An Alaska king salmon/Conrad Gowell, Wild Fish Conservancy

Feds sued to protect king salmon

With the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in chaos amid a Trump administration reorganization, the Wild Fish Conservancy has decided it is time to go after the agency for failing to act to protect Alaska king salmon.

The Duvall, Washington-based group a year ago petitioned the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), an agency within NOAA, to consider classifying the world’s northernmost Chinook, aka king salmon, as threatened or endangered under the terms of the federal Endangered Species Act.

NMFS agreed that consideration of such a listing was warranted but has since failed to act on the petition. As a result,  the Conservancy filed suit in the U.S. District Court in the nation’s capital last week to force federal action.

“In response to the Conservancy highlighting the threats to these Chinook salmon populations,” the suit says, “the Service issued a 90-day finding that the Petition ‘presents substantial scientific or commercial information indicating that the petitioned action may be warranted.’ That finding triggered the requirement for the Service to determine whether listing of the species under the ESA is warranted or not warranted within 12 months” ending Jan. 11.

The suit asks the court to “order the Service to promptly issue a finding on the Conservancy’s petition “by a reasonable date certain,” and “grant such preliminary and/or permanent injunctive relief as the Conservancy may request during the pendency of this case.”

The suit does not stipulate what relief the Conservancy wants there, but opens the door for the conservation group to ask a judge to impose a temporary listing of king salmon pending a formal NMFS decision.

Such a listing would have the potential to cause significant chaos in Alaska commercial fisheries given requirements for actions to protect threatened or endangered species. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game, the chief management agency for salmon in Alaska, has for years recognized that kings are at low abundance levels compared to historic numbers, but does not consider the fish threatened.

Ups and downs

Salmon are a naturally volatile species with historic records and studies of prehistoric indicators of salmon numbers both showing periods of scarcity and great abundance, sometimes with a great degree of variation between how various salmon species are or were doing at different times.

This appears to be one of those times of huge differences in survival between the various species. Sockeye salmon in Bristol Bay have been caught in record numbers in recent years. And pink salmon have for two decades been harvested in historically unprecedented numbers in the 49th state.

Alaska in 2013 witnessed a never-before-imagined salmon harvest and still state record catch of 272 million salmon of all species.

That catch was “powered by a record pink salmon harvest of 219 million fish,” the agency reported that year. The harvest of those 219 million pinks, or “humpies” as Alaskans often call these salmon, more than doubled the 100-million, all-species harvest of salmon that state fisheries managers once considered the mark of a good season.

Since the beginning of the new millennium, however, 100 million has come to be considered a mediocre, if not poor, year. The state’s 10-year-average harvest through last season now stands at 175.2 million salmon per year, according to Fish and Game numbers. But those catches have been dominated by small, low-value pinks and marked by dramatic swings in catch numbers between even years and odd years when pinks, both wild and hatchery farmed, return in the greatest number.

Commercial fishermen who control the state’s salmon-production hatcheries prefer to call the hatchery fish “wild caught” salmon,  but they are simply farmed salmon turned loose to fatten on the free pastures of the sea rather than being kept in net-pen feedlots where it costs money to feed farmed salmon.

And there are some scientists who contend that this farming of the sea is one of the problems facing Alaska Chinook.

The boom in hatchery salmon releases/ICES Journal of Marine Science

The sea farmers

Japan started farming the sea with chum salmon not long after World War II. But it wasn’t until the 1970s that Alaska, now the biggest player in the ocean-farming business, got into the game.

Japanese hatchery successes then attracted the attention of Alaska commercial fishing interests struggling with low harvests due to weak salmon returns linked to cold North Pacific Ocean water and misguided salmon management.

“It was during this time of low harvests that the (Alaska) Legislature responded to the crisis by establishing the Division of Fisheries Rehabilitation, Enhancement, and Development (FRED)” within Alaska Fish and Game in 1971, a history of that now-defunct division recounts. 

