An Idaho king salmon, born in the Snake River drainage and fattened on North Pacific pastures off Alaska/Idaho Fish and Game photo

Study blames Alaska pink salmon for Idaho Chinook losses

Forty three years after a top official of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game publicly and clearly revealed a plan to take over the pastures of the North Pacific Ocean by flooding them with 49th-state salmon, fishery biologists in the Pacific Northwest appear to have finally caught on to what has happened.

“For all species of pacific salmon and steelhead returning to Idaho, pink salmon abundance had a strong negative effect on intrinsic growth rate, and the negative effect has increased through time,” two Idaho fishery scientists have reported to the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commision. (NPAFC) Additional work understanding the mechanism for increasing odd-year pink salmon abundance effects on Columbia basin anadromous salmonid ocean survival is needed, especially given the increasing impacts in a changing ocean climate.”

The study couldn’t come at a much worse time for Alaska with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) studying a petition to have Alaska Chinook salmon put on the nation’s Endangered Species list and the agency reviewing the management of Lower 48 Chinook salmon off the Alaska coast.

The latter action follows a federal judge’s ruling that NOAA isn’t paying enough attention to the food needs of endangered Southern Resident Killer Whales that largely survive on Chinook returning to the Columbia River after having fed and matured on the ocean pastures off Alaska.

Some of those Columbia Chinook are born in Idaho’s Snake River and its tributaries nearly 1,000 miles from the sea. From there they make a long and arduous journey down the Columbia to enter the sea at the Oregon-Washington border.

Off the Oregon-Washington coast, the Alaska Coastal Current helps propel them north into the Gulf of Alaska where most of them spend two to three years feeding and growing before making the long journey back to their spawning grounds. 

For decades, it had been thought the only serious, manmade hurdles to survival these and other Snake River salmon faced were the huge hydroelectric dams they must get over and the massive, lake-like reservoirs behind those dams that they must now negotiate on their way to the sea.

Canadian scientists, however, identified a new and then unknown threat in 2018 with the discovery that declines in the numbers of Chinook in undammed rivers and streams from Washington State north Southeast Alaska mirrored declines in Chinook productivity in the heavily dammed Columbia drainage.

Controversial finding

To say that the findings of biologist David Welch and colleagues at Kintama Research Services in British Columbia were controversial would be an understatement. With many Pacific Northwest salmon advocates worried their scientific paper warning of ocean issues might shift attention away from long-running efforts to remove dams from the Columbia watershed in the name of saving salmon, their paper spent more than a year and a half in peer review before being published in the journal Fish and Fisheries in 2020.

The paper has remained controversial since with many environmental activists in the Pacific Northwest and Canada of the opinion that whatever problems the region’s salmon might face in the ocean are little more than a big distraction from the damn dams issue.

The latest study, however, points to an ocean mechanism that could be depressing returns to the Columbia drainage. Some scientists were not surprised by the latest findings, and one of them had warned of it decades ago.

Stan Moberly, the long-gone director of Alaska Fish and Game’s long-gone Division of Fisheries, Rehabilitation, Enhancement and Development (FRED), in the early 1980s predicted that “we will begin to see the effects of surpassing the ocean’s rearing capacity within a decade or so.

Alaska salmon managers were then finding huge success in boosting returns of Alaska wild salmon returns through better, scientific, fisheries management, and the state was just beginning to add to those returns with industrial-scale hatcheries

“As we approach that time (of maximum carrying capacity),” Moberly warned, “the salmon-producing countries of the North Pacific will be negotiating for these ‘grazing’ rights and for the establishment of quotas for release of artificially propagated salmon. Alaska’s position at the bargaining table, no doubt, will be strengthened if we also have a history of stocking the ocean with large numbers of juvenile
salmon.”

Negotiations for grazing rights never came into play, but Moberly’s predictions as to an ever-increasing number of salmon in the North Pacific eventually came true as did his expectation that Alaska salmon returns would keep growing thanks to the state stocking the ocean with huge numbers of juvenile salmon. Alaska hatchery salmon releases grew from less than 100 million young fish in 1980 to about 2 billion per year today.

