A Copper River Chinook salmon, one of the fish Alaskans call ‘king’ /Craig Medred photo

The secret Alaska Chinook slaughter

How is it that in a state with so many in tizzy about the bycatch of Chinook in the Bering Sea pollock trawl fishery, no one has uttered a peep about the massive waste of Chinook in the commercial salmon fisheries of Southeast Alaska?

The latest report from the technical committee of the Pacific Salmon Commission reports that more than 48,000 Chinook died there as a result of “incidental mortality.” This is slightly more than twice the 23,255 salmon the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported as dead as bycatch in the Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands  (BSAI) pollock and groundfish fisheries in the same year. 

Incidental mortality – fish killed but never recovered – is the commercial salmon fishing equivalent of bycatch – fish that are killed but cannot be sold.

Maybe Alaskans are so selfish they don’t care about all the Chinook incidentally killed in Southeast because most are of Canadian or Lower 48 origin. Or maybe the whole freak out over trawl Chinook bycatch was only a political ploy to stir up more votes for former Rep. Mary Peltola, the Congresswoman for all of Bethel and the queen of bycatch, in her run for the Senate. Or maybe Alaskans are just ignorant about how dirty Alaska salmon fisheries are in general.

The Commission report records that slightly more than 22 percent of the Chinook, the fish Alaskans call kings, that are killed in Southeast die due to incidental mortality. This means that more than one out of every five kings killed in the region would be described by most as “wasted.”

Southeast kings weighed an average of 11.2 pounds in 2025, according to Alaska Department of Fish and Game figures. So to catch a reported 1.6 million pounds of Chinook, you can calculate that the Southeast fisheries wasted another 539,000 pounds.

The Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands (BSAI) trawl fisheries look clean by comparison.

“In the past few decades, salmon Prohibited Species Catch in Alaska has averaged about 200,000 fish annually from an average pollock catch of more than 1.3 million metric tons,” scientists reported in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science in 2020. “In the Bering Sea, Chinook and chum salmon accounted for approximately 10 and 90 percent of the salmon PSC, respectively from 2011 to 2019.”

Nearly all of the Chinook caught in the trawl fisheries are immature and thus relatively small. But even if one considers them equal in weight to the Southeast average, the total poundage harvested as bycatch, according to that study, comes to 224,000 pounds of Chinook sacrificed to catch 28.7 billion pounds of pollock.

Compare this to the 539,000 pounds of Chinook sacrificed to harvest 1.6 million pounds of Chinook. Then think about it all in the context of  “feeding people all over the world” as the Alaska Salmon Alliance likes to put things in its promotion of the state’s commercial salmon fisheries.

A reasonable individual might well conclude that the best thing for both the salmon and the people of the world would be to ignore the pollock trawl fishery and shut down the Panhandle fisheries involved in those incidental kills of Chinook.

But then again, pound for pound, the Chinook are worth a lot more money, becuase they are sold to the wealthy, and the value of that pollock is low, because most of it is eaten by lower-income folk.  And money buys influence in the 49th state.

Discarded versus lost

Of course, the bycatch – unlike the incidental mortality – needn’t be lost.  Bycatch salmon are counted on the decks of trawlers and could be salvaged for donations to the poor. Trawlers are already encouraged to do this via the federal ” Prohibited Species Donation” program.

For better or worse, however, these donations are voluntary, and there is no clear accounting of how much bycatch salmon goes to Seashare, the Bainbridge Island, Wash., nonprofit authorized to accept and distribute nonsaleable, prohibited-species catch. 

Seattle-based Trident Seafoods – which runs groundfish processing plants in Akutan and Sand Point– claims “92 percent of our king salmon and 70 percent of our chum salmon bycatch went to food programs in 2025.” Trident has a long association with Seashare, but there is no way to independently confirm how much Chinook it donated to the organization.

National Fishermen, a trade publication, in October reported that 8 percent of Seashare food distributions are now credited to bycatch contributions, but did not report the volume of seafood other than to say it comprised 270 million servings.

Seashare does not appear to report the volume anywhere, but partner businesses put it at between 1.5 million pounds (Alaska Airlines), 1.7 million pounds (Channel Fish Processing) and  1.8 million pounds (Southstream Seafoods) in 2025. And Cause IQ, nonprofit monitoring organization, reported Seashare distributed more than 1.68 million pounds of seafood in 2024. 

Eight percent of these numbers would work out to somewhere around 120,000 to 144,000 pounds of bycatch, which is not a lot considering the volumes of Chinook, halibut and chum salmon pulled aboard trawlers.

Still, there is no doubt that some Chinook bycatch goes to charity to feed the poor, including some of the poor in Alaska, and the federal government, which manages the groundfisheries of the Alaska coast, could require these donations of salmon and halibut bycatch if it chose.

There can be no donation of “incidental mortality” because these are fish killed in inefficient fisheries that leave their carcasses floating away into the sea. And the number of Chinook dead to incidental mortality is likely under-reported, possibly significantly so.

New data raises questions

The “sublegal incidental mortality” reported by the Commission in 2025 involved 29,617 kings. These are Chinooks under 28 inches in length, which Southeast fishermen, both commercial and sport, are required to release. Most of the so-called troll “shakers” were thought to survive along with kings freed from purse seines or gillnets.

But a peer-reviewed study published in Fisheries Research last year raised questions about these assumptions.

