Russian salmon harvest/Trade
Competition for cheap protein
Russia looks to have once again beaten Alaska in the annual battle to produce the maximum volume of the lowest-value salmon in the Pacific Ocean, and this despite a Russian pink salmon return that came in significantly below forecast.
The Russians were expecting a catch of over 291,000 metric tonnes – somewhere in the neighborhood of 180 million to 215 million of the fish Alaskans call “humpies,” but according to the fishing industry website Tradex, the catch came in at under 222,000 tonnes.
That works out to 135 million to 162 million of the fish, depending on average weights. The Alaska harvest was supposed to have pushed above the lower number, but it too came in weak and many of the fish were small, thus reducing the tonnage.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game is reporting a statewide harvest of 113.8 million, or about 82 percent of the preseason forecast of 138.4 million with the big bust coming in Prince William Sound.
The Sound harvest of 42.6 million pinks fell almost 20 million short of a preseason forecast just shy of 62 million. That faltering harvest accounted for almost 80 percent of the shortfall of pinks and ensured the state dipped below a statewide, odd-numbered year harvest of 200 million or more salmon for the first time since 2011.
Outside of Bristol Bay, which has been reliably producing big returns of sockeye salmon since the Bering Sea region warmed, it was a weird year for Alaska salmon fisheries.
Ups and downs
On the upside, the Kenai River, arguably the most famous salmon stream in the state, met the minimum spawning goal for Chinook salmon for the first time in five years. Chinook – or “king salmon” as most Alaskans call them – are the largest and most valuable of the salmon species, and they have been struggling so badly for the past decade that the federal government is now studying whether they should be added to the endangered species list.
The Kenai return was only 15 fish over the minimum goal of 15,000, but it did show that state fishery managers were making progress in returning at least some Chinook stocks to abundance. The return, more than twice the size of last year, came at a cost, however.
A commercial setnet fishery for sockeye along the Kenai coast, which has in the past intercepted thousands of kings on their way to the river, was shut down for almost the entire summer, and an in-river sport fishery, which once made Kenai kings famous among anglers around the world, remained closed for yet another year.
But at least the kings were rebounding there, which was more than could be said for the situation in any number of Chinook systems elsewhere in the state. The Deshka River, a popular tributary to the Alaska Range-draining Susitna River system north of Alaska’s largest city, witnessed a return of only 1,690 Chinook, less than a tenth of the roughly 18,600 only four years ago and less than a fifth of the minimum, in-river goal of 9,000 of the big fish.
This despite virtually no harvest of Deshka-bound Chinook in Cook Inlet, and the closure of all sport fishing on the river.
The story was only worse on the nearby Little Susitna River, where the king return was reported as a mere 69 fish. The river has a minimum escapement goal of 2,100, which hasn’t been met since 2022, even though the river has remained closed to king salmon anglers since then.
Statewide, kings have been struggling for a decade, and there was no real sign of a statewide turnaround. In far Western Alaska, the return to the Kuskokwim River was below average, but big enough to allow a harvest of about 35,000 of the fish and meet the escapement goal of 120,000.
But to the north of the Kusko, the Yukon River suffered through another disastrous year. The state reported fewer than 50,000 Chinook entered the massive river draining the Yukon Territory, Canada and the vast, empty Alaska Interior.. That was less than a third of the historic average of more than 150,000.
The state closed king salmon fisheries along the river in the hopes of increasing the number of fish reaching spawning grounds in Canada, but only 1,739 were counted by a sonar in Eagle, just west of the U.S.-Canada border. This was in line with a 2024 return that had shown an improvement over 2022 and 2023, but still only a fraction of the historical average of more than 23,000.
Western Alaska residents have tried to blame the disastrous returns of Chinook on bycatch in the nets of Seattle-based pollock trawlers that haul in more than 1 million tonnes of pollock in the Bering Sea each year, but there is no evidence to support that belief. The scientific analysis of the bycatch linked fewer than 700 Yukon Chinook to the trawl bycatch last year, and nearly all of those were immature fish, some of which would not have survived to spawn.
Bering Sea trawl bycatch doesn’t help explain Chinook shortages elsewhere, either, or the shrinking size of the fish across their range from the wild and undisturbed Noatak River above the Arctic Circle in Northwest Alaska to the wild and undisturbed Chickamin River near the southern end of the Alaska Panhandle.
Canadian researchers five years ago tied the declines in productivity of the state’s Panhandle Chinook systems to the declines of Chinook in the dammed and human-altered rivers of British Columbia, Canada, and the Pacific Northwest, and all indications now point to a coast-wide, North America decline in the species
On Kodiak Island, far to the north of the Panhandle, the Ayakulik River, a small but fabled stream among anglers, welcomed back only 444 Chinook this year. At the start of the new millennium, it was witnessing returns of more than 8,000 to almost 25,000 per year. The return this year was less than a tenth of the minimum, in-river goal of 4,800.
It has long been suggested that kings, which have been shrinking in size for decades, are losing out to the smaller and far more plentiful pink, chum and sockeye salmon in competition for food at sea.
As a result, they theorized, Chinook growth at sea is slowed, and some of the fish are weakened and die or more easily fall victim to other predators. This hypothesis has, however, proven impossible to fully substantiate given how little is known about the survival of salmon at sea, where the fish spend most of their lives.
Bright spot
While kings remain in trouble in Alaska, there are some indications that Gulf of Alaska sockeye caught a break possibly linked to the weak return of pinks last year and the relatively weak return of pinks this year, at least compared to past odd-numbered years.
