Alaska salmon tracker/ADF&G

Oh-oh moment for Alaska salmon season

With the Alaska commercial salmon season now more than 80 percent done with a harvest lagging behind the pre-season forecast, as was the case last year, the time has come to ask an impertinent question:

Is global warming actually a bad thing for Alaska salmon fisheries?

Remember “The Blob” that warmed the North Pacific Ocean in 2013, 2014 and 2015? That hot water event was blamed for dead whales and sea otters, and left panicked scientists warning that the stage had been set for “toxic (algae) blooms (to) be more frequent, more widespread, and more toxic” than ever.

As it turned out, The Blob years were great years for Alaska salmon. The state record harvest of 272 million salmon came in 2013. The second largest harvest on record – 263.5 million fish – came two years later. 

In between those years, the harvest dropped to 156.4 million, but the Alaska harvest of salmon in even-numbered years is historically smaller, significantly so, than in odd-numbered years, and 2014 did produce the fifth-highest harvest for an even-numbered year in state history.

Those harvests combined also resulted in an average annual harvest of 233.9 million salmon during The Blob years. Harvests declined a bit as a smaller son of blob followed The Blob, but the 2013 to 2018, five-year-average harvest was still about 205 million.

This being an odd-numbered year, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game back in January optimistically forecast 214.6 million salmon would be caught. It is now obvious, barring some sort of late-season miracle which doesn’t appear to be developing, that the catch is going to come in well short of that.

The only real question is how short.

As of this writing, Fish and Game is reporting a catch of 136.7 million salmon. If harvests over the last seven weeks of the season match those of 2023 – and they’ve consistently lagged behind 2023 to date – the end-of-season catch would come in at around 165.1 million.

If the last weeks of the season match the five-year average for these last few weeks, the catch would come in around 159.1 million or about the same as the worst year during “The Blob.”

One thing here is already hard to ignore. This is destined to be the first, odd-year catch of under 200 million salmon since 2011, and it could fall short of the 177.2 million that year. Should it fail to climb above the 2003 catch of 162.2 million salmon, which is a possibility, it would qualify as the smallest, odd-year harvest in this century.

Pink salmon timing chart/ADF&G

The salmon that are noticeably missing are pinks (see the graph above), the fish Alaskans usually call humpies. The state forecast a harvest of 138.4 million of these smallest and least valuable of Alaska salmon. 

The harvest should have peaked last week, which was when it traditionally does. The catch at that time was 66.7 million. If it were to match the odd-year harvest of 2023 from here on out, one might anticipate the harvest of another 28 million humpies to bring the season’s total close to 95 million or about 69 percent of the forecast.

But the trend line, obviously, is going down when it should still be going up, which would tend to indicate this year’s late-season catch is not going to match that of 2023. It now looks like state fisheries biologists were way too high with their 2025 forecast, as they were with their 2024 forecast.

For those who might have forgotten, last year was not a very good year for Alaska commercial salmon fishermen. The harvest barely squeaked over the 100 million fish bar that defined a good season back in the last century.

To find a harvest as small as the 2024 catch of 101.2 million salmon, you had to go back in the harvest records to 1988. But the small harvest of 2024 did follow a big harvest of 230.2 million salmon in 2023.

Still, if you take that big harvest of 2024, add it to the small harvest of 2024, and optimistcally calculate a catch of 170 million for 2025 – even though it doesn’t look like this year’s catch will get there – you get a three-year average harvest of about 167.3 million per year from an ocean that has been cooling.

This is a little less than three-quarters of the annual average harvest for The Blob years, but before anyone jumps to the conclusion that warming is better than cooling because it produces more fish, there is one more fact that needs to be considered.

The big catch

Large harvests look good on paper, but in Alaska’s case, these large harvests have been dominated by pinks, the smallest and least valuable of the species, and there are some scientists pointing to evidence that huge numbers of pinks decrease the size and number of much more valuable sockeye salmon, and likely of coho and Chinook salmon.

Chinook are the biggest of the Pacific salmon species. They are the fish Alaskans call “king salmon,” and they have been in a Pacific-wide decline for decades. The decline is so bad, the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is now considering adding these fish to the nation’s endangered species list. 

Alaska’s Kenai River was once famous for its bounty of these big kings. Anglers trooped to the river from all over the world to try to catch one, but that ended years ago due to poor king survival at sea.

And then things got even worse.

