A mainstream media long stuck on the idea that dams and global warming were the only problems facing the fabled Chinook salmon of the Pacific Northwest seems to finally have realized there might be more to the story.
When your agenda is wholly focused on the trees, however, it is easy to miss what else is going on in the forest.
And warming, North Pacific waters and reservoirs behind dams creating prime habitat for predators that prey on young salmon cannot be ignored as factors increasing the survival difficulties for Chinook, or what Alaskans usually call king salmon.
But when there is a fire already burning and someone throws gasoline on it, things are only going to get worse.
Some now contend that this is exactly what happened when Alaska dove heavily into the business of farming the sea with pink salmon or “ranching,” as the Alaska salmon farmers prefer to call it.
Writing in an op-ed published by The Seattle Times earlier this month, Tim Schuerch, the assistant general counsel for the Calista Corporation, an Alaska Native-owned business, observed that salmon “hatcheries were developed on a key assumption: that the ocean could absorb any scale of hatchery production. Today, that assumption looks less certain.”
The scientists already knew why, and they had known why for some time. Bay sockeye were booming because Southwest Alaska lakes had warmed, increasing the survival rate for young salmon feeding in those lakes. Thus more young salmon were making it to the ocean, and a warming Bering Sea was providing more food to feed them.
As a result, more adults returned. Fisheries science isn’t exactly quantum physics. It is, on many levels, pretty simple.
(In defense of The Times, it should be noted, that its Bristol Bay reporting appears to have been largely financed by the Pulitzer Center, and when journalists go begging for financing to report on the evils of “climate change disrupt(ing) economies, health, and culture,” you can’t really expect them to bite the hand that is feeding them and write about a case in which warming has turned out to be a good thing, at least in the here and now.
Some knew
As to Schuerch’s claim that it has been assumed that the ocean can “absorb any scale of hatchery production,” he is partially right. But not every fisheries biologist bought into that idea, and as pink salmon numbers have boomed in the Pacific while other species of salmon struggle, more and more have come to question what ocean ranching of low-value pink and chum salmon means for wild Chinook, sockeye and coho salmon from streams and rivers all along the coast of North America.
Alaska fisheries biologist Stan Moberly saw this coming 44 years ago when he first observed that the ocean was approaching its salmon carrying capacity. The then-director of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s now defunct Division of Fisheries Rehabilitation, Enhancement and Development (FRED), Moberly did not, however, warn against what the continuing proliferation of Alaska hatchery salmon might do to the ocean ecosystem.
Instead, thinking more like a businessman than a biologist, he warned of a potential battle over the “allocation of ‘grazing’ rights on the North Pacific pasture. 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.
“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.
“Alaska’s salmon industry is the State’s largest employer and has an economic worth at first wholesale value estimated to be near $4 billion. If Alaska intends to secure its position in the world marketplace, the salmon rehabilitation and enhancement program must keep pace.”
This was in 1982 when Alaska was the world-leading salmon producer. The state is now a relatively minor player in global markets. Net-pen salmon farmers – as opposed to Alaska’s ranchers – long ago took over the marketplace.
Keeping pace
Alaska’s ranchers and fish managers did keep pace with the net-pen farmers through the ’80s as the harvest of wild fish grew and hatchery salmon – ie. those “Alaska wild caught” salmon – entered the picture. But the FRED program Moberly was trying to sustain in 1982 was gone within a dozen years of his observations on the increasingly crowded pastures of the Pacific.
FRED transitioned from a hatchery operation into a state monitoring program with a handful of employees after an economic analysis prepared for the Alaska Senate’s Special Committee on Domestic and International Commercial Fisheries concluded that revenue generated by the state’s “pink and sockeye hatchery programs are estimated to be less than the cost of running these programs.”
Still, the state hatcheries paid for by bonds approved by then tax-paying Alaskans did not disappear.
All of the salmon factories in the business of producing commercial volumes of salmon were turned over to private, non-profit corporations run by commercial fishermen, with the so-called PNPs then given exclusive rights to harvest hatchery salmon for “cost recovery” purposes.
The PNP hatchery operators were subsequently aided by the state managing harvests of returning salmon in such a way that many of the state-hatchery-produced salmon once caught in the state’s “common property” commercial fisheries escaped the nets of fishermen to return to the hatcheries to ensure their financial survival.
The return to the state taxpayers on this deal was basically zilch. The state has long leased the still-state-owned hatcheries to private businesses for token fees.
Some might have viewed this as a taxpayer ripoff back when Alaskans were paying taxes, but by the 1980s, the state was flush with oil revenue, and the state income tax was long gone. So everyone was happy to have the costs of running the hatcheries taken care of, and the new hatchery operators did a good job of selling the idea that along with providing tens of millions of fish to boost commercial harvests, they were providing some salmon for Alaska anglers and dipnetters, even if the numbers of these fish never amounted to diddly-squat.
