Alaska Airlines suspended it’s ceremonial, first-of-the-season flights of Copper River king salmon to Seattle last year. Can the brand itself survive the significant number of anywhere-but-Copper River kings now sold as Copper River kings?/Alaska Airlines photo

A big fish story

In a society where lying has increasingly been normalized as acceptable behavior on the road to success in business and politics, the commercial fishing industry in Alaska’s Prince William Sound deserves some sort of special award.

Why? Because they are making a lot of money selling non-Copper River king salmon as Copper River king salmon.

Salmon labeled and sold in this way brought Sound fishermen an astounding average of $23.01 per pound this year, according to recently released Alaska Department of Fish and Game data. That was more than 16 times the all-species average of $1.40 per pound for Alaska salmon, and more than 35 times greater than what fishermen were paid for the 44.1 million pink salmon that comprised 45 percent of the 2026 harvest.

How many of these high-value Chinook, as most of the rest of the world calls king salmon, were actually the progeny of kings that spawned in the Copper? Nobody knows for sure, but it’s not 100 percent, and the percentage, which varies from year to year, has in the past been documented to be as low as 57 percent.

To date, the fact that your Copper River king might not be a Copper River king at all hasn’t changed the pricing.

Not only did the 2026 price paid for Copper River kings put to shame the price paid for any other Alaska salmon – Southeast Chinook (king) came in number two at $8.35 per pound – it buried the $3.67 per pound average being paid Norwegian salmon farmers and the $3.38 per pound paid Chilean salmon farmers.

Farmed salmon now dominate the world market, and the Norwegians and Chileans, who produce the bulk of it, set the global pricing benchmark for salmon. Other than the Copper River and Southeast Alaska kings, the only Alaska salmon to top the Norwegian price at the dock this year were Cook Inlet kings, 419 of which sold for $4.22 per pound, according to the state.

Sound sockeye, many of which appear to be slipped into the market as “Copper River sockeye” whether they are or not, did beat the Chilean price, however, and delivered $3.43 for Alaska fishermen, nearly twice the statewide average price of $1.83 per pound for other Alaska sockeye.

What has made the Copper River fish so valuable at the dock is a cachet that boosts their price at the dock and steadily escalates their value as they move through the supply chain on the way to the retail market. Even before the season opened this year, Goldbelly’s Pike Place Market in Seattle was offering Copper River kings at $129.99 per pound for those willing to get in line to wait for “the king of the sea.”

“The king of the sea” is the cachet, though, not necessarily the biggest of the lies surrounding the sale of Copper River kings.

The claim

Copper River kings are said to be special because they “embark on one of the most grueling migrations in the wild, swimming over 300 miles of frigid, fast-moving waters,” the Copper River/Prince William Sound Marketing Association proclaims. “This journey forces them to develop higher fat content – particularly those prized omega-3s – resulting in a richer, buttery texture and more vibrant color than salmon from easier waters. It’s not marketing; it’s marine biology.”

Actually, it is marketing, given that the salmon bought as a Copper River king could have come from the Bering River, a 25-mile-long stream just southeast of the Copper River, or the Situk River, an 18-mile-long stream a little farther south, or the Alsek River, the 180-mile-long river just south of the Situk, or one of dozens of other Chinook-producing streams, rivers and hatcheries from there all the way south to the Elk River hatchery in southern Oregon.

Then again, that Copper River king could have come from other rivers where some Chinook swim upstream against 300 miles or more of fast-moving water to reach their spawning grounds, such as in the 400-mile Stikine or the 385-mile Skeena or the South Thompson River, a 36-mile-long spawning stream that requires Chinook to first swim about 400 miles up the Fraser River.

Not to mention the Chinook of the vast Columbia River drainage.

Chinook spawning in the headwaters of the Salmon River in Idaho undertake a journey of more than 900 miles up the Columbia and Snake Rivers to get home. That’s even more than 1,900 miles covered by Yukon River kings spawning in the Yukon Territory and northern British Columbia.

At this time, you cannot legally buy a Yukon Chinook because commercial fishing seasons have been closed to protect a species struggling to survive. But Chinook from the Stikine, Skeena, Bulkley, Thompson, Salmon, Snake and a variety of other Columbia River tributaries far from the sea show up in troll catches from Southeast Alaska south, as well as in that Copper River king catch.

So there are a lot of plain, old “Pacific Chinook salmon” out there that have been forced to “develop higher fat content” to supply the energy to make it home, and some of them likely have higher fat content than Copper River kings.

What this means in terms of health and taste is another issue. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) credits wild Chinook as the salmon with the highest fat content, with 13.3 grams per 100 grams of flesh compared to 12.3 grams for farmed Atlantic salmon. But the USDA also says the farmed Atlantic salmon has 2.1 grams of healthy Omega-3 fat in that 100-gram serving compared to only 1.7 grams for Chinook. 

Canadian scientists who in 2023 undertook “A Comparative Analysis of the Nutritional Quality of
Salmon Species in Canada among Different Production Methods and Regions” concluded that “the greatest differences in nutritional content were between species, rather than if it was wild or farmed….While nutritional content differed among salmon types, each type can provide dietary essential nutrients that can benefit consumers.”

Oregon State University researchers had come to a similar conclusion years earlier and reported that  “whether farmed or wild, salmon are tasty fish and a healthy protein choice. They look and taste nearly the same.”

Every Alaskan, of course, knows that any wild salmon, with the possible exception of pink salmon, taste better than any farmed salmon. But if you want to have fun with your friends sometime, hold a party and serve up a mix of unidentified salmon species with some farmed salmon thrown in just for fun.

(Editor’s note: The author has actually done this and discovered regional differences in taste, with some folks from the Lower 48 actually favoring relatively low-fat pink salmon filets and most Alaskans unable to determine any difference in taste between sockeye from the Copper and Kenai rivers, and many unable to determine any difference in taste between sockeye and king salmon.)

All of which brings us to the big, Copper River king salmon lie.

The decline of actual “Copper River king salmon” that began in the harvest of 2019 and appears to be continuing/ADFG

The big lie

Here things get real easy to sort out because, in this case, to paraphrase that line from the Copper River/Prince William Sound Marketing Association, the issue isn’t about “marketing; it’s geography.” And what genetic testing of Copper River kings has found is that a whole lot of them were spawned somewhere other than the Copper River.

It’s possible that Copper River king salmon for which someone paid big money weren’t even hatched in a river. It could have been spawned and reared in a hatchery somewhere in Canada or the Lower 48 before being sent to sea as part of an ocean ranching operation.

The state of Alaska has known about all of this for years, but ignored the false advertising involved in selling non-Copper River kings as Copper River kings and the consumer protection aspects of allowing the sort of advertising to go on. In fishing period five of the 2021 Copper River king season, a study being run by Fish and Game recorded that “Chinook salmon, originating from stocks across the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, outnumbered Copper River stocks.”

On that occasion, the study said, “nonlocal stocks made up 61.6 percent” of the harvest. