Wild Fish Conservancy…Intent to Sue Over Alaska Fisheries Catching Threatened and Endangered Pacific Northwest Chinook Without Federal Oversight
Alaska theft of others’ salmon exposed
The Seattle-based Wild Fish Conservancy has finally figured out that the consequences of things that happen in Alaska don’t stay in Alaska and is demanding federal oversight of 49th-state harvests of Chinook, most of which are salmon originating from Canada and the Pacific Northwest.
The Conservancy points out that Alaska Department of Fish and Game genetics research has found that “nearly nine out of ten Chinook salmon caught in commercial fisheries along the South Alaska Peninsula in 2024 and 2025 originated outside Alaska.”
But the South Alaska Peninsula fishery is just the tip of a much bigger iceberg when it comes to Alaska’s commercial catch of the big, Canadian and Pacific Northwest-bound salmon that Alaskans call “kings.” These fish, some of which are now on endangered species lists, run a gauntlet of commercial fisheries dotting the Alaska coast from the Aleutian Islands east and then south to the U.S.-Canada border in Dixon Entrance.
Near the end of October, the organization petitioned the North Pacific Fishery Management Council and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to develop a management plan for non-Alaska Chinook in the federal waters of the Alaska Peninsula Management Area and Kodiak per the requirements of the Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Conservation and Management Act.
Should the federal agencies fail to act, the Conservancy said that it is ready to sue to force them to follow the law.
The terms get a little confusing here because the original definition of “bycatch” has been bastardized over the years. After trying to sort this out, researchers for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), reported that “it quickly becomes apparent the term ‘bycatch’ has meant and continues to mean different things to different investigators.”
In the U.S., bycatch was originally used to describe the harvest of any fish that fishery managers didn’t want caught. Commercial fishermen, because they regulary catch fish other than those fishery managers want caught, didn’t like that definition.
So bycatch came to be redefined and limited to fish that could not be legally sold because fishery managers had decided that banning the sale of certain fish provided the greatest incentive to encourage fishermen to avoid catching those fish.
Managers recognized that at the end of the day, commercial fishing is a business like any other business, and businesses respond to rules and regulations that affect their bottom line. If fishermen catch fish they can’t keep, they’re just wasting time and money dealing with their disposal.
As a result of this regulatory rulemaking, any fish banned from sale became bycatch, and everything else became, at least in the eyes of commercial fishermen and the industry in which they are involved, “incidental” harvest. Today, the Bering Sea pollock trawl fishery has a ‘problem’ due to Chinook bycatch, while other Alaska fisheries are up to their ears in “incidental” harvests of Chinook that go largely unmentioned.
Alaska’s special rules
Tens of thousands of Chinook that fishery managers would rather see make it back to their spawning streams are every year caught as “incidental” harvest in gillnet and seine fisheries for sockeye, chum and pink salmon. And sometimes as “incidental” catch in gillnet fisheries theoretically intended to target returning Alaska king salmon.
Incidental harvests of Canadian or Pacific Northwest Chinook made up 29 percent of the catch of “Copper River king salmon” in 2021, according to a state genetics study, and the number is likely higher now, given that Copper River fishery managers have closed the waters inside the “barrier islands” at the river’s mouth to reduce the harvest of Copper River kings themselves.
A state closure of those waters inside the barrier islands in 2021 did prove effective at limiting the harvest of a weak return of Copper River kings, but non-Alaska Chinook paid a price.
All of these salmon were, however, marketed as high-value “Copper River kings.” Salmon so labeled are the most valuable salmon in the 49th state because they are sold with a claim that they are special due to their parents making a long journey up the silty, sandy, highly turbid Copper River to spawn in clearwater tributaries.
Whether the upstream journey of Copper River kings makes them taste better or not is debatable, but it’s clear that non-Copper River kings snagged in the nets off the mouth of the river carry no genetic benefit from Copper River parents.
Selling Chinook salmon of Canadian and Pacific Northwest origin as coveted, high-value “Copper River kings” can only be described as false marketing, but this issue has never been contested.
Non-Copper River kings sold as Copper River kings certainly raise traceability issues, and given that a threatened or endangered king could end up in the mix, there are also sustainability issues.
The capabilities of modern genetics research make the origins of all salmon caught in Alaska traceable, which is probably about the last thing Alaskans want to know given that most of the Chinook now being caught in the state’s marine fisheries are non-Alaska salmon.
Everyone’s guilty
Commercial fishermen catch and kill the vast majority of these non-Alaska Chinook, but anglers aren’t exactly innocent.
