A Golden Alaska Seafoods mothership heads to sea to service the fleet of trawlers operating far off the Alaska coast/Trident Seafoods

Data contradicts feelings

Alaska Commissioner of Fish and Game Doug Vincent-Lang went to Soldotna for a fishing conference this week, stated one thing obvious about the decline in Alaska king salmon, and is now being roasted on Facebook as social media does what social media does.

Here’s just a taste from Caleb Martin’s STOP Alaskan Trawler Bycatch Facebook page:

“…He runs a clown show and takes bribes from big trawler (sic).” Mikey Demandel

“He needs to be fired for not even calling bycatch as part of the problem. Their ‘free pass’ to rape and pillage our resources has got to stop !!!” Douglas Holloway

“F### this clown! indigenous science says if you waste to (sic) much fish there will be no more fish.” Robert Jackson

“He needs to pull his head out of his ass.” Craig Wenrick

And it went on and on like that.

It is an interesting aspect of human nature that in a world where the internet puts a wealth of substantive data at the fingertips of the masses, many still prefer barstool bullshit as a source of information.

In this particular case, there are apparently a lot of Alaskans who need a bogeyman, and the Seattle-based trawlers that prowl the waters far off Alaska’s coast have become that bogeyman. But, as Vincent-Lang noted, they’re not the problem.

So let’s get into the reality.

Chinook bycatch by the numbers/NOAA

Small numbers

The trawl bycatch of Chinook last year totalled 38,786 of the big fish Alaskans call kings, with most of these caught in the Gulf of Alaska, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which closely monitors these fisheries.

Bering Sea trawlers, however, get most of the attention because of the unexplained collapse of king salmon in the Yukon River drainage that slices through Central Alaska on its way into Canada. People in the sparsely inhabited Yukon drainage really, really need someone or something to blame for this loss of a precious resource, and they’ve decided the something to blame is the trawl fleet, much as the people of Salem, Mass., once decided it was the damn witches.

Unfortunately, the Bering bycatch can’t begin to account for the number of missing fish.

The Bering trawl catch last year totaled 10,450 kings, with 8,046 of those taken by the pollock trawlers operating in the Bering Sea and around the Aleutian Islands in what NOAA calls the BSAI fishery. The pollock trawlers have been portrayed as the biggest, baddest bogeyman in this discussion, although the trawl and non-trawl bycatch of 28,336 Chinook in the Gulf of Alaska was three and a half times bigger than that in the Bering Sea.

How many Chinook were caught in the nets of Russia’s Bering Sea trawlers, which drag one side of the international dateline while U.S. trawlers drag the other, is unknown. The Russians have little reason to avoid Chinook bycatch or be concerned about it because the vast majority of these fish originate in North American streams and rivers.

NOAA’s latest genetic stock analysis tied 97 percent of the Bering’s Chinook bycatch to North American waters, with Western Alaska rivers the “largest contributor, 52 percent; with smaller contributions from British Columbia, 15 percent; North Alaska Peninsula, 13 percent and West Coast U.S., 7 percent.  The proportional contribution of Western Alaska stocks was higher than the average over the last ten years (44 percent), and the proportion of middle (2 percent) and upper Yukon (2 percent) stocks was about average (2 percent and 4 percent, respectively).”

Now let’s do some math using those averages, using the higher Yukon averages rather than the lower percentages of 2024.

Applying these slightly higher percentages to a 2024 Bering Sea trawl bycatch totaling 10,450 Chinook produces a body count of 627 dead Yukon salmon. Let’s ignore that most of the kings caught as bycatch are immature, with some destined to die before spawning, and just consider these lost spawners.

The loss of 627 kings returning to the Yukon River to spawn would amount to less than 1 percent of the 64,198 kings, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game calculated past the Pilot Station, fish-counting sonar in 2024.

But that sonar number is calculated within the range of the sonar’s “90 percent confidence interval of 50,105 to 78,291 fish,” according to the agency. So, in other words, the true count could have been low or high by more than 14,000 fish.

This is the margin of error, and 627 salmon are easily lost in this margin.

(Editor’s note: The author doesn’t like this any better than many readers will. It would be nice to believe that putting an end to trawling in the BSAI would solve the Yukon problem. But facts are facts. And one of the founding principles of this country is that you don’t burn witches unless you can somehow show them guilty.)

Clean versus dirty

But this story doesn’t end with the data on how few Yukon kings are killed by trawlers, because there is also a very interesting discussion to be had about the general business of commercial fishing, wherein gear is often broken into two categories: clean and dirty.

Clean gear catches only the fish that fishermen want and/or allows for the release of non-target species with no or minimal mortality. Dirty gear catches and kills non-target species from king salmon to flounder and spiny dogfish to sea birds, seals, whales, who knows what.

Researchers studying the deaths of endangered manatees in the period from 1993 to 2012 reported finding “fishery-related gear” responsible for the deaths of at least 35 of them.

