The Port Valdez salmon ranch/Valdez Fisheries Development Association
The great hatchery promise
With Alaska on track to post its worst salmon harvest since 1979, it’s time to revisit the promise made to the state’s once taxpaying voters when they ponied up tens of millions of dollars to build industrial-scale salmon hatcheries later turned over to commercial fishermen.
And what have the hatcheries done in the years since 1982?
Little but increase the size of the oscillations between the booms and the busts historically tied to odd-year and even-year pink salmon, while showing signs of expanding these oscillations to impact other, more valuable species of Alaska salmon as well.
Twenty-eight years after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound, a peer-reviewed study looking for long-term fisheries damage from the spill found evidence the real damage being done in the region linked to years in which hatcheries helped push Sound pink salmon returns above 30 million.
In those years, the study concluded, Copper River sockeye suffered. Some scientists, the late Ken Tarbox of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and others, believed these consequences rippled north into Cook Inlet to affect Kenai River sockeye returns as well.
Cause and effect in situations like these is near impossible to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt, but it is worth considering that the Sound witnessed a return of more than 43 million pinks last year, according to Fish and Game data, and the Copper River sockeye harvest this year came barely pushed above 243,000 fish.
This was a third of the forecast commercial harvest of 728,000 sockeye, and fishery managers failed to allow enough salmon to escape upriver to meet their optimum “escapement” goal. Suffice to say, the size of the sockeye return was far, far short of what was expected.
Meanwhile, to the north, the Kenai returned a half to a third of the expected number of sockeyes. The exact numbers there are still being compiled, but it is obvious that return was also way, way below the forecast.
And yet, the biggest, even-year hit came in the pink salmon fishery in the Sound itself.
Biggest losers
Two years ago, the even-year return of 2024 was so low that Gov. Mike Dunleavy appealed to the federal government for disaster relief, but this year’s return of pinks to the Sound, the hatchery heartland of the 49th state, has been such a disaster that it makes 2024 look like a good year.
Dunleavy complained that a harvest of 9.95 million pinks in 2024 was 75 percent below the five-year average, but that 2024 harvest turned out be nearly three times the size of this year’s harvest of 3.8 million, a third of which went to the hatchery operators to cover their costs, according to state data.
What a difference a year makes.
Alaska last year witnessed an all-species harvest of 194.8 million salmon – 119 million of which, or 61 percent, were pinks, the smallest and least valuable of the species. These are the salmon species most Alaskans call humpies and often treat with disdain.
The prevailing, Last Frontier view of humpies might best be summed by a headline that appeared in the now-dead Mat-Su Frontiersman newspaper in the state’s Susitna Valley more than two decades ago.
“Pink salmon’s bad reputation isn’t all deserved,” it read.
In that story, Valley Life editor Casey Ressler quoted local angler Dirk Armanst complaining that “The reason there are so damn many pinks (in local waters) is because nobody takes them out of the river. Nobody wants them. By the time they get into freshwater, they’re useless.”
Ressler did go on to note that “before they get to the streams…pinks are one of Alaska’s most important commodities. They are at the heart of the commercial fishing industry.”
Or, at least they are the heart of a commercial fishing industry that has tied itself to producing the jug wine, so to speak, of the global salmon market in this century. And up until 2024, and again this year, low-value, cheap-to-produce hatchery pinks have generally worked out well in a state where commercial fishermen never met a hatchery salmon they didn’t like.
This year, however, has turned into the second straight even-year disaster thanks to another of those oscillations in harvests the hatcheries were supposed to eliminate.
Mother of all busts
The state’s pink salmon fisheries are basically done for the year, and the reported statewide catch stands at less than 38 million, a third of what it was last year. It is likely to reach 39 million before all is said and done, but it would take a miracle to reach 40 million.
The dearth of humpies, which has been led by a massive crash in hatchery production, looks set to result in an all-season, all-species salmon harvest of under 90 million salmon – something unheard of in a 21st Century marked by Alaska’s rise to the position of a world leader in the ocean-farming business.
As the numbers stand at this point, this all-species harvest could reach 89 million if the last few weeks of fishing meet the five-year-average. But since this year’s harvests peaked in the week of Aug. 10 to 16, catches have – week-by-week – ranged from a half to a quarter of that average.
Aside from Bristol Bay, where higher sockeye prices helped make good a modest return of fish, it’s been a grim year, with the hatcheries in Prince William Sound headlining the disaster.
The Prince William Sound Aquaculture Corporation (PWSAC) fared better and, aided by higher prices for humpies given a demand for the fish suddenly out-pacing the supply, it reported capturing the fish it needed for cost recovery. But there were no extra fish left to be snared by the Sound’s commercial seiners.
This isn’t the way it was supposed to work. Alaska’s state-funded hatcheries were supposed to save commercial fishermen, not replace them with factory-farm workers.
AK farm problem
And let there be no doubt that the state of Alaska is involved in the salmon farming business despite the charade of claiming it’s not because it banned net-pen farming in 1990.