When the state in 2021 examined the origins of Chinook caught in Cook Inlet, it found that only 0.02 percent of the Chinook caught in a relatively new Cook Inlet Winter King Salmon Fishery were Inlet-linked salmon. The researchers didn’t fine-tune the study to specify where those fish came from, because no one really wanted to know, but did report on tagged fish that couldn’t be ignored and found that “most of the ”known-origin fish came from British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon. All but two known-origin fish identified as originating from Alaska were from outside of Cook Inlet.”
Still, the big revelation from that study didn’t concern the winter harvest of so-called “feeder kings.” Everyone had long thought most of those fish originated from somewhere other than Cook Inlet, but it was generally believed the May through August return of kings that spawn in the Inlet changed the dynamic.
It did, but not by much.
“The Outside Cook Inlet reporting group was the greatest contributor to the Lower Cook Inlet summer fishery harvest for all years and ranged from 95 percent in 2018 to 99 percent in 2015,” the study reported. As for Upper Cook Inlet (UCI), which includes the waters around the mouths of the Kenai and Kaslif rivers, the study reported that “the Outside Cook Inlet reporting group was the greatest contributor to the UCI summer fishery harvest for all years an estimate was available and ranged from 77 percent in 2018 to 92 percent in 2016.”
And when adipose-fin clipped salmon were checked for tags, again “most of these known-origin fish came from British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon,” the study said.
The odds that any one of these fish came from one of the 13 endangered and seven threatened populations of Chinook in Canada, or from the seven threatened and one endangered stock in the Pacific Northwest (PNW), are extremely low.
But the odds of fish from such threatened and endangered populations being caught only increase as the number of Chinook either directly or incidentally harvested in Alaska salmon fisheries climbs. The data from state genetics studies would make it appear somewhere around 35,000 Canadian and PNW Chinook are now caught in Alaska before the southward migration of Chinook reaches the Panhandle, where the real carnage starts.
STOP Alaska Troller Catch
If the relatively small bycatch of Chinook in the Bering Sea was enough to stir a rabid “STOP Alaskan Trawler Bycatch” campaign, there ought to be an even more rabid “STOP Alaskan Troller Catch” campaign underway to rein in these Southeast Alaska fisheries.
Both commercial and sport fisheries for Chinook in the Panhandle are largely built on the harvest of non-Alaska fish.
“The major contributors to the (region’s) troll and sport fisheries ordered from north to south were Southeast Alaska/Transboundary River, North/Central British Columbia, West Coast Vancouver Island, South Thompson, Washington Coast, Interior Columbia River summer/fall, and Oregon Coast reporting groups,” a state genetics study undertaken in 2019 reported.
“Collectively, these seven stock aggregates, referred to as driver stocks, accounted for 93 percent of the troll harvest and 95 percent of the sport harvest. The South Thompson (River) driver stock was the largest contributor to the troll fishery (24 percent of the harvest), and Southeast Alaska/Transboundary River (TBR) and West Coast Vancouver Island stock groups were the largest contributors to the sport fishery (31 percent) of the harvest each).”
The South Thompson River is a tributary to Canada’s Fraser River. It supports a population of what biologists call “ocean-type Chinook.” These kings go to sea shortly after they hatch, much like pink salmon, whereas most Alaska kings spend one or more years rearing in freshwater before heading to the ocean.
Some Southeast Alaska trollers have actually cited the boom in South Thompson Chinook as a reason the commercial troll fishery in the Panhandle should be allowed to prey heavily on southern-bound Chinook stocks that contain threatened and endangered species.
South Thompson kings are believed to be thriving due to a late May to early June arrival in the Fraser estuary.
“In Puget Sound, Chinook salmon showed consistently lower survival in even-numbered outmigration years when juvenile pink salmon are present, an interaction that others suggest has also occurred in the lower Strait of Georgia. Also, Lower Fraser Chinook salmon typically emigrate from the estuary after 6 weeks. This suggests that high numbers of fish that enter the estuary in March and April may be entering the ocean in May.”
The thinking is that a huge biomass of Lower Fraser Chinook, pink and chum salmon is leaving a badly overgrazed Fraser estuary just as the Thompson River Chinook start arriving, but that the prey base is already starting to rebuild itself. The Thompson Chinook are thus then able to spend a couple of months or more feeding and growing in a rich estuarine habitat before heading to sea.
Fundamental ecology
The prey base issue in the Fraser estuary has an interesting connection to Alaska, where the issue of food competition has been dismissed as a concern as it relates to the state’s industrial-scale, open-ocean salmon farming. These hatchery-connected operations have largely been successful over the years and are promoted as a big economic benefit for the 49th state.
There was, however, a massive collapse in Prince William Sound this year. State and hatchery forecasts predicted about 20 million pinks would return to the Sound, approximately three-quarters of them hatchery fish. These fish were expected to produce a harvest of about 18.7 million pink salmon, with 14.7 million credited to the hatcheries and another 4 million linked to “natural production.”