Two years later, commercial fishing interests formed the United Fishermen of Alaska, destined to become one of the state’s most influential political entities. Together, FRED and the UFA began advocating for state backing of hatcheries, both private and state-owned.

The goal at first was conservative with a plan to boost the commercial harvest level of 1972, a meager 23 million salmon, to a reliable 83 million per year, or about half of what is now the average harvest.

To grow more salmon, the Legislature in 1974 approved a plan to create private, non-profit hatcheries and developed various loan programs to help fund their construction. Two years later, lawmakers turned to Alaska voters to approve the first of three separate bond packages to fund state-run hatcheries.

Then FRED director Stan Moberly had big plans for an Alaska takeover of the North Paific pastures as he would confess in a 1982 review of FRED operations.

He predicted that as global markets for salmon became ever more competitive, the ocean ranchers would end up fighting over “grazing rights” at sea.

Pasture claiming rights

“If the Japanese and Soviets adhere to their proposed schedule of (hatchery) production, we will begin to see the effects of surpassing the ocean’s rearing capacity within a decade or so,” he said.

“As we approach that time, 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.”

FRED in 1982 reported a release of fewer than 325 million young salmon from state and private, non-profit (PNP) hatcheries. By the year 2000, the state hatcheries would have been turned over to commercial-fishermen-controlled PNPs to operate, and hatchery salmon releases would have grown more than fourfold to 1.4 billion, according to a Fish and Game report. 

The Russians would be slower to enter the ocean-ranching grazing game, but they would by the early 2000s be releasing 1 billion young salmon.

As hatchery salmon numbers went up, and Alaska and Russia boosted production of wild pink salmon with maximum-sustained-yield management, the population of the largest of the Pacific salmon and the Alaska state fish crept ever downward.

“Since at least 2007, Chinook salmon populations throughout Alaska have experienced significant declines in productivity and abundance,” the Conservancy’s lawsuit argues.

No one has been able to definitively prove that these declines, which a group of Canadian researchers calculated to have begun almost 50 years ago, are linked to the Alaska/Russia boom in both sea-farmed and wild-pink and chum salmon, but fingers have been pointed in that direction.

“There is… a large and growing, decades-long body of evidence indicating that high abundances of salmon and density-dependent interactions among salmon at sea reduce salmon growth, delay maturation, and reduce salmon survival,” a U.S. and Canadian scientists reported in a peer-reviewed study published in the ICES Journal of Marine Science in January.

Warmer waters in the more southerly reaches of the North Pacific may be the main factor affecting the lower productivity of Canadian and Pacific Northwest watersheds, they wrote. But they added that “for Chinook, coho, and chum salmon…competition for prey in the north also appears to be affecting growth, survival, and abundance.

“In addition, there is evidence that competitive interactions may be influenced by life history and associated ocean distributions; e.g. Chinook salmon migrating northward from the Pacific Northwest show stronger evidence of competition with pink salmon than do Chinook populations remaining further south, where pink salmon are less abundant.”

Pinks thriving

Alaska’s Kenai River – the grey-green, glacier-fed waterway just south of Alaska’s largest city and the most popular salmon fishing watershed in the state – has played host to the humpy boom in recent years.

It in 2020 witnessed an unprecedented and record return of a reported 1.4 million pink salmon and the actual number was likely higher given the humpy count came from a sonar at river mile 14.

The count, state fisheries biologist Brian Marston reported at the time, “was almost three times the previous largest pink count for the Kenai River.”

This is unlikely good news for the river’s struggling population of king salmon. A study published in the peer-reviewed Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences in April reported that such massive influxes of pinks can displace spawning Chinook and increase the food competition Chinook young face when they head to sea.

“In the Sultan River,” they wrote, “Chinook spawners shifted upstream in odd-numbered years when…pink salmon were abundant in the lower river and Chinook fry per redd declined.”

