It’s almost everywhere in AK

Editor’s note: This post has been updated. The faces of the ”badass local gals” in the art attached to the story have been obscured because of complaints from their parents and Jackie Kondak, the owner of The Fresh Catch Cafe, that young women might somehow be blamed for the harvest of the Chinook salmon caught and sold by their father, seiner Dan Miotke.

This seems about as likely as U.S. Air Force pilots being blamed for following President Donald Trump’s orders to bomb Iran or someone blaming Miotke for killing and selling an endangered species, although there might be a greater chance of that being the case than of the girls being blamed for anything.

What is known from state studies of Chinook salmon harvests in Lower Cook Inlet, where this fish was caught, is that 94.8 to 99.8 percent of the Chinook found in the Lower Inlet come from “Outside Cook Inlet stocks.” Among these stocks are salmon from British Columbia, Washington state and Oregon.

In Washington and Oregon, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports that  ” two species of Chinook salmon are listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), seven species are listed as threatened under the ESA, and one species is a candidate for listing under the ESA.”

The Canadian government’s Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada lists four populations of British Columbia Chinook as endangered, three as threatened, and one as a stock of concern.

The probability that the Miotke killed a Chinook originating from one of these stocks is extremely low, given that endangered and threatened salmon are defined by the very nature of their rarity. The fish the Miotkes caught would constitute a needle in the haystack of the overwhelmingly “Outside Cook Inlet” Chinook stocks preyed on by both commercial and sport fishermen in the Lower Inlet.

But it might be as likely that this was a threatened or endangered Chinook as it is likely anyone would target the Miotke teenagers in some way for their father killing the fish because the issue here isn’t about a couple of teenagers; it’s about the selfishness of Alaska fishermen – both commercial and sport – who claim to be all about conservation when what they are really all about is money.

Commercial seine fisheries have been touted as better than the state’s gillnet fisheries because they capture fish by surrounding them with a net that theoretically makes it possible to identify and release non-target species of salmon like Chinook in lower Cook Inlet.

But in practice, things don’t often work out this way because commercial fishermen – no matter how much they like to proclaim an interest in the ”sustainability” of wild salmon (or at least some Alaska salmon) – aren’t conservationists; they are businessmen.

And their business is catching and selling salmon for profit.

It is nice to think they would go out of their way to avoid and/or save salmon species that are facing sustainability issues, but – in the best-case scenario – that takes a little effort and – in the worst-case scenario – it means they forfeit a little profit.

Chinook salmon, or what Alaskans call kings, are particularly vulnerable becuase they are the most valuable salmon in the state. Those caught in Cook Inlet last year sold for an average, at-the-dock price of $3.46 per pound, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. That was about twice what an Inlet sockeye was worth, more than five and a half times what a coho was worth, more than eight times what a chum was worth, and more than 13 times what a pink salmon, the most common salmon in the state, was worth.

Chinook are valuable because they are rare. Cooper River kings are the most valuable of these Alaska fish, because they are especially rare in that they are available fresh for only a few weeks in May and June and then only in very limited quantities. Fewer than 6,000 of those fish were caught last year, and the average price paid fishermen at the dock was $17.63 per pound.

One can only hope that the Fresh Catch Cafe’s Kondak, another individual in the making-money business, had the sense to label the Miotke salmon for what it was – a rare catch of a potentially rare king – and charge accordingly on her menu.

The original story:  

Bycatch was on the menu at the Fresh Catch Cafe in Homer on Wednesday.

Whether it was a king salmon trying to return to the Kenai or Susitna rivers, where kings are struggling badly, or one of the pricey, hatchery-spawned and reared Chinook that are supposed to fill the Homer Spit “Fishing Hole” to benefit U.S. anglers who annually pay hundreds of millions of dollars in excise taxes on fishing gear to support “sport fish restoration,’‘ nobody knows.

The fish could even have been of Canadian or Pacific Northwest origin, given that Alaska fisheries annually pick off lots of Chinook salmon headed south.

What it definitely was not was one of the sockeye salmon that were the target species when the Alaska Department of Fish and Game opened a seine fishery in the mouth of Kachemak Bay, a fishery that has spawned complaints in Homer about not only what fish are being caught but about seiners and their nets blocking access to the city’s smallboat harbor, a busy place this time of year.

As of Friday, the seine bycatch of Chinook was reported to be small at 15 fish, according to Fish and Game, but added to the 89 setnet caught kings in the same area, it brought the total harvest to 99. The Eastside Setnet (ESSN) fishery along the Cook Inlet coast just to the north was shut down for most of the 2025 season for fear it would catch that many Kenai-bound Chinook, if not more.