The actual catch turned out to be about a fifth that size, with the hatcheries taking the biggest hit. The state yesterday released its official season summary, which put the Sound harvest of pinks at 5.4 million fish, up from an earlier reported 3.66 million. The report did not break down the split in the catch between hatcheries and the common-property fishery.
But since the end of the season, the “Inseason Commercial Harvest Estimate” for the Sound has been showing a common-property harvest of 2.6 million salmon, which would appear to indicate the newly reported harvest was due to late reporting from the hatchery take of “cost recovery” salmon. And it would appear the hatcheries, first established to provide “common property” salmon for commercial fishermen, this year took more than half the salmon harvest, which wasn’t much.
In 2024, the state reported Sound hatcheries dumped about 800 million juvenile pinks into the Sound. The expected harvest of 14.7 million hatchery pinks in 2026 was based on a projected survival rate of around 2 percent. It would now appear, based on a hatchery harvest of 2.8 million pinks, the actual survival rate was near 0.35 percent.
Even if all the fish caught by Sound fishermen, as opposed to being mopped up by hatchery contractors, were hatchery pinks, the total, end-of-season catch of 5.4 million pinks would barely top the 3.9 million wild pinks the state forecast would be harvested.
And even if the “natural production” component of the harvest was made up almost entirely of hatchery strays, or wholly of hatchery strays, the return on those 800 million hatchery-hatched pinks, fed in pens to fatten them up before release, would reach only 0.675 percent.
So what happened?
Well, given that returns of pink salmon to Kodiak Island north of the Sound and to the state’s Panhandle south of the Sound were near forecast levels, the thinking among many. if not most fisheries biologists, is that the nearshore waters of the Sound were overloaded with young pinks and many starved.
So what happens if 10 kids show up for the trip, and you are forced to ration these calories among them for 60 days? Well, you’re only going to be able to make available 440 to 500 calories per kid per day, and most of the kids are likely going to starve.
Something similar to this appears to be what happened in the Sound this year.
Bigger consequences?
The bigger question surrounding the collapse of pink returns, however, centers on whether high-value sockeye salmon and Chinook returning to the Copper River, near the south edge of the Sound, and to Cook Inlet, just north of the Sound, were victims of the fallout from humans dumping those 800 million little pinks into the ocean.
A forecast harvest of 1.25 million Copper River sockeye came in at less than half of that at 612,000, although the officially released figure now reports a Sound-wide harvest of 767,000 sockeye. This would appear to include cost-recovery sockeye from the Main Bay hatchery, which appear to at times slip into the market for sale as Copper River sockeye.
Copper River sockeye, like Copper River kings, are alleged to be “unique” among salmon and thus worth a much higher price. This year they were good for an average price of $3.43 per pound, according to state data. That was 48 cents more per pound than Southeast sockeye, 58 cents more per pound than Cook Inlet sockeye, $1.54 more per pound than Kodiak sockeye, and $1.71 more per pound than Bristol Bay back sockeye that brought an average price of only $1.72 per pound.
Cook Inlet fishermen were supposed to benefit from a big sockeye catch this year with a forecast harvest of 5.6 million Cook Inlet sockeye, nearly all of which are wild fish. It didn’t work out that way. The now-reported official, end-of-season harvest number is 1.3 million or less than a quarter of the expected harvest.
The Copper River king salmon harvest is now reported at 4,985, but it had been forecast to be very low. How many of these salmon that fishermen sold for a whopping $23.01 per pound, according to the state report, were Canadian and/or Pacific Northwest Chinook is at this time unknown.
The relationship between pink numbers and Chinook returns is also unclear. But past research has shown a strong and consistent correlation between big pink returns to the Sound, as was witnessed in 2025 when the Sound harvest hit 45.1 million, and declines in Copper River sockeye. The correlation has been dismissed by the state becuase no one has been able to prove that the hatcheries are the direct cause of the correlation.
What has, however, become plainly obvious since the state turned the Sound into a pink-salmon producing factory is that the historic variations between abundant odd-year pinks and less-abundant even-year pinks have steadily increased. Thus human fisheries management meant to, for economic reasons, even out the oscillations of nature has done the opposite.
Threatened and endangered
This has not threatened or endangered pink salmon, which appear to have a survival advantage over all other species of salmon in a slowly warming North Pacific Ocean. Researchers in 2018 reported that North Pacific salmon abundance reached levels never seen in human history, but with pinks – the smallest of the salmon species – making up 70 percent of the biomass.