The Sultan is a river draining into Puget Sound.

“Since 1997, Puget Sound Chinook abundance averaged 34 percent less in odd- versus even-years, and was negatively correlated with pink abundance,” the authors of the study wrote. “These findings support the hypothesis that pink salmon reduced Chinook abundance and influenced the biennial patterns and decline of Southern resident killer whales.” 

Southern resident killer whales (SRKWs) are a federally listed endangered species in Puget Sound. The group depends largely on Chinook salmon.

“Management actions to reduce the growing abundance of pink salmon, especially those reaching spawning grounds, could potentially benefit the recovery of ESA-listed Chinook salmon (in Puget Sound streams) and the SRKWs,” the authors of the study concluded.

Whether the same applies to the Kenai is an unknown, but the Wild Fish Conservancy in its court filings noted how much things have changed on that popular river over the years.

Alaska Department of Fish and Game Kenai Chinook forecasts and actual returns

Down, down, down

“For example,” the lawsuit says, “one member of Wild Fish Conservancy has a long history of fishing for Kenai River Chinook salmon in Alaska, and is adversely impacted by the Service’s conduct here. This member lives in Washington, but grew up in Kenai, Alaska.

“He has fished for Alaska Chinook in the Kenai River and elsewhere in the Gulf of Alaska, like Cook Inlet. This member began fishing for salmon in the Kenai River in 1974, and historically, returned every year (except for three years) to fish for Chinook salmon, as well as sockeye, coho, and pinks.

After moving to Washington in 1994, fishing for Alaska Chinook salmon in the Kenai River was always this member’s motivation for making the annual trip to Alaska. This member did not make the annual trip to Kenai in 2013, 2015, and 2023 because of diminished Alaska Chinook populations. And though he traveled to Kenai in 2022 and 2024, the Chinook fishing season was closed, and he was only able to fish for other salmon, like sockeye and coho.

“This member expects the Chinook fishing season to be closed again this year (2025), so he is not planning to make the trip to Alaska. He has personally seen the decline of Alaska Chinook populations, primarily through his trips to the Kenai River.

“In the late 1980s through late 1990s, he expected to catch 45 to 50 Alaska Chinook in a season, but in 2021 (the last time he was able to fish for Alaska Chinook), he caught just four. He loves fishing for, observing, and photographing Alaska Chinook, and he is devastated by the population’s collapse and by the state and federal government’s failure to take the necessary steps to protect the species.”

Late-run Kenai kings, fish that sometimes used to weigh close to 100 pounds, once supported a thriving guide industry on the river. It is now long gone, and commercial salmon set gillnetters who once cashed in on plentiful sockeye bound for the Kenai are now shut down because of Chinook salmon bycatch.

After years of ignoring the bycatch problem, they have begun experimenting with more selective and Chinook-friendlier fishing gear, but at this point, it remains unknown whether that gear will reduce the deaths of kings caught incidentally to commercial fishing.

A late-run Kenai king return that in the late 1980s provided tens of thousands of fish for commercial, sport and personal-use fishermen and still left 40,000 or more alive to reach the spawning grounds, last year totalled a mere 6,690 big fish in total, less than half the minimum spawning goal of 15,000, according to the state.

It was the worst return on record and marked the fourth straight year the return had failed to reach the minimum goal. The situation looks little better for this summer. State biologists are forecasting a total return of 8,742 of the big fish. 

If the forecast is met, it will be the second-worst Kenai return on record. And there is no expectation of the return of age seven Chinook, the biggest of the big fish that made the river famous. Those fish returned to the river in the thousands in the late 1980s, but since the 504 in 2021, the state hasn’t seen a one.

At a base level, everyone agrees Alaska kings are in trouble. The big argument is not over whether the Wild Fish Conservancy is wrong in its view of the situation, but focused on whether an Endangered Species Act designation, an extra move with a lot of complications, is warranted.