By 2005, the University of Alaska’s Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) was reporting that Alaska, once a bit player in the use of hatcheries to farm the ocean, had become far and away the North American leader in open-ocean, pen-free salmon farming.

Alaska’s release of close to 1.5 billion salmon fry in 2000 accounted for 69 percent of the coastwide, North American release of salmon, ISER reported, with about 94 percent of those salmon pinks and chum of significantly lower value than Chinook, coho and sockeye salmon but far and away the cheapest fish to produce.

Alaska would continue to boost pink and chum hatchery releases in the years that followed, as would Russia after witnessing Alaska’s hatchery success, and by the late 2010s, scientists were reporting that there were more salmon in the North Pacific than at any time in human history with the pinks, the smallest and least valuable of the species, dominant.

Production in 2018 reached  “approximately 950 million pink, chum, and sockeye,” a peer-reviewed study published in Marine and Coastal Fisheries: Dynamics, Management, and Ecosystem Science reported. “In 2019, salmon abundance remained exceptionally high ( approximately 854 million salmon). Together the 2018/2019 period was the highest two-year period of salmon abundance on record since 1925, nearly 20 percent greater than the previous two-year high in 2009/2010, and more than 3.2 times higher than average abundance during relatively low salmon production years from 1960 to 1975.”

By then, pink salmon – both wild and hatchery fish – had taken over the pastures and some scientists were of the view the larger and more valuable species of salmon – Chinook, coho and sockeye – appeared to be suffering as a consequence.

Alaska, however, took a different view.

Protecting economic interests

Bill Templin, Alaska’s director of commercial fisheries research dismissed the view of an ocean at carrying capacity in 2018, when the Alaska Board of Fisheries considered a proposal to reign in hatchery production. 

Templin admitted there might be an appearance of a problem, but argued that “correlation is not causation.” This is an old, not-quite-accurate, scientific cliche that dates back to statisticians in the 19th Century.

As it applies to most science, the standard would be more accurately stated as “correlation does not prove causation.” Particularly within the medical community, where cause and effect relationships are especially difficult to prove, the old cliche is now suspect as a scientific standard as researchers at the George Mason University College of Public Health argue.

The problem here might best be illustrated by the now widely accepted view that cigarette smoking causes cancer in multiple organs even though many smokers never get cancer and many non-smokers do get cancer.

A 2021 study of more than 230,000 Australians found that by age 80, an estimated 48.3 percent of current-smokers would develop some sort of cancer, but this number was only about 15 percent greater than the 41.1 percent of never-smokers who would develop cancer by age 80.

Still, there is no doubt that for many people, smoking cigarettes greatly increases the odds of getting cancer and especially lung cancer. Though new studies appear to indicate some smokers are genetically protected against that particular disease, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control say that “nearly nine out of 10 lung cancer deaths (today) are caused by smoking cigarettes or secondhand smoke exposure.”

Note the word “caused” which the CDC uses to describe the correlation between cigarettes and lung cancer.

Aware of the problems in proving cause and effect, the Alaska Legislature in 1993 enacted a law – widely considered the wild salmon protection act – that was intended to ensure that wild fish were protected when science entered the gray area of possible, probable and provable – something few things are in science.

“Effects and interactions of introduced or enhanced salmon stocks (ie. hatchery fish) on wild salmon stocks should be assessed; wild salmon stocks and fisheries on those stocks should be
protected from adverse impacts from artificial propagation and enhancement efforts,” the law of the last century said.

At the time it was adopted, the Alaska Fish and Game swore allegiance to the “precautionary principle,” “a moral and political concept, sometimes with legal consequences, that precaution should be taken in the face of uncertain risks, for example, in the management of resources when information and data is scarce regarding the possible outcomes of certain actions.”

Both the legal guidelines for protecting wild salmon and the precautionary principle were subsequently ignored, and the latter was later flipped on its head with Templin and others arguing that the precautionary thing to do in the 21st Century is to refuse to reduce the size of hatchery operations because reducing them would have significant economic impacts.