They also noted the numbers of Chinook, along with coho salmon and steelhead trout, were “depressed throughout much of their range.” Those salmon appear even more depressed now than they were eight years ago.
This has not stopped Alaska fishermen from preying on them, especially in the state’s Panhandle. That region’s fishermen now find themselves under fire from both Canadian and U.S. interests because of this, and not without reason.
The data from the state’s very own genetics research does not look good for Southeast’s commercial troll fleet:
- 58 percent of the Chinook catch in the early winter troll fishery is made up of Canadian/Lower 48-born salmon.
- 81 percent of the Chinook catch in the later winter troll fishery comes from Canadian/Lower 48 stocks.
- An average of 60.5 percent of the Chinook caught in Outside water in the spring troll fisheries is Canadian/Lower.
- Regionwide summer troll harvests are 92 to 96 percent Canada/Lower 48
The situation is slightly better in the sport fisheries, which catch significantly fewer Chinook overall. Harvests there weigh toward Alaska-spawned fish, with the state reporting that:
- The Ketchikan area catch as 65 percent Alaska
- The Wrangel-Petersburg area catch as 73 percent Alaska
- And the Northern Inside catch as 86 percent Alaska
But when it comes to anglers fishing the outer coast of the 49th state, the genetics study reported that “Canada was the largest contributor to the Outside area all-season sport fishery harvest (65%), followed by U.S. South (24%) and Alaska (10%)….”
In 2019, the study said, the total sport Chinook salmon harvest was 29,700 fish, including an estimated
6,600 Alaska hatchery fish….(but) the vast majority of the harvest occurred in Outside areas (ports of Craig/Klawock, Sitka, Yakutat, Elfin Cove, and Gustavus, followed by harvest in Ketchikan, and Petersburg/Wrangell.”
Those Outside areas are where the catch of non-Alaska Chinook becomes an issue. Anglers in 2019 likely harvested something on the order of 18,000 to 19,000 Canadian and Lower 48 Chinook. But their catch was just a fraction of the Alaska harvest, as is the case every year.
In 2025, despite a commercial troll harvest of Chinook that the state ranked as “the lowest in 66 years,” Alaska trollers killed 105,000 Chinook, about 70,000 of which appear to have been of Canadian and Lower 48 origin. This directed harvest is about 10 times the number of Canadian and Lower 48 Chinook that died as bycatch in the Bering Sea pollock trawl fishery in 2020, according to the NOAA.
And the Bering Sea trawl fisheries bycatch of more than 32,000 Chinook was that year the highest in the decade, according to NOAA. The number fell to less than half that at 13,783 the next year. It has since fluctuated between 6,337 (2022) and 18,914 (2025) as the trawl fleet continues to experiment with technology intended to reduce the volume of bycatch.
This bycatch, it should be noted, is the fallout from the nation’s largest food-fish fishery, which harvests roughly 3 billion pounds of seafood per year, according to NOAA. The state’s commercial salmon fishery have only once reached a third of that catch. That happened in 2013 when the state’s record slamon harvest reached 272 million fish with a combined weight of 1.1 billion pounds.
And yet their “incidental” catch of Chinook, a species in trouble pretty much everywhere in the Pacific, far exceeds that of the trawlers. But that’s not the only issue with the Alaska salmon harvest.
No harvest since 2013 has come anywhere close to generating the poundage landed that season, although odd-year harvests dominated by pink salmon have regularly come close to 200 million fish and sometimes topped that bar. The 2025 harvest was near 195 million, but weighed less than 793 million pounds.
The poundage loss has largely been due to the shrinking size of the high-value Alaska salmon – kings, cohos and sockeyes. The average commercially caught king weighed 10.7 pounds last year and was down to 10.3 pounds this year, with the average sockeye coming in at 5 pounds.
The shrinkage of Chinook has proven astounding. The average commercially caught king in the 1990s weighed 17.8 pounds, a weight similar to what it weighed in the 1980s. Sockeye have not shrunk as much, but the 1990’s average was more than three-quarters of a pound higher at 5.78 pounds, according to state data.
The declines in size are thought by many scientists to be linked to food availability given the current competition between the huge numbers of salmon now at sea thanks, in part, to hatcheries in Alaska, Japan and Russia.
Alaska has, in the past, made up for what it lost in size by increasing its salmon production volume, but that balloon went bust this year. The season’s catch of 98.9 million salmon fell more than 27 million salmon short of an already low preseason forecast of 126 million and marked the first time in the 21st Century that the harvest has fallen under 100 million.
Alaska fisheries could once make a legitimate claim to being “the best-managed, most sustainable in the world,” but that claim is getting harder and harder to defend with almost every even-numbered year now being classified as a “disaster” due to runs that fail to match forecasts.
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