Before the waters of the North Pacific Ocean warmed and its population of pink salmon exploded, Alaska’s Kenai River was home to a run of giant king salmon that attracted anglers from around the world.
And then the glory years ended.
Forty years ago this May, the late Wes Anderson, a local Kenai Peninsula angler, pulled from the river a monster of a 97-pound, 4-ounce king destined to become a world record. Some were of the opinion that if Anderson and pal Bud Lofstedt had hustled that fish to a weigh station instead of allowing it time to dehydrate, it might have weighed 100 pounds.
That it came up just short only added to the Kenai’s fame. For years after Anderson’s catch, the river witnessed a quest for a 100-pounder that began in May and continued through July.
Hundreds of kings 60, 70, 80 pounds and more were pulled from the river in those years. There were so many that the Alaska Department of Fish and Game had to amend its “Trophy Fish Program” to hold down the number of “Trophy Fish Certificates” it was being forced to issue for Kenai fish.
The statewide bar for a “trophy” king, or Chinook as much of the rest of the world calls the largest of the salmon, remained at 50 pounds, but to qualify for a certificate for a Kenai trophy, the fish had to weigh a minimum of 75 pounds.
That remains the standard today, but it has been more than a decade since kings of that size were regularly caught, which might, in some ways, be the least of the issues because the return of Chinook to the most-fought-over fishery in the 49th state has shrunk to once-unbelievable lows.
The entire return last year was about 7 percent of what it was at its peak in 2004.
Needless to say, no one was allowed to fish, and it will be same again this year with another tiny return predicted.
What happened?
Across Alaska, Chinook have been in trouble for years now. Thirteen years ago, then Gov. Sean Parnell announced a five-year, $30 million plan for a “comprehensive Chinook Salmon Research Initiative.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game was slated to receive $10 million per year to devote to “Chinook salmon-related research and management.” It got the first $10 million from the Parnell administration and another $5 million before Parnell’s successor, Gov. Bill Walker, pulled the plug on the research.
By then, a return of early-run Kenai kings that had once numbered 15,000 to 20,000 per year had shrunk to under 2,000, and a late-run of generally bigger fish that supported the June-July fishery was down to about 15,000.
The Research Initiative ended up going nowhere. Scientists still aren’t sure of the reason for the decline of the biggest of the Pacific salmon, but Canadian researcher David Welch and colleagues at Kintama Research Services in British Columbia in 2020 pointed to big problems for Chinook at sea.
Their research documented a 65 percent decline in the productivity for Chinook salmon-producing rivers from the northern end of the Alaska Panhandle to Oregon. Kenai kings were not included in the study, but only because necessary comparative data was lacking.
The Kintama study proved highly controversial because the findings indicated there was more to the big declines in Washington and Oregon Chinook than just dams on the Columbia River and other rivers in the region. As it turned out, the declines in productivity of Chinook spawned in the undammed rivers of Alaska and Canada mirrored the declines in the dammed rivers of the Pacific Northwest.
Since that study was published, the ocean-wide problems of Chinook have become only more obvious. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is now considering a petition asking that all Alaska Chinook be placed on the Nation’s Endangered Species List.
- “The Karluk River Chinook salmon escapement through July 25 is 66 fish which is the lowest on record.”
- “The Ayakulik River Chinook salmon escapement through July 25 is 327 fish, which is the lowest on record.”
- “SEAK Chinook salmon stocks are currently experiencing low abundance.”
- “The Chinook salmon run in the lower Yukon River is nearly complete and passage at the Yukon River mainstem sonar by Pilot Station was 64,000 fish. Escapement goals within the Yukon River drainage (with a minimum goal of 500,000 at Pilot Station) will not be achieved.”
- Three-hundred-fifty-six kings passed the Kenai sonar counter over the weekend, but the return remains at only 62 percent of the lowest previous return as of this date.
- The Deshka River Chinook is the lowest on record for this date.
The Karluk, the Ayakulik, the Yukon and the Deshka are all well-known Alaska king salmon systems, but no king salmon drainage in the state is more famous than the Kenai because of the once-massive size of the Chinook caught there.
No more.
Bad for business
The nearly 400 licensed guides in business on the river at the peak of the king salmon fishery early in the new millennium are now down to less than half of that. The eastside setnet fishermen, who never tried to find a way to reduce their bycatch of kings, because the fish are valuable when sold, spent last summer on the beach and are destined to spend this summer on the beach.
And when, if ever, the river will return to the glory days of old is unknown.
The river last obtained reached the top of its optimum spawning goal of 30,000 late-run kings in 2008 when a total of about 45,000 kings returned, but by then the crash was well underway. The total return the next year fell to the 30,000 mark and only about 20,000 of them escaped gillnetters and anglers to reach the spawning grounds.
By 2013, the entire run size was down to about 15,000, and the state was scrambling to shut down fisheries to maintain the spawning escapement. Periodic closures then and in the years the followed were credited with helping get the total return back up to 30,000 in 2017, but it was all downhill from there.