Scientists who in 2024 studied scale samples from sockeye caught between 2013 and 2022 reported finding a linkage between pink salmon numbers and the sockeye salmon growth recorded 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 reported in the peer-reviewed ICES Journal of Marine Science.
The data led them to conclude that Alaska, in its effort to produce large numbers of low-value pink salmon with the aid of hatcheries, is undercutting the harvest of high-value sockeye.
“It is important to recognize that in the present era,” they wrote, “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.”
Weak returns of pinks to both Prince William Sound and Cook Inlet in 2024 and the relatively weak return of pinks to those areas this year coincided with a large and unexpected return of sockeye to the Inlet.
As Sounds pink returns were falling far below expectations, the Inlet returns of sockeye were climbing way, way above expectations.
The state has yet to complete its calculation on the total size of the run, but it looks to have been in the range of 10 million to 11 million sockeye. The Kenai River, the most popular fishery in the 49th state, ended up flooded with sockeye.
The escapement of 4.25 million sockeye into the river was more than three times higher than the upper goal of 1.4 million sockeye in-river. From July 15 to August 8, there wasn’t a day when fewer than 50,000 sockeye swarmed into the river, and that number swelled to above 100,000 on 21 days, topped 200,000 on three days, and hit a mind-boggling 247,250 on July 27.
There were so many fish entering the river that most participants in the river’s Alaska-only dipnet fishery, part of a state food-security effort, caught a freezer full of fish early and quit fishing before the July 31 end of the season. And anglers from Alaska, the Lower 48 and around the world found the river so stuffed with sockeye it was hard not to catch a salmon, whether by accident or design.
The Kenai wasn’t the only river enjoying a big sockeye return either. The nearby Kasilof River returned 1.2 million sockeye, almost three times above the top-end, escapement goal of 320,000, and the Copper River’s in-river return ended near 900,000 sockeye, about 300,000 above the minimum goal and pushing close to the upper management object of 976,000 after a commercial harvest of 840,000 sockeye that came in just shy of 10-year average
harvest of 889,000.
The overall return, however, was only about 65 percent of the forecast of 2.6 million as nearly all fisheries in and near the Sound – the focal point for Alaska’s commercial ocean-ranching business – faltered.
Along with returns to the Sound being smaller than expected, so were the fish themselves. Of the approximately 3.3 million pinks the Prince William Sound Aquaculture Corporation (PWSAC) reported harvested in front of its various hatcheries, the average weight worked out to just over 2.8 pounds.
The average weight of Sound pinks last year was 3.3 pounds, but fewer than 10 million of the fish were caught. Even-year pinks and odd-year pinks are significantly different salmon, and the odd-year fish are dominant. They usually return at rates three to four times that of the even-year fish.
PSWAC is engaged in a massive, ocean-farming operation, and its total pink catch this year was 6.4 million of the fish, according to the state. That would have amounted to 65 percent of the Sound’s total pink harvest in 2024, but thankfully for the Sound’s fishermen, the odd-year runs are much, much bigger.
The 2024 harvest in the Sound, for instance, topped 57 million, making it almost six times bigger than the 2024 short of 10 million. Another catch on the order of five times that of 2024 was expected this year but never materialized.
Why is unknown. But the commercial production hatcheries that turned the Sound from a bit player in the Alaska commercial fishing business into a big hitter appeared to be having an off year.
They’d been expected to produce more than 45 million humpies this year, or about 75 percent of the total number of pink salmon returning to the Sound. But the fish didn’t cooperate.
The return of sockeye to PWSAC’s Main Bay hatchery also turned into a bust. The hatchery had been expected to produce 1 million fish and account for about a third of a forecast 3.3 million harvest for Copper River and Sound sockeye.
The total harvest of sockeyes in the Sound, however, came in at just over 1.2 million, according to state data, and most of those, approximately 70 percent, were wild Copper River fish, according to the state.
The relatively weak return of sockeyes to the Sound, where hatcheries are king, versus an unexpectedly large return of will sockeye to Cook Inlet, points to issues related to survival at sea.
Pinks are believed to have an advantage there due to warming sea surface temperatures that reached a peak in “The Blob” years of 2013 into early 2016. Waters have cooled somewhat since, and there is speculation that sockeye have benefited all along the North American coast.
British Columbia’s Fraser River, where sockeye have been struggling in recent years, saw an unexpected return of 8.8 million sockeye, according to the Fraser River Panel. That was three times greater than the preseason forecast of 2.9 million, and almost 20 times the number of sockeye that passed a salmon counter at Mission, B.C., last year.
Coming in the wake of that disaster, the 2025 return caught Canadian salmon managers by surprise and left Canadian commercial fishermen angry that they didn’t get to cash in on the bounty after years of weak returns, the CBC reported. Fishery managers caught by surprise at the size of the return limited the commercial harvest to 200,000 sockeye and illustrated how much scientists still don’t know about the survival of salmon at sea.
Bill Templin, Alaska director of commercial salmon fishery research, has described the North Pacific as a big “black box” into which billions of young salmon disappear each year with fisheries scientists still largley guessing how many will return.
which is engaged in the massive ranching of pinks, reported on its website
Russia has won in many ways: Control of the Northern Shipping route with dozens of Ice Breakers in their fleet, several of which are nuclear…. They also (As of September 2025) have an oil rig in the Bering Sea where the Shell Kulluk failed over a decade ago…Russia has also won the war in Ukraine even though NATO keeps it’s head in the sand….Lastly, the world’s second largest bank Next to JP Morgan is now located in Moscow….Americans need to understand the BRICS alliance which will replace the US dollar as world currency within a generation.