Bering Sea trawl gear isn’t clean, but in the big picture, it isn’t all that dirty either. There’s a better case for dirtiness to be made against Gulf of Alaska trawlers, especially the Gulf pollock fishery, based on NOAA data.

According to NOAA, Gulf trawlers last year caught approximately one Chinook for every five metric tonnes of pollock or about one king per every 11,000 pounds of those whitefish largely destined to be made into the surimi used to create imitation crab, shrimp and scallops; minced or mealed for use in fish sticks, or fileted for use in such products as the Filet-O-Fish that McDonald’s is promoting in the United Kingdom or the Creamy Chipolte or Sweet Chili Fish Wraps the fastfood chain is now promoting in Canada. 

The Gulf fishery is not particularly clean. The Bering Sea fishery is more than 31 times cleaner, with a rate of one king for every 346,126 pounds of pollock.  This would make it among the cleanest, if not the cleanest, mixed stock fisheries in the state.

The only cleaner fisheries are the seine fisheries for pink or chum salmon that operate in bays containing nothing but pink and chum salmon streams.

For comparison sake, the Upper Cook Inlet drift gillnet fishery is considered a pretty clean, mixed-stock fishery – especially compared to the king-snagging east side setnet fishery. The drift fleet this year caught, or at least reported catching, only 100 king salmon.

The state has yet to tabulate the poundage of the Inlet catch, but if you take the numbers of sockeye, silver, pink and chum caught this year and multiply those numbers by the average weights of each species caught last year, the poundage comes out to about 21 million pounds.

One hundred kings would then work out to about one king for every 210,000 pounds of sockeye, coho, pink and chum salmon. To fish as clean as the Bering Sea trawlers, the Inlet drift fleet would have to get its catch down to about 60 kings.

As to whether the drift catch was, in fact, limited to 100 kings this year is hard to say. The Inlet drift fleet is not closely monitored like the trawl fleet, and with king bycatch a hot-button issue, drifters have a motive to maybe take a king home rather than report it as a commercial catch.

In that regard, it is worth noting the king catch last year was almost three times higher than this year, despite a much weaker return of the kings to the Kenai River and despite drifters fishing less and thus catching only about two-thirds the number of sockeye, their prime target.

Salmon poundage is available for last year and totals about 13.3 million. There were 284 kings sold to processors. This works out to a king for every 46,743 pounds of salmon caught, which makes the fishery look way dirtier last year than this year, unless the 2025 king catch has been underreported.

The difference between this year and last doesn’t necessarily mean, let alone prove, the 2025 catch of kings was underreported. There’s a lot of year-to-year variation in salmon harvests. But, then again, the drift fleet has some credibility problems, given that the former director of the United Cook Inlet Drift Association, and a still revered member, isn’t exactly a shining example of honesty.

Hypocrisy

Now, given the mixed-stock nature of the Chinook bycatch in Alaska trawl fisheries, and genetics studies which show the trawlers are in general catching more Canadian and Lower 48 Chinook than Alaska Chinook, it is also more than a little hypocritical for Alaskans to be protesting trawl bycatches of kings while doing nothing to reduce the directed and bycatch harvest of Canadain and U.S. West Coast Chinook in the 49th state.

Maybe this could be considered the “Puget Sound payback.” The trawlers haul their pollock and associated revenue back to the Seattle area, and Alaskans get even by picking off a lot of southbound Chinook.

While Alaskans scream about trawlers taking some Alaska kings as bycatch, Alaskans are taking far more Canadian and Lower 48 Chinook as both bycatch and directed harvest.

The North Pacific Management Council reports the genetic data from the Gulf of Alaska trawl fisheries show that about 90 percent of the Chinook caught there are “not of Alaska origin.”

There are more Alaskan kings caught in the Bering Sea trawl fisheries, but if you do the math, the trawl bycatch of Alaska kings in both the Gulf of and the Bering Sea worked out to less than 11,000 last year.

The majority of the harvest, almost 28,000 Chinook, were Canadian and West Coast U.S. kings. When it comes to these fish, some of which are returned to waters in which Chinook have been classified as endangered, the trawl bycatch harvest pales next to the Alaska harvest of Canadian and West Coast U.S. kings.

The state of Alaska allows the harvest of up to 5,500 king salmon – nearly half the trawl bycatch of Alaska fish – in a winter sport fishery in Cook Inlet. Genetic testing of those fish reported 92 percent were of Canadian, Washington state or Oregon origin, meaning this fishery, one of the smallest of Alaska fisheries, by itself has the potential to catch more than 5,000 non-Alaskan king salmon.

Some more of these non-Alaskan Chinook, though not nearly as great a percentage, are caught in the summer sport fisheries in the Inlet, especially the lower Inlet where, according to the same genetics study, about 38 percent of the king catch comprises non-Alaska fish.

Purists might classify this as bycatch, given that Alaska fisheries are supposed to, ideally, be catching Alaska fish, but that’s not always the case. The summer fisheries in the Inlet can account for the harvest of more than 4,000 non-Alaska kings.

Thus, in any given year, these smallish sport fisheries could be harvesting up to 9,000 non-Alaska kings.