King salmon bycatch in the ESSN has, of course, been in the spotlight for years because of the king salmon crisis on the Kenai. But the reality of the situation is that the ESSN is not alone in catching fish that managers would prefer reach their spawning grounds.

Becuase this is Alaska, and bycatch is us.

Big target

The whales in the debate surrounding Alaska bycatch, which has become a big political issue (what isn’t these days), are trawlers that net approximately 3 billion pounds of pollock per year in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).  This makes their out-of-sight, high-seas fishery by far the largest fishery in Alaska.

Three billion pounds of pollock per year compares to an annual average salmon harvest of about 760 million pounds per year, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. As most Alaskans are aware, this harvest differs widely in size between even-numbered years and odd-numbered years when the state is swarmed with both hatchery and wild pink salmon.

The record salmon harvest reached nearly 1.1 billion pounds, about a third of the average pollock harvest, in 2015, but has been generally trending downward ever since, in part due to small declines in salmon numbers and in part due to the shrinkage in size of the most valuable salmon: kings, cohos and sockeyes.

The shrinkage of those fish is largely attributed to warming waters in the North Pacific Ocean and competition with the booming number of odd-year pink salmon, thanks in part to hatchery boosting of pink production at a time when wild production has increased thanks to warmer Pacific waters.

Two out of every three salmon commercially harvested in Alaska last year, an odd-numbered year, were smallish, low-value pinks, the fish Alaskans commonly call humpies. Just shy of 120 million of them were worth $114 million to the fishermen who caught them, or less than $1 per salmon, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G). 

Less than half as many sockeye, which comprised the second largest species of salmon harvested, were worth three times as much. Sadly, the most valuable fish – king salmon worth an average of almost $68.50 each on average – made up a mere 0.01 percent of the harvest by number and not all that much more, 0.25 percent by weight, according to state numbers.

Kings are the largest of the salmon species, and their average 10.7 pound weight last year was more than four pounds higher than that of the 60-cent-per-pound chum salmon that averaged 6.4 pounds on average to rank as the state’s second-largest salmon in 2025. 

Various interest groups have publicly blamed the decline in Alaska king salmon on bycatch in the trawl fisheries, although there is no scientific evidence to support that conclusion. But the trawlers, being largely Seattle-based, are a popular target because their profits flow mainly toward Seattle and because their bycatch, in raw numbers, looks significant.

In reality, if NOAA numbers can be believed, the trawlers operate what might be the cleanest fishery in the state in terms of bycatch. The North Pacific Fishery Management Council (NPFMC) reports “North Pacific groundfish discard rates of  less than 1 percent for pelagic trawls.”

“Midwater trawling, also known as pelagic trawling, involves towing a large net through the water column to catch pelagic (midwater) fish species,” according to the Marine Stewardship Council. These trawls do sometimes strike the seabed in Alaska, but that is something trawl captains try hard to avoid for fear of having gear torn loose.

Those adamant that trawling is the reason Alaska king salmon are in decline argue that the so-called “discards,” which include salmon and halibut along with unmarketable species of fish, are underreported despite observers on many of the boats being paid to monitor and track harvests. Some under-reporting is certainly possible, but even if there were fivefold under-reporting, the trawlers would still be a lot cleaner than many other Alaska fisheries, nearly all of which are in the bycatch business, whether it is officially called that or not.

Officially, the NPFMC reports discard rates of 7 percent for bottom trawls, 19 percent for hook-and-line (longline) gear,  and 1 percent for pot gear. Longline gear is the traditional method of harvest for catch halibut, Pacific cod and sablefish, but much of the sablefish fishery has transitioned to pots in recent years because of conflicts with sperm and killer whales that became adept at feeding on sablefish, commonly called black cod in Alaska, hooked on longlines. 

Researchers studying the problem in 2017 estimated that fishermen were losing 24 to 70 percent of their catch to whales. The shift to pots ended that problem and significantly reduced bycatch rates in that fishery.

Catch, not bycatch

Bycatch, as originally defined by scientists, was the catch of any “fish, mammal, bird, or other animal or group of animals captured unintentionally by the commercial fishing industry,” as the Encyclopaedia Britannica still describes it. 

But neither the U.S. commercial fishing industry, which has long profited from the sale of fish “captured unintentionally” or intentionally while posited as unintentional,  didn’t like that definition, nor did some in the sport fishing industry.

So the U.S. Congress changed the definition of the word to mean “fish which are harvested in a fishery, but which are not sold or kept for personal use, and includes economic discards and regulatory discards. Such term does not include fish released alive under a recreational catch and release fishery management program.”

