Nobody yet knows

After decades of ignoring the problem of deadly Chinook salmon bycatch in the Cook Inlet set gillnet fishery, commercial fishermen are now pushing for a whole-scale shift to seemingly less deadly beach seines.

Lisa Gabriel and her husband, Brian, are to be commended for pushing for the experimental use of this gear in the Inlet last summer. They helped to prove it can catch sockeye salmon by the thousands.

“On all tested locations, it was shown that sockeye salmon can be harvested at an economically viable level while releasing all king salmon in a healthy condition,” an Alaska Department of Fish and Game report on the experimental fishery showed. “It was shown that the set beach seine method could be adapted at different beach locations to account for different geographic elements such as tidal strength, current, water depth, beach angle and other beach characteristics.”

Other setnetters now pushing for a fishery-wide shift to beach seines are likewise to be commended for their willingness to fix the problem of bycatch in set gillnets killing the big Kenai River salmon Alaskans call “kings.”

But there’s one small problem.

Nobody knows if beach seining will reduce mortality among those kings or not. What is known is that the really small sample of kings – 16 Chinook in all and only one over 34-inches in length, a size important for spawning production – were alive when brought to shore in beach seines and alive when released.

They might have survived to spawn. They might have died before getting a chance to spawn.

Seeing the financial success of the experimental seine operations, state fisheries biologists should have been prepared to expand the experiment a bit this summer – to increase the sample size of Chinook – and to tag the released fish to determine if they did, indeed, make it to the spawning grounds.

That the Inlet Chinook caught in nets came ashore alive last summer is a big improvement over their being tangled in a gillnet and suffocating to death before being pulled from the netting, but it doesn’t mean much if one of the consequences of being handled on the beach is that they die before spawning.

Commissioner of Fish and Game Doug Vincent-Lang should know a thing or two about this.

Mixed signals

As a state fisheries biologist more than three decades ago, he was the lead author on a study of catch-and-release angling for coho salmon on the Little Susitna River, a study that stumbled upon a problem with catching and releasing ocean-fresh salmon as opposed to those that had adapted to life in the river.

Salmon basically appear to toughen up after they make the physiological changes necessary to survive in freshwater after years in saltwater.

That study, published in the peer-reviewed Fisheries Research in 1993, reported that a somewhat startling 69 percent of the salmon caught and released by rod-and-reel fishermen in the lower, tidally-influenced river died. The mortality for those caught upstream from the Little Su’s rather substantial estuary dropped to 12 percent, and the mortality for those dipnetted and held at a weir even farther upstream fell to 1 percent.

Most of the catch-and-release studies that followed looked at catches of salmon being caught in-river as had most of the studies done before the Vincent-Lang report. But researchers at the Pacific Salmon Ecology and Conservation Laboratory at the University of British Columbia six years ago undertook a five-year study of catch and release in the Salish Sea.

The results were tabulated last year, and one of the big takeaways, as project leader Scott Hinch told the Pacific Salmon Foundation, was this:

“What really surprised me was just how delicate marine salmon are. We all know that scales come off these fish when you handle them, but we found the level of scale loss and fin damage caused by landing nets and handling were directly related to their subsequent survival.”

“East Coast Vancouver Island (ECVI) Chinook salmon that were released with various (and some times minor) types of injuries to fins, scales, and/or eyes had on average 15 to 20 percent poorer survival within the first 10 days of release compared to fish that were in good physical condition when released, with the latter group having very little mortality during this time period,” the study itself reported.

“We estimate Fisheries Related Incidental Mortality for adult Chinook (20 to 39 inches) to range up to 40 percent depending on fishing practice, gear type, and subsequent injuries caused by the C/R encounter,” it said.

There is here both good news and bad news for supporters of a transition to commercial beach seines. The bad news is that if they drag fish onto the beach to sort them as shown in the above photo from the Homer News, they’re probably not doing the fish any favors.

The good news is that if someone can come up with a way to hold and sort the fish without dragging them onto a scale-scouring beach, mortality might be reduced to almost nothing.

The risks to Chinook from handling of any sort were recognized more than a decade ago by Alaska Fish and Game, which in 2014 banned Kenai catch-and-release anglers from removing those fish from the water and forced anglers to use barbless hooks.

Both regulations were intended to reduce the handling of catch-and-release kings. The in-river mortality rate from catch and release was at that time estimated at 8.25 percent.

The difference in in-river mortality between Kenai Chinook, ie. king salmon, and Little Susitna coho, ie. silver salmon, in Alaska is in line with UBC’s findings that coho are somewhat less resilient than Chinook when it comes to catch and release.

As to why that is, they reported, remains unknown.

As to beach seine mortality, all mortality remains unknown. It might be saving all Chinook. It might be saving no Chinook. And it is most likely saving some Chinook. Then the question becomes this:

What number of Chinook, if any, can be sacrificed to support a cleaner – if that proves to be the case – method for commercially fishing sockeye along Inlet beaches?

The Kenai has now gone years without meeting the minimum escapement goal for spawners. With the set gillnet fishery shut down last year and angling for kings banned, the river still saw a return of only 44 percent of the goal of 15,000.

The river faces a conservation problem of considerable magnitude at a time when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is considering putting Alaska Chinook on the Endangered Species List, which would complicate the bejesus out of fisheries management in much of the state. 

The forecast for the Kenai king return this year – 8,742 kings greater than 34 inches in length – is already down to 61 percent of a minimum spawning goal that has been lowered to 14,250, and that is if the forecast is met.

The 2024 forecast was for 13,639 large kings, and fewer than half that number came back.

Beach seining sockeye to save Chinook certainly represents a commendable, good-faith effort on the part of commercial fishermen to finally solve the bycatch problem.  But until some research is done, no one really knows if it’s a cleaner, fish-friendlier means of harvest or just looks like a cleaner, fish-friendlier means of harvest.