In recent times, so few of the big kings have been returning to the Kenai that for the past four years fishery managers have failed to achieve the minimum spawning goal despite closing down fisheries.

The return this year is creeping slowly toward the possibility it might meet the minimum goal, but to get there, the state had to close a valuable commercial set gillnet fishery whose participants long refused to try to find ways to eliminate their bycatch of kings.

The setnetters target sockeye, but kings regularly get tangled in their nets. Some of those kings are harvested. An unknown number suffocate while tangled in the gillnet monofilament, only to fall out dead before they can be harvested.

Because of the bycatch problem, setnetters largely sat on the beach this year and watched more than 4 million sockeye go up the Kenai – nearly three times the maximum, in-river escapement goal of 1.4 million. 

That Kenai sockeye came back so strong a year after a weak return of pinks, with this year’s pink run looking similarly weak, might just be a coincidence, or it might have something to do with a tongue of colder water in the central Gulf of Alaska.

The 2024 “Ecosystem Status Report” prepared for the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council noted  “sea surface temperatures as low as 1 degree Centigrade below the monthly mean in July” of last year in the central Gulf.

Cooler waters are thought to favor sockeye, and the smaller-than-forecast return of pinks this year, coupled with their puny size, would appear to indicate those fish found less food on the North Pacific pastures or faced stiffer competition from other salmon species for what food was available there.

The Prince William Sound Aquaculture Association, which operates three major hatcheries in the Sound, is reporting that the pinks it has harvested for hatchery cost-recovery are averaging 2.6 to 2.9 pounds.

That is well below the 3.3-pound average the state reported for pinks harvested in the Sound last year, and significantly below the 3.1 pounds of the big-pink year of 2023 when Sound fishermen and hatcheries combined to catch 58.1 million of the littlest of the Pacific salmon.

This data can be expected to add ammunition to a long-running scientific debate about interspecies competition between salmon at sea. Researchers who studied scales taken from sockeye salmon from 2013 to 2022 produced a study that last year reported they could find the fingerprints of the big pink salmon years in those scales.

“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,” they wrote in a paper published in the peer-reviewed ICES Journal of Marine Science.

While they noted those percentages might not seem all that high, they added that “the overall effect of pink salmon abundance on sockeye growth was over two times greater than the effect of sockeye salmon abundance.”

And they cautioned that “it is important to recognize 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. Understanding this dynamic is critical for making responsible decisions related to the management of salmon hatcheries and conservation of wild Pacific salmon.”

The sockeyes in the study, however, were fish subjected to a warmer ocean.

If the ocean is headed back toward a cold phase, it might not matter what hatchery operators do. If fewer pinks survive at sea, the zero-sum game could easily shift in favor of sockeye and result in nothing more than hatcheries spending their money to raise fewer adult salmon.

That would solve the biology problem, but surely create a new economic problem. The hatcheries would probably need to ask the state to grant permission to use an ever larger percentage of the hatchery returns for cost-recovery, and this would take fish – and with them money – out of the nets of commercial fishermen.

This is the problem the late Wayne Alex, a Juneau salmon seiner, feared when he long ago tried to rein in the growth of the state’s large-scale, commercial-production hatcheries, or what are known a “salmon ranches” so as to separate them from their very similar cousin, the “salmon farm.” 

Alex was all too aware of what had happened with the big-time companies – British Petroleum, Union Carbide and Weyerhaeuser Co. – that in the 1970s thought they could make big money ranching Oregon salmon.

A 1985, UPI headline pretty well summarizes how that all worked out – “Aquaculture: A promise unfulfilled After 12 years and millions of dollars – no profit.” 

This seems unlikely to happen in the 49th state. The ocean cooling of the moment is thought to be a temporary thing. And, if it isn’t, the hatcheries themselves have become more economically important in the Sound and in Southeast Alaska than the commercial fishermen who control them.

Commercial seiners in Southeast have already engaged in two permit buy-back programs to minimize their competition for fish, and it’s not inconceivable that if Sound hatcheries needed to up their cost-recovery harvests to stay in business, a similar buy-back plan might be floated there.

Mainly though, the reality in all of this is that nature still rules the planet, and humans – like all the animals – either adapt or die no matter whether nature directly dictates those deaths, as it just did with the new SARS-CoV-2 virus – or we bring on our own demise with wars, environmental devastation or even experimentation with infectious diseases.