Then there is the commercial drift net fishery off the mouth of the Copper River. The fishermen there get the highest prices in the state for the Chinook they sell as Copper River kings, but the fish they are selling aren’t always Copper River kings.

In some years, according to the genetics studies, more than 40 percent of the fish can be other than Copper River king salmon.

In 2021, for example, the state reported that “of the 43.1 percent of harvests sampled attributable to nonlocal stocks, the majority originated from the British Columbia reporting group (20.7 percent), followed by West Coast U.S. (8.0 percent), Coastal Southeast Alaska (6.0 percent), and all other reporting groups (less than 5 percent each).”

So let’s figure there is the potential for the catch of the Copper River drift fishery to, in any given year, be comprised of 37 percent Canadian and Pacific Northwest Chinook, ignoring that the vast majority of the coastal Southeast salmon are also spawned in Canada. All the major Chinook-producing streams in the Panhandle flow out of Canada, and most of the spawning and rearing habitat for those systems is in Canada.

The Copper River fishery was tightly restricted this year to protect a weak return of Copper River, but still caught approximately 5,500 kings. Thirty-seven percent of that would be a few more than 2,000 kings. This could be considered the Copper River “bycatch” in a perfect world where everyone is supposed to catch only “their” salmon.

Add those 2,000 kings to the 9,000 from the Inlet, and the Alaska bycatch of Canadian, Washington, Oregon and Idaho Chinook is already equal to the trawl catch of Alaska Chinook. But the Cook Inlet sport fishery and the Copper River commercial fishery are bit players.

There is also bycatch of Chinook in Southeast seine and gillnet fisheries, plus a directed catch in the troll fishery. This year, according to Fish and Game, “the annual all-gear allowable catch limit for Southeast Alaska/Yakutat (SEAK) is 130,800 treaty Chinook salmon, (ie.) non-Alaska hatchery-produced Chinook salmon,” or approaching five times the trawl harvest of these stocks.

The bulk of allocation went to commercial and sport trollers who were allowed to harvest 92,700 non-Alaska Chinook. This harvest has received a lot of media attention since March 2020, when the Washington-based Wild Fish Conservancy filed a lawsuit accusing  NOAA of threatening the survival of endangered killer whales in the Salish Sea by allowing the over-harvest of Chinook, the whale’s prime food, in Alaska.

Three years later, a federal court judge ruled in favor of the Conservancy, but the ruling was overturned by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The appeals court, however,  noted that NOAA remained under orders to finish a new biological opinion as to Alaska Chinook harvests and the whales. That opinion is not yet complete and could result in the dispute ending up back in court again.

Meanwhile, the Conservancy has filed a petition to have Alaska king salmon listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. NOAA is still reviewing that petition.

While Alaskans think the trawl fisheries are too dirty, some folks outside of Alaska think Alaska fisheries are even dirtier. The Canadians, especially, have been getting angrier and angrier about the number of “their” fish being caught in Alaska fisheries.

Alaskans upset about kings being caught in trawl fisheries to the tune of a few tens of thousands might consider the Canadian claim that “millions of Canadian salmon” are catch or bycatch in Alaska fisheries.

That claim would appear an exaggeration, although it would appear possible Alaska harvests of Canadian fish, all told, might approach a million. The Canadians, thankfully, appear to have missed what might be a bigger issue.

Alaska salmon ranches that farm the sea have, for decades now, been flooding the North Pacific with hatchery salmon. There are indications that competition from these hatchery salmon might be doing far more damage to Canadian runs than Alaska interceptions of Canada-bound salmon that will never get home to spawn.

The reality is that the fisheries of the North Pacific are as complicated as the North Pacific ecosystem, and almost everyone fishing in the big, wide ocean is guilty of stealing someone else’s fish to a greater or lesser degree.

This is even the case with Bering Sea pollock. As Russian researchers have noted, the regions pollock are primarily linked to the “North Okhotsk Sea and East Bering Sea super-populations,” the latter of “which is usually half larger than the North Okhotsk Sea super-population. However, at some periods, including the present time, the North Okhotsk Sea super-population can take the leadership by biomass.”

The East Bering Sea super-population is, however, “characterized by a high migration activity” to the southwest, west and northwest into Russian waters. The Russians are, without a doubt, catching Alaska pollock and vice versa.

This makes it an unfortunate irony that if U.S. trawling in the Bering Sea were brought to an end, the Russians would likely increase their harvests right up against the boundary line to take advantage of pollock migrating out of what would become a sanctuary zone for pollock.

The total pollock harvest, now split between Russian and U.S. fleets, would likely decrease to some extent, though possibly not much. As for the bycatch, it would disappear.

Not because it would end, but because there would be no reason for the Russians to report it.

North Pacific pollock stocks with the big, black circles representing the North Okhotsk Sea and East Bering Sea super-populations with the arrows indicating the direction of their migrations/Russian Pollock

Correction: This is an edited version of the original story. The cutline beneath the photo was changed.