As a result, in the years that followed the privatization of state hatcheries, Alaska’s ocean-ranching salmon business became the Godzilla of North American hatchery operations. The number of young salmon Alaska now sends to sea every year dwarfs the production of all the hatcheries in the Lower 48 U.S. states and Canada combined.
The state reported a PNP hatchery release of about 1.7 billion young salmon this year, or about three times the number of hatchery salmon the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission says are annually released from salmon hatcheries in other U.S. states and British Columbia, Canada, combined.
Most of the salmon released in Alaska are, unfortunately, destined to die at sea. The bulk of these fish are low-value pinks, the smallest of the Pacific salmon, and chums. At sea, they have average, long-term survival rates in the 3 percent range.
And there’s the rub.
Though the Norwegians, Chileans and others who today feed the world with salmon farmed in pens have increasinlgy come under fire for the volumes of forage fish caught and used for feed at their farms, the quantity of forage Alaska hatchery salmon devour at sea has up to now been barely noticed, although it would appear to take a significant bite out of the food supply of marine waters.
A study of 600 million young pinks released from Prince William Sound estimated that in their first growing seasaon, they consumed about 484 million pounds of forage, and these fish – which some have described as “little eating machines – were just getting started.
What the ranchers have going for them is that they don’t have to pay to feed these fish. Given the current cost of salmon feed-pellets in Norway, the first-year cost of feeding those Sound pinks would appear to be somewhere around $38 million to $39 million.
But the ranchers get free food for their hatchery fish. Only it isn’t exactly free.
It’s paid for in ecosystem tradeoffs. The food being eaten by all those humpies, as Alaskans call pink salmon, is food that would be eaten by some other fish or seabirds if the hatchery fish weren’t devouring it.
Whose paying?
“All sockeye salmon stocks examined exhibited a downward trend in productivity with increasing PWS hatchery pink salmon returns,” the authors of that peer-reviewed study wrote. “While there was considerable variation in sockeye salmon productivity across the low- and mid-range of hatchery returns (0–30 million), productivity was particularly impacted at higher levels of hatchery returns.
“We do not know if possible deleterious interactions between hatchery pink salmon and wild sockeye salmon in this study are from predation or competition, or whether they occur in nearshore or offshore areas,” the authors add. “But pink salmon feeding may cause a general depletion of prey availability that could impact sockeye salmon without tight spatial overlap of these two species. In this regard, the apparent impact to sockeye productivity may reflect a general increase in pink salmon abundance across the northeast Pacific rather than increased abundance of hatchery pink salmon to PWS (Prince William Sound) in particular.”
That “general increase” would include wild salmon being managed for maximum-sustained yield in the 49th state. And if the natural production of these fish is already high and interfering with the survival of other wild salmon, the hatchery fish are just adding gasoline to the fire.
Other researchers later found evidence that the burden of competition isn’t limited to Copper River sockeyes either.
After looking at the scales of other West Coast sockeye salmon to measure growth, they reported finding a “consistent pattern of lower growth in odd years” when pink numbers are at their maximum.
There is, at this time, no concrete evidence to show that high pink numbers due to hatcheries in Alaska and Russia adding tens of millions of adult pinks to the Pacific on top of booming natural runs, are specifically harming Chinook. But one theory that this might be the case has been floating around for almost a decade.
And, at this point, there is more reason to believe that the bounty of pinks – the lowest value salmon in the Pacific – are part of the problem than to believe that they are not, because there is no denying the role of pinks as a disruptor in the Pacific ecosystem.
The Alaska Board of Fisheries – which has overseen the state’s commercial fishing business as the least valuable salmon in the state have become ever more plentiful while the most valuable salmon in the state have, with the exception of Bristol Bay sockeye, become fewer in number – has long refused to confront Schuerch’s suggestion that hatcheries are now harming wild salmon.
But then, why would the Board care? The commercial salmon fishing business isn’t called a ‘business’ for no reason. What does it matter if hatchery salmon are replacing wild salmon as long as there are lots of salmon being caught, and they can all be sold as “wild-caught Alaska salmon?”
And though the hatcheries tout themselves as non-profits, which somehow makes a business more honorable than one working for profit, there are now people making money off the hatcheries. The hatcheries, according to a study conducted for the state, pay their workers well, a small group of commercial purse seiners can still make good money netting humpies despite the low price paid for these fish, and some Seattle-based salmon processors dealing in high volumes of low-value salmon can crank out profits from Alaska processing plants now largely staffed for weeks each summer by foreign workers.
And if those processors struggle because sales lag in a country where pink salmon, especially canned pink salmon, is little in demand, they can count on the Alaska Congressional delegation jumping in to pressure the government to buy the product they can’t sell.
Schuerch failed to make this connection in his commentary, but sooner or later folks in the Pacific Northwest might just figure out that their tax dollars are being used to prop up Alaska hatchery operations that are harming returns of prized Chinook salmon and steelhead trout to Washington state, Oregon and northern California, and then things could get really interesting.
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Categories: Commentary, Outdoors
