s land, and just 43,000 cattle. By 1890, Kansas had 1.4 million people, 57 percent of the land was in farms, and there were over 3.8 million cattle.”

Meanwhile, in Montana cattle had increased from 5,500 head to 500,000, and “Montana also had large numbers of horse and sheep on the range, which also reduced bison habitat,” he wrote. “Similar patterns are seen in the rest of plains. Even if the bison could have escaped
the hunters, they would have had minimal viable habitat given the competition from farmers and ranchers. And, of course the hunters reduced the costs of establishing farms and ranches.”

Leuck added that bison were much better suited to the plains’ habitat than cattle, but there were problems in farming/ranching them:  They needed thousands of acres of range to roam, which ran counter to the 160- to 320-acres of land available to homesteaders, and “fencing was extremely costly on the plains before barbed wire, which was invented in 1874 and did not arrive en masse until the 1880s, after the bison were (largely) gone.”

Wild salmon were fortunate in that their numbers were never decimated to bison-level lows. But salmon populations were hard hit in the 1960s and 1970s due to overfishing both on the high seas and in coastal areas on top of cooler, less productive ocean waters.

North Pacific Anadromus Fish Commission (NPAFC) data records an oceanwide, all-country catch of only about 150 million salmon in 1972 compared to modern-day harvests that first reached 300 million in 1981 and haven’t fallen beneath 300 million since 1990 with a peak of over 700 million in 2023.

Alaska harvests alone averaged about 180 million per year for the decade of the 2010s despite increasing oscillations between odd-numbered years, when pinks are most abundant, and even-numbered years when they are less so

The massive, Pacific-wide catch of 2023 was dominated by pink salmon from Russia and Alaska. Along with their numbers being boosted by hatcheries, pinks appear to benefit from today’s warmer waters in the North Pacific.

And as with the cattle on the Great Plains, some domesticated humpies appear to have now taken the place of wild sockeye salmon and possibly coho and Chinook salmon with the latter two the subject of much more debate than the former.

Along with the EVOS study showing sockeye numbers going down as pink numbers go up, there have been other studies documenting the same shift, and what might be considered a study published this spring that indicated discover of a smoking gun.

In a study published in the peer-reviewed ICES Journal of Marine Science, Peter S Rand from the Prince William Sound Science Center in Cordova and Ruggerone, reported that an examination of a collection of past scales taken from sockeye salmon revealed the “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.”

The lack of growth is a sign of food stress. There is no way to ascertain how many salmon died because of this before their scales could be sampled, but it is in such a situation inevitable that mortality increases because some fish starve to death or become more vulnerable to predation.

The scale data was, in this case, enough for the two scientists to conclude that “in the present era, hatchery releases represent a classic ‘zero-sum’ game where an incremental increase in hatchery releases results in some loss of growth and productivity of wild salmon through increased competition at sea.”

Or to put that in terms more easily understood by laymen, hatchery salmon are now replacing some wild salmon in the Pacific Ocean, something that should come as no surprise to anyone who has been watching the development of the hatchery business in the 49th state.

The ocean farmers now devote considerable resources to raising their young fish in pens just like those used by farmers in Norway and around the world, so as to maximize the advantage those fish have over wild fish in what is a vicious fight for survival once all go to sea.

Raising salmon in net pens became illegal in Alaska in 1990, but the ban is not airtight.

The state’s Finfish Farming Prohibited statute says “a person may not grow or cultivate finfish in captivity or under positive control for commercial purposes” in Alaska, but exempts state hatcheries and any “nonprofit corporation that holds a salmon hatchery permit under AS 16.10.400 to sell salmon returning from the natural water of the state.”

Statute 16.10.400 is the law that set up the hatcheries as businesses. It gave them the authority to catch hatchery fish as needed to provide “funds for reasonable operating costs, including debt retirement, expanding its facilities, salmon rehabilitation projects, fisheries research, or costs of operating the qualified regional association for the area in which the hatchery is located.”

Hatchery backers prefer to call the business “ranching” so as to distinguish it from farming in Norway, Chiles and other coutnries where salmon are raised salmon to maturity in net pens, but the Alaska hatchery businesses look more like marine versions of free-range farms for chickens, free-range farms for ducks and free-range farms for pigs. 

The Templin PowerPoint:  RC3_Tab16_Alaska_Hatchery_Interactions_Research_Overview (1)

Statement of Commissioner of Fish and Game Doug Vincent-Lange: WebPage