At the same 1982 aquaculture conference that Koernig offered the promise of hatcheries stabilizing Alaska salmon returns, John McMullen, the acting director of Fish and Game’s now defunct FRED Division, let slip the four-letter “farm’ word.
He used it to defend state failures in growing the desired numbers of hatchery sockeye because of IHNV, a contagious disease Alaska hatcheries are still battling. McMullen promised the disease problem could be solved by the ability “to farm around” IHNV.
This is what farmers do before they put their livestock, or fish, out to pasture. There is, however, one big difference between open-range terrestrial farming or ranching, as some call it, and open-range ocean farming, and that is that the farmers on land have a good idea of what their pasture looks like when they turn their stock loose.
The marine farmers not so much. It’s now pretty clear that VFDA and PWSAC unknowingly turned their hundreds of millions of little pinks loose on bad pasture in 2024. There is no other explanation for what has since happened.
Together, VFDA and PWSAC were forecasting they would produce a return of 16.6 million pinks – 10.2 million for the hatchery in Valdez and 6.4 million for the three PWSAC hatcheries scattered around the Sound. The low-ball, worst-case estimate for all of these hatcheries combined was 7.5 million pinks – 5.1 million for VDFA and 2.4 million for PWSAC.
The hatcheries were slated to take about half of that 16.8 million, or approximately 8 million returning pinks, for cost-recovery and broodstock needs combined. Fish and Game’s “Preliminary Alaska Commercial Salmon Harvest – Blue Sheet,” which updates harvests statewide twice daily, now reports a Sound hatchery cost-recovery harvest of slightly less than 1.3 million pinks. That does not, however, iclude the millions of pinks taken for broodstock.
The total Sound harvest of pinks, counting the hatcheries’ cost-recovery and the fish caught by commercial fishermen, stands at 3.8 million. The preseason, Sound-wide prediction called for a total harvest of 21.3 million hatchery and wild pinks.
As it turned out, the entire harvest of wild and hatchery fish combined was smaller than the predicted harvest of wild fish alone. Whether Fish and Game fully met its escapement goals for wild fish remains unknown at this time. So, too, the percentage of hatchery pinks that strayed on their way back to the hatcheries and ended up captured as Alaska “wild-caught salmon” in the common-property fisheries.
Whether the wild fish or the hatchery fish fared better once they went to sea also remains unresolved, although Alaska’s ocean farmers try hard to stack the deck in favor of hatchery fish.
As a general rule, bigger, stronger salmon fry and smolt show better survival than smaller fry and smolt, though this is not always the case.
State fisheries biologists say it will take some time to fully apportion the Sound harvest between common-property ”wild caught” fish and hatchery pinks. But a return of even half of the wild fish that the state forecast would indicate they fared better once they went to sea than the carefully tended hatchery fish fattened up in net pens just like the Norwegian farmed salmon kept in the same kind of pens and fed until they reach a marketable size.
We’re better?
Alaska’s ocean farmers like to claim that what they do is environmentally friendlier than what the Norwegians, Chileans and other net-pen farmers do, but someone really needs to ask some tough questions as to just how true that claim.
The net-pen farmed salmon are raised in closed pens that can be easily monitored to gauge the environmental consequences of what happens in the waters around them. The ocean-farmed fish are dumped into the sea, where they can cause all kinds of impossible-to-monitor consequences, as the state Board of Fisheries was told in 2018.
The VFDA was that year asking to expand the size of its hatchery operation. The request had run into criticism from Alaska personal-use dipnet and rod-and-reel fishermen of the belief the state was already producing too many pink salmon to the possible detriment of sockeye, Chinook and coho returns.
Alaska Department of Fish and Game scientist Bill Templin then appeared before the board with an 84-screen Powerpoint presentation outlining the impenetrable tangle that is the ecosystem of the North Pacific Ocean.
Templin conceded there was a correlation between humpy increases and the decline in number of other species of salmon, but argued that no one could prove causation.
Not knowing what the hell you’re doing is, of course, the best argument not to do it. Or do it in a very limited, experimental way with careful monitoring, as the medical community did when doctors first started experimenting with brain surgery.
It was an ironic decision given that Koerning, McMullen and everyone else at the 1982 aquaculture conference appeared in agreement that the North Pacific was then already nearing its salmon carrying capacity.
Alaska was then releasing about a third as many hatchery salmon as it does now, according to the data compiled by the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission, and humpies had yet to overwhelm the annual harvests.
Nineteen eighty-three was an odd-year and thus a good one for pink salmon. Alaska witnessed a healthy catch of just shy of 60.4 million pinks that year, but they comprised less than half (47 percent) of a statewide harvest just shy of 128 million, and by weight, which is how the dollar value is determined, they accounted for less than a third of the harvest.
You have to wonder if Alaska shouldn’t have frozen the ocean-farming business when it was ahead. And here we can leave this story with words of Curt Kerns, an aquaculture specialist who was at that 1982 conference:
And now we are at a point that fry-to-adult survival of even a fifth of 5 percent would be a cause to sing hallelujah.
Categories: News, Outdoors, Uncategorized