“Although most Pacific salmon directed fisheries target maturing homing salmon, smaller fish are also frequently caught and released if they fall below legal-size limits, particularly with Chinook salmon, or in the hopes of catching a larger fish in recreational fisheries,” the Canadian researchers involved in that study wrote. “However, across many gears and fisheries, smaller or sub-legal sized Pacific salmon are more prone to injury and more likely to suffer high release mortality (RM). Complicating the matter further, most studies examining RM have focused on legal-sized (e.g., larger) individuals, potentially biasing estimates of RM, which are likely too conservative when assessed at the population level.”

The study noted that salmon caught by hook and line, whether by commercial trollers or anglers, were most vulnerable in marine and estuarine environments, and became less vulnerable as they moved upstream in creeks and rivers, a phenomenon first reported on Alaska’s Little Susitna River way back in the last century.

A 1992 study authored by Doug Vincent-Lang, now the Alaska Commissioner of Fish and Game, reported that 69 percent of coho salmon “caught with sport gear in the estuary of the Little Su” died after release. Hook and release mortality fell to 12 percent above the estuary and miles upstream at the state’s fish-counting weir, mortality for coho dipnetted and released fell to 1 percent.

Other studies have followed on that one and led the Canadian researchers to conclude that released salmon are most resilient “to negative aspects of capture and release in upper areas of the freshwater migration.” Elsewhere, they took the resilience of salmon to be the opposite.

“Release mortality risk was high (26 to 45 percent observed mortality) in all fisheries and environments
when captured fish were bleeding, had high levels of scale loss, had fin or eye damage, and were exposed to low oxygen from net crowding and exhaustion,” they wrote. “Highest RM risk ( greater than 45 percent observed mortality) was associated with gill net and purse seine fisheries. Air exposure and handling duration contributed to high RM when water temperatures in any environment exceeded 18 degrees Centigrade (64.5 degrees Fahrenheit). Estuarine and lower river environments have elevated RM risk due to osmotic, maturation, and temperature changes. Short to medium term (less than 24 hour) observations were poor predictors of longer-term RM, and observations of at least 5 to 10 days were needed to assess more complete RM rates.”

The Pacific Salmon Commission now appears to be estimating incidental mortality at only 2 percent for Chinook caught in Alaska gillnet fisheries. The number is orders of magnitude higher for seine fisheries at 48 percent, but that is linked to a large harvest of “sublegal incidental mortality.”

These are those kings under 28 inches long. More than 80 percent of the incidental harvest in the seine fishery is of such fish. Much of this could be linked to the difficulty of identifying smallish kings captured along with large numbers of chum salmon in a seine. A Chinook under 28 inches usually weighs somewhere between eight and nine pounds. Chums are in the same range. The average for the harvest this year was 8.3 pounds, according to state numbers.

Finding what you look for

Commercial fishing is a messy business, and in a lot of Alaska’s commercial salmon fisheries, nobody is sure of how messy. The trawl fishery stands out mainly because it is the most closely watched Alaska fishery, with observers onboard many boats keeping track of what is hauled in.

Outside of Southeast, where there has been a lot of investigation of incidental mortality rates over the years, nobody really knows what the king salmon incidental mortality rates for seine and gillnet fisheries because there is no monitoring.

What is known is that significant numbers of kings are caught in many of these fisheries and that many gillnetters keep a landing net handy. Why? Because Chinook, or other large salmon, often entangle themselves in gillnets rather than getting gilled, and these fish are prone to drop out when the net is pulled in.

The landing net is kept handy to scoop up dead or dying dropouts. Nobody reports how many of those dropouts are missed and sink away out of sight. But the Canadian study on release mortality certainly didn’t make gillnet and seine fisheries look much better than trawl fisheries.

“Our risk analysis showed that in terms of fishing gear type, purse seines and gill nets yielded proportionally more “very high risk” release mortality outcomes than the other gear (angling studies, and beach seine studies),” the researchers reported. “The primary issue with purse seines is that bycatch often remains in nets and on board too long resulting in injury and asphyxiation leading to poor survival after release.

“Gillnets also cause similar outcomes for bycatch resulting from long periods of time when fish are entangled. Gillnets may be the riskiest gear because, unlike purse seines, they are used in all three environment types and over a large range of soak times.”

The study did conclude that beach seines, which are being considered as a replacement for set gillnets along the beaches of Cook Inlet, do reduce release mortality but must be used carefully.

“Set sizes should be kept small to allow quick sorting, particularly if water levels are shallow or temperatures are high and nets should be kept loose during sorting to minimize crowding injuries and stress,” they wrote. “Often the net is pulled farther up shore to facilitate sorting, but this leaves little water in the net, increasing risk of asphyxiation. Beach seines should not be pulled too shallow if the set is large or there is low water velocity flowing through the net. We also suggest prioritizing the release of bycatch, which can be especially difficult if sorting in deep water and if the release species is more likely to dive.”

The study did not compare beach seining to commercial dipnetting, which has already replaced some Cook Inlet set netting with some success. But all indications are that it also reduces incidental mortality.

Of course, Alaskans had the ultimate in selective fisheries before statehood in the form of fish traps, which allowed salmon to be held and sorted without injury. But commercial fishermen convinced naive Alaskans that fish traps were the cause of salmon declines, and the traps were banned.

Fish traps were not the cause of salmon declines. Overfishing and colder water in the Pacific Ocean were the causes of salmon declines. Most fishery declines in human history have been caused in part of wholly by overfishing or, in the case of salmon, blocking waterways so the fish could no longer reach their spawning grounds.

Often these things happened because it is easier to talk about conserving salmon than to do what is sometimes necessary to conserve salmon, and because people are sometimes willing to let their ‘need’ for salmon, be that a need for food or money, get in the way of what is best for the fish.