The hatcheries are now big business. Those in Prince William Sound, the pink salmon production capital of Alaska, have been credited with supporting what is estimated to be almost $200 million per year in business.

And just last year an economic study of hatcheries funded by the commercial-fishermen-controlled Southern Southeast Regional Aquaculture Association, one of three big hatchery players in the state’s panhandle, estimated the total, statewide economic output of hatchery operations at $576 million.

There are plenty of profit motives here to trump precautions designed to protect wild salmon in Alaska and, it increasingly appears, wild salmon elsewhere.

The Idaho scientists are far from the first to point out apparent losses of salmon and steelhead apparently linked to the explosion of pink salmon in the North Pacific, an explosion that appears to have been ignited by the perfect storm of hatcheries, warmer ocean waters and management of wild pinks for maximum abundance.

Japan feels the sting

Pinks have become so dominant in the Pacific that the Japanese, who pioneered the open-ocean farming of salmon with the start of major hatchery operations not long after the end of World War II, are now watching their hatcheries suffer.

Japan’s hatchery success helped encourage Alaska’s leap into “ranching” salmon – Alaska’s politically correct description for ocean farming – and Alaska’s success encouraged the Russians to get into open ocean farming as well.

It is the latter now causing problems for the Japanese.

Japanese researchers this month told the NPAFC that “returns of Hokkaido chum salmon peaked at 61 million in 2004 and then started to decline, falling to about 20 million in the 2020s. Their carrying capacity has declined significantly since.”

They blamed this on a combination of warmer ocean temperatures and losses “due to interspecific competition with pink salmon in the Bering Sea.” Those are, however, Russian pink salmon and not Alaska pink salmon, which tend to stay in the Gulf of Alaska where they compete for food with other North American salmon.

“Our model suggests that the significant increase in pink salmon in the Bering Sea has the most detrimental effect on Hokkaido chum salmon,” they added. “It is also reasonable to assume that if further global warming increases sea surface temperatures in the coastal waters of Hokkaido in spring and in the Sea of Okhotsk in summer, Hokkaido chum salmon will be in an even more critical situation than at present.”

The boom in Russian pink salmon in the Bering Sea has also been implicated in the shrinkage of the size of sockeye salmon in Bristol Bay, home to Alaska’s most valuable salmon fishery. The sockeye caught in the Bay last summer were the smallest ever with an average weight of 4.4 pounds.

This was more than two-and-half pounds less than the more than 7-pound average of 1977, a prime size in a modern market focused on fresh and frozen salmon filets. Bigger fish now trade at a premium.

The NASDAQ salmon index was today reporting wholesale salmon prices that started at $5.24 per kilogram for salmon of 1 to 2 kilos and climbed to $7.14 per kilo for fish of 6 to 7 kilos. Seven-pound salmon – fish in the neighborhood of 3.2 kilos – were trading at $6.49 per kilo or about $2.95 per pound, which would make a 7-pound Bay sockeye more than 50 cents per pound more valuable than a 4.4-pound Bay sockeye.

Accounting for both the weight difference and the price difference, the big fish would each be worth about $20.65 compared to 4.4-pound sockeye worth about $10.50. That’s a big difference.

But good luck getting the Russians to scale back the production of cheap pinks to benefit Alaska sockeye or, for that matter, Japanese chums. Cross-border cooperation on anything between the U.S. and Russia has pretty much died since the Russians invaded Ukraine.

And on an international level today, no one is even talking about the “grazing rights” Moberly envisioned more than 40 years ago with national interests overwhelming the interests of wild fish.

The Canadians, who have watched their salmon returns tank in the new millennium, are now even talking about following the Japanese-Alaska-Russia model and building hatcheries to farm salmon rather than just letting the fish run wild. 

But with strong indications the ocean has reached its carrying capacity, some scientists are asking whether new hatcheries in Canada will actually produce more salmon or simply replace more wild salmon with hatchery fish.

Correction: This is an edited version of the original story. It was corrected to reflect that $576 million in economic output is for all Alaska hatcheries combined.