An Alaska fisheries management failure
Seemingly without thought, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has confessed to mismanaging wild chum salmon in Southeast Alaska to the benefit of private hatcheries run by commercial fishing interests.
The confession is contained in the graph of salmon harvests above and in a state report (attached below) explaining what the agency doesn’t know.
In that document, state biologists admit to a “lack of broadscale data on nearshore marine ecosystem processes and juvenile salmon (all species) growth, distribution, and abundance” along “little understanding of the mechanisms by which the last marine heatwave impacted salmon growth and survival in inshore and offshore waters.”
As is obvious in the chart of past salmon harvests, wild chums in Southeast have been in a downward decline since hatchery production of ocean-farmed chums exploded near the start of the new millennium.
Before that, the chart reflects increases in both wild and chum salmon late in the 1990s, as ocean conditions for Alaska pink and chum salmon improved, leading to a huge boom in Alaska statewdie salmon harvests.
Southeast chums were part of this boom, but as the number of hatchery chums kept going up through the years, the number of wild chums started falling.
Wild salmon non-protection act
As these Alaska ranching operations were expanding in the 2000s, the state recognized the as potential threat to wild salmon and enacted a “policy for the management of sustainable salmon fisheries.” This 2012 policy, incorporated into law by regulation, has been generally and widely referred to as the state’s wild salmon protection act because that is what it was supposed to do.
“Management of salmon fisheries by the state should be based on the following
principles and criteria,” the policy says, and among those are requirements that:
- “(ii) scientific assessments of possible adverse ecological effects of proposed habitat alterations and the impacts of the alterations on salmon populations should be conducted before approval of a proposal….
- “(D) effects and interactions of introduced or enhanced salmon stocks on wild salmon stocks should be assessed; wild salmon stocks and fisheries on those stocks should be protected from adverse impacts from artificial propagation and enhancement efforts….(emphasis added).”
But forget about that
It is clear from the record of annual harvests illustrated at the top of this story that the state has known, or should have known, for more than a decade that wild chum salmon were in decline in Southeast despite excellent ocean range conditions that led to a boom in the survival of Southeast hatchery chum.
And yet, here we are in 2026, with the state admitting it has no idea of the “effects and interactions of (these) introduced or enhanced salmon stocks on wild salmon,” state biologists were charged with determining before allowing hatchery expansions.
It is equally clear from the data that the state has failed miserably to follow the wild salmon policy’s dictate that “wild salmon stocks and fisheries on those stocks should be protected from adverse impacts from artificial propagation and enhancement efforts….”
Why? Because anyone with even a modicum of knowledge of fisheries science can see the most obvious explanation for the decline of Southeast wild chum as hatchery salmon numbers explode.
The simple, two-word explanation would be “nearshore survival.”
The importance of nearshore survival to the overall survival of salmon at sea is well documented. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration put together a simple graphic labeled the “Salmon Survival Pyramid” that generally defines the situation, although survival rates can vary significantly from salmon species to salmon species.
For better or worse, all salmon are born into a war zone where the vast majority are destined to die long before they get a chance to head back from the ocean to the streams and rivers of their birth.
This circle of death starts before they leave freshwater and continues at sea. As the NOAA pyramid illustrates, only one in 10 will hatch and head for the ocean. Of those, only one in six will survive to the smolt stage where they will battle with not only their own kind but other species of salmon in the fight for survival.
Of those smolt, only about one in 12 will live to range the ocean as adults, and only half of the adults will survive to spawn.
The idea behind hatcheries was to improve on the huge loss of salmon between the egg and alevin stages in freshwater. Alaska’s Fish and Game estimates that “survival from egg to fry is about eight times higher in hatcheries than in the natural environment.”
This is why the state got into the hatchery business to help nature in the first place. But this help didn’t stop at simply aiding spawning salmon.
Alaska salmon ranchers wanting to farm the sea took “enhancement” one step farther by fattening their fry and smolt in net pens just like those used by the salmon farmers in Norway, Chile, Scotland and elsewhere.
There is only one reason for going to the trouble and the cost of feeding Alaska hatchery chum in net pens, and that reason is to increase the chances for survival at sea as smolt. The ADF&G chart of chum salmon production in Southeast Alaska this century would clearly indicate that this strategy is working for the hatchery fish.
Fatter, stronger hatchery chums are producing chum harvests never before witnessed in the region. As for the wild fish?
Well, the wild fish are pretty clearly getting beaten down.
Were state officials following the law, as spelled out in the state’s “wild salmon protection act,” they would, at the very least, banned net-pen fattening of chums years ago if for no other reason than to see whether this sparked a shift in the skewed ratio of hatchery fish to wild fish since the start of the century.
There is, it must be recognized, a possibility that the decline in wild chums is linked not to nearshore survival but to in-stream survival. That would seem unlikely given that the spawning habitat for Southeast chums is largely undisturbed, and the state reports that spawning goals for wild chum have generally been met
Decent escapements and healthy habitat would lead any competent fisheries biologist to conclude the number of wild chum smolts going to sea remains in the range of the numbers that produced good returns of wild chums in the early 1990s and even better returns of wild fish at times in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s.
But there is one caveat that needs to be considered here. Significant numbers of hatchery chums have been found straying into Southeast streams and rivers to spawn, and pretty much all research on straying hatchery salmon that spawn naturally or interbreed with wild salmon to spawn has found a reduction in fecundity, the ability to produce an abundance of offspring.
Thus, there is a possibility that maintaining the spawning goals of yesteryear might today be producing significantly fewer young salmon with even lower chances of survival when they leave freshwater.
Whatever the case, the wild chum returns seen decades ago have not materialized as ocean conditions have improved, while hatchery returns have exploded. All of which points to the big, fat hatchery chums fed to increase their chances of survival are doing way better than the wild chums they mix with in the nearshore environment.
But the only way to really know if this feeding and fattening of young hatchery chums gives them a competitive advantage at sea that ends up harming wild chums is to shut down net-pen feeding operations and see what happens.
This is, of course, not something the Alaska ranchers are going to do on their own because they wholly believe that spending the money to feed young chums results in the return of a lot more adult chums, and thus they are not about to stop their feeding operations out of fear this would shrink the returns of hatchery chums and reduce the amount of money to be collected in “cost recovery” in harvesting those fish.
This is about all that need be said.
Alaska’s ocean farmers don’t want to risk losing the competitive advantage they feed into their fish, and if that means fewer wild salmon, they don’t care. The state Board of Fisheries, a regulatory body whose members are appointed by Alaska governors and approved by Alaska legislators, and state fisheries managers are supposed to care, but they have shown little interest in protecting the state’s wild salmon.
The state’s commercial salmon fishing industry has long been the tail that shakes the regulatory dog. And pressured by those interests, the Board has repeatedly bowed to hatchery interests in the past.
As for state fishery managers, they seem more interested in playing the wild salmon-hatchery conflict to generate funding for various research projects that fund state jobs than standing up for the salmon.
Someone should probably sue to get the state to abide by the wild salmon protection act, but as a lawyer familiar with the situation said, “you need a plaintiff who can show harm to step forward,” and that’s a problem in that the wild salmon being harmed can’t speak for themselves.
Categories: Commentary, News, Outdoors