The return has now missed the minimum spawning goal for five years straight and was down to 6,630 fish last year despite the closure of the river to all king salmon angling and the closure of the eastside Cook Inlet set gillnet fishery which has in the past harvested thousands of the fish a by-catch every summer.
As for the oldest kings that grew to truly monster size in the past, there is no sign anymore. There have been no seven-year-old kings counted in returns since 2021.
Nothing looks to change this year, either. The state has forecast a total return of 8,742 Chinook this summer. If the forecast proves accurate – seven of the last eight have been overestimates – the return would amount to 61 percent of the minimum goal of 14,250.
“Abundance has continued to decline since the Stock of Management Concern designation in 2023. The 2024 run and (spawning) escapement were the lowest in 40 years of record. This year’s forecast would be the second lowest on record.”
What is at the root of the problem is impossible to say with absolute certainty. Some blame a North Pacific explosion of pink salmon, driven in part by Alaska hatchery fish, but the director of the state’s commercial fishery research division has countered that correlation is not causation and argued that even if it is, hatcheries play only a small part in the pink salmon boom.
Other scientists have accused him of distorting data to support the latter claim, but research director Bill Templin is right that there is no ironclad proof that pink salmon, which now often return to the state in numbers that equal or exceed, the total of the all-species salmon harvest in years prior to the 1990s are the cause of king declines.
The big spikes in the chart after the 1990s largely denote odd-numbered years when pinks return in even greater numbers than in even-numbered years.
Pesky pinks
But while Templin has dismissed Alaska’s bounty of low-value pinks as a factor affecting king salmon abundance anywhere, fisheries biologists studying returns of Chinook to the Snake River nearly 2,000 miles south and east of the Kenai have come to a different conclusion.
The NPAFC is a treaty organization formed in 1992 by the U.S., Russia, Canada and Japan – later to be joined by the Republic of North Korea – that was intended to “promote the conservation of anadromous stocks (Pacific salmon and steelhead trout) ” in the North Pacific.
The organization has an “Enforcement Committee” that works with the coast guards of all five nations to stop high-seas fishing for salmon, “and attempts by fishing vessels of members and non-member countries to avoid compliance with the” Convention for the Conservation of Anadromous Stocks in the North Pacific Ocean.
But the NPAFC’s power is limited to preventing removals of salmon from the Pacific and not the additions of the salmon to the Pacific, even though the latter have long been known to hold the potential to wreak ecological havoc.
Early in the 1980s, as Alaska was only beginning to dive heavily into the open-ocean farming of salmon that Alaskans prefer to call “ranching,” Stan Moberly, the then director of the now long-gone Division of Fisheries, Rehabilitation, Enhancement and Development (FRED) within the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, warned that Pacific would within a decade or so see the effects of hatchery’s boosting salmon numbers above the ocean’s rearing capacity.
The state of Alaska subsequently set out to establish that history.
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.
“The total harvest of pink salmon in Prince William Sound was a new record of 56.5
million fish. The harvest was composed of 14.7 million hatchery-origin fish caught for
cost recovery, and 41.8 million fish caught in the common property fisheries, which was
composed of 89 percent hatchery-origin fish.”
The volume of hatchery-origin fish in the common property catch of Sound fishermen was a reflection of how small the natural returns of pinks to the Sound before hatchery operations began.
Those hatcheries started flooding the Sound with young pink salmon every spring. State researcher in 2002 reported a release of 542 million hatchery pinks in the Sound, more than four times the natural production of 128 million fry.
Voracious eaters, these salmon were reported to be gaining four percent of body weight per day – the equivalent of a 150-pound man gaining six pounds per day – through the summer.
By mid-August, the newly fattened young pinks were riding the Alaska Coastal Current out of the Sound into the northeast east Gulf of Alaska where young salmon then emerging from Cook Inlet also feed.
Little is known about the interactions between young Cook Inlet salmon and young Prince William Sound salmon in the Gulf, but what is known is that early marine survival plays a key role in the overall survival of salmon.
Kenai king salmon returns began collapsing in 2005 after several years of four-fold increases in the number of Sound pinks entering the ocean due to hatchery farming. Those king salmon returns steadily fell until 2009.
By then, the total number of returning, late-run kings numbered 30,000 – the upper goal for the spawning escapement. Since 2009, there has been only one other return this large.
For 15 of the past 16 years, the total number of returning kings has fallen below 30,000, and for that reason, the state has been forced to strictly restrict harvests – often going so far as to close seasons or ban the harvesting of kings – in the commercial, sport and personal-use fisheries.
Despite such restrictions, fishery managers have now come up short of the spawning goal for late-run kings for six straight years with last summer’s return less than half of the minimum goal, and this summer’s return forecast to reach only 61 percent of the goal.
It is hard to restore a salmon run when this is the case, and if the Idaho researchers are right, the pink-related problems for king salmon have now spread beyond possible nearshore interactions in the northeast Gulf to a Gulf of Alaska-wide problem.
Correlation, it is true, does not prove causation, but it must also be understood the two are often linked.
Thanks Craig- spot on.
best regards
tom barrett