Prince William Sound all-species salmon harvest to date/Alaska Department of Fish and Game
Sound salmon fisheries collapsing
With the normal peak of Prince William Sound salmon returns now in the rearview mirror, the ocean-farming heartland of the 49th state is marching toward a commercial fishery collapse of epic proportions.
The return of sockeye salmon to the Sound can already be declared a disaster. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game forecast a low but generally average return of these Copper River salmon at 8 percent below the 10-year average of 1.53 million.
As the way things stand today, the return appears unlikely to reach 65 percent of the forecast. The in-river sockeye count is now 30,000 fish short of the lower management objective for the date and daily returns haven’t met the daily minimum since July 13.
State fisheries managers remain hopeful they will meet the minimum goal for both sockeye and even more valuable Chinook, the big fish Alaskans call king salmon. But the odds of that happening are getting slimmer by the day.
The commercial fishery announcement for the Sound today put the best spin possible on those numbers in declaring that “the (Chinook) escapement goal was met in four out of the last seven years. The current trend
in large Chinook salmon passage indicates that count levels at the end of sonar operation are likely to be around the lower end of the escapement goal.”
The announcement put an even brighter spin on the sockeye situation.
“(The) cumulative sonar count through July 27 is 568,413 fish whereas 597,585 fish would be expected by this date based on historical timing applied to the 2026 inriver goal,” it said.
In reality, in a well-managed fishery, the number of fish to “be expected” would be somewhere above that lower goal and somewhere below the upper goal of almost 966,000.
Fisheries management is a little bit like driving. The idea is to stay between the lines on either side of the road.
The Copper River sonar count of sockeye salmon/Alaska Fish and Game
Fish managers fell behind the curve for sockeye early this year in the belief that a late spring thaw and colder water had delayed the sockeye return. There were valid reasons to believe this as the low catch of 34,000 on May 25 grew to more than 72,000 on June 4.
But it was soon obvious that the harvests were out of line with the in-river returns and managers shut the fishery down on June 12 and didn’t reopen it until July 10. There was then a meager catch of slightly more than 14,000 sockeye.
That was the last opening of the year, and the season’s harvest amounted to 242,652 sockeye, or a third of the projected commercial harvest of 728,000 of the sockeye that are the state’s most valuable, thanks to a cult following.
Copper River salmon, however, are the least plentiful salmon in a region that has built its modern business around salmon hatcheries that farm the ocean with cheap-to-raise pinks and chums. This ocean-farming, or what Alaska commercial fishermen prefer to call “ranching,” has proven highly fruitful in past years, especially the odd-numbered ones.
The shortest-lived of the salmon species, odd-year pinks and even-year pinks have historically shown returns that varied by the tens of millions per year. The 2024 Sound harvest of only about 10 million pinks was considered a near disaster, but the catch rose to nearly 44.5 million humpies, as Alaskans call these fish, last year.
These returns have always yo-yoed through time, but the hatcheries have only served to increase the size of the swings, and the crash this year may be one for the record books.
The pink return is now past its normal peak in the Sound, and the harvest is shy of 100,000 with Fish and Game optimistically reporting that “harvest levels and recent reports of increasing pink salmon abundance throughout PWS are encouraging, conservative management is warranted until these fish begin showing up in steam counts and hatchery special harvest areas….While escapement trends are improving, they remain below what is anticipated for this date. The department does not anticipate these stocks will sustain a consistent schedule of openers at this time.”
The fact is that pink returns are weeks behind what is normal, and the general rule in fisheries management is that if the fish are this late, it’s because they’re not coming.
Prince William Sound humpy harvests to date versus the historic norm/Fish and Game
The salmon hatcheries the state helped build and/or finance before turning them over to commercial fishermen to run were supposed to prevent this sort of disaster, but they’re failing this year. The hatchery run by the Valdez Fisheries Development Association, a hatchery that has in the past produced so many pinks that they couldn’t all be harvested, reported on July 16 that it had “achieved 13 percent of its 2026 pink salmon revenue goal.”