This was great news for an Alaska salmon fishing industry, which has long been in the bycatch business. It was this definition that allowed the ESSN fishermen to argue that the Kenai kings they were killing weren’t “bycatch” in their sockeye fishery because those fish were being sold or kept for personal use.

Somehow they never grasped that this sort of thinking might come back to bite them in the ass as it did when the whole fishery had to be shut down to save Kenai kings becuase the setnetters had never devised a way, or even tried to devise a way, to minimize their bycatch of kings.

But those setnetters weren’t, and aren’t, the only Alaska salmon fishermen in the bycatch business.

As Tim Schuerch, an Anchorage attorney, pointed out in a recent commentary for The Seattle Times,  “Washington invests substantial public, tribal and community effort to restore its salmon runs, honor tribal treaty fishing rights and protect the salmon food supply for endangered southern resident killer whales. Yet some of those fish are caught far away in Area M, an Alaska mixed-stock fishery on the Alaska Peninsula and eastern Aleutians that intercepts salmon from across the North Pacific.”

These Washington state fish are not targeted in the Area M fishery. They are caught unintentionally by fishermen focused on harvesting chum salmon. An average 837,000 chum were harvested in Area M annually from 2022 through 2024, with most of them,  51 percent, coming from somewhere other than Alaska Peninsula streams and rivers, according to a state genetics study.

This is what happens in mixed-stock fisheries such as that in Area M, which  has been regionally contentious for years because fishermen to the north on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta believe Area M fishermen are ripping them off when really the Area M fishermen are mainly taking advantage of the Japanese and Russians.

On average every year from 2022 to 2024, 247,000, Area M chums of Russian or Japanese origin outnumbered by about two-and-a-half to one the 103,000 “Coastal Western Alaska” chums in the catch. And then there were the 69,000 chums from British Columbia and Washington, which became the subject of Schuerch’s commentary.

“This Alaska fight reaches Puget Sound’s salmon and orca,” is how his column was headlined, and though Schuerch focused on chum salmon, he noted that “the Chinook evidence is also troubling.

“In 2025, ADF&G estimated the South Alaska Peninsula post-June fishery harvested 15,893 Chinook. Because the South Alaska Peninsula has no documented Chinook spawning stocks, all of those fish originated elsewhere. ADF&G classified about 14,500 – over 90% – as ‘non-Alaska.’

He went on to argue that “Washington cannot meet its salmon recovery goals if distant commercial intercept fisheries continue to harvest fish from Washington-linked stock groups without timely, effective stock-origin consequences (to limit this bycatch). A fishery that intercepts salmon from across the North Pacific should be managed with the whole North Pacific in mind, not only where the nets are set.”

A less than perfect world

For better or for worse, he was a little naive as to the massive consequences for Alaska fisheries if the state were to begin real-time genetic monitoring of harvests, which it now has the power to do, and manage the state’s commercial fisheries so as to minimize the harvest of Washington, Canadian, Japanese and Russian salmon.

Case in point, the fabled Copper River kings – pound for pound the most valuable salmon in the state.

Some years, fewer than 60 percent of the fish caught and sold for $50 per pound and up as Copper River kings aren’t actually Copper River kings.

When the state conducted a study of the “Genetic Stock Composition of the Commercial Harvest of Chinook Salmon in Copper River District, 2018–2021,” researchers found that in 2021, 43 percent of those Copper River kings were non-Copper River salmon.

They were Southeast Alaskan, Canadian and Pacific Northwest kings. The catch of non-local fish was lower in some years than others, but averaged close to 30 percent over the three years of the study.

One can only imagine the reaction a British Columbia fisherman upon discovering this bycatch of Canadian fish, given how little commercial fishing is now allowed in B.C. and the outrageous prices Alaska fishermen are getting for catching Canadian fish and selling them as “Copper River kings.”

Needless to say, the state has discontinued studies of the genetic composition of the Copper River catch, and no one has suggested any real-time monitoring to shift the fishery off other people’s salmon when the catches of non-Copper River salmon in the harvest rise.

Consider that in the fifth fishing period in 2021, the percentage of non-Copper River kings in the Copper River king harvest actually rose to 66.5 percent, according to the state study. And the state, instead of trying to minimize the harvest of non-Copper River kings had done the opposite

It has pushed the Copper River drift gillnet fishery further from the mouth of the river to protect returning stocks of Copper River kings and, in all probability, increased the percentage of non-Copper River kings being caught in that fishery.

All of which sort of makes the much-lambasted trawl fisheries looks almost pristine clean because this is Alaska and bycatch is us.