It subsequently closed its special harvest area because there were no surplus salmon. As of July 24, harvests remained halted as the Association focused on trying to collect enough fish to provide needed brood stock. Fish and Game was today optimistically reporting that “VFDA brood stock numbers at the hatchery continue to improve as fish move into the special harvest area (SHA). VFDA staff estimated 200,000 fish (on) July 28 in the SHA with more coming across from the north shore. Brood stock is assessed daily, and cost recovery will resume if brood stock goals are met.”
The VFDA had forecast a return 10.2 million humpies with a lowest estimate of just over 5 million. Given that the Sound is near the historic peak of pink salmon returns with the harvest as low as it is, it will take something of a miracle if there is a Sound-wide harvest of 5 million pinks.
Especially given that the hatcheries run by the Prince William Sound Aquaculture Corporation don’t look to be in much better shape than VFDA.
In a normal year, those hatcheries would be swarmed with both pink and chum salmon. PWSAC chums can, at this point, can be declared as big a bust as Copper River sockeye, or maybe a bigger one. PWSAC reported the harvest of no cost-recover chums and said that the “Wally Noerenberg Hatchery finished chum egg-take operations on July 27, meeting 65 percent of the egg goal.”
The corporation’s one bright spot was at the Main Bay hatchery where the goals for both cost-recovery harvests and egg-take were met. PWSAC insiders, however, said that the cost-recovery funds from the sale of those fish aren’t going to begin to cover the corporation’s operating costs, and it is probably going to need to turn to the state to borrow funds to operate next year.
The million salmon/million dollar question is whether this is to be the near-term future.
Back to the future?
Poor state salmon management helped contribute to a collapse of the Alaska salmon fisheries in the 1970s, but fisheries scientists agree that both high-seas gillnetting of salmon by foreign fishing fleets and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) played significant roles.
The foreign fishing was phased out after passage of the Magnuson–Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act in 1976. And though offshore, U.S. trawlers continue to net some salmon as bycatch while fishing for pollock, cod, sole, Pacific Ocean perch and other so-called “groundfish,” the harvest is minuscule compared to what the foreign takes once were.
The PDO is a different story. It was in its cold phase from near the start of the 1960s until about 1975. It entered another cold phase in 2020 and since then it has been getting colder and colder.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Graphic
Historically, colder water has been linked to lower salmon productivity than warmer water, but the PDO is often overlooked these days because of all the hyperbole surrounding global warming. There was much hand-wringing about “The Blob,” a shape-shifting pool of unusually warm water in the Gulf of Alaska from 2013 to 2108.
Alaska during that time saw larger salmon returns than at any time in recorded history. There was only one problem. The overwhelming majority of the fish were pinks, the smallest and least valuable of the salmon species.
Odd-year pinks, scientists have concluded, benefit from warm waters, having evolved to thrive under warm water conditions.
Colder water conditions are thought to benefit other species of salmon, notably sockeyes, Chinooks and cohos. Or at least that’s what the data has indicated. If one goes back to the early 1970s, commercial Chinook harvests were two or three times larger than what they are now, and statewide pink salmon catches were smaller than the those in the Sound alone in last year.
The boom in warm water is generally in line with metabolic theory that links total resource biomass to temperature and decrees that production should generally go up in natural ecosystems as temperatures increase. Or at least this should happen until temperatures reach a breaking point at which certain species can no longer function.
Unfortunately, the North Pacific is no longer a natural ecosystem. It is an ecosystem that has been flooded with hatchery fish, and there is no telling what happens when cooler waters reduce the marine phytoplankton species that are at the base of the ecological pyramid.
With more salmon of all species competing for less food, some or all are going to lose, and maybe what is happening in the Sound this year is that the humpies, which were once among the big winners, are now the biggest loser in an every-salmon-loses situation.
But only time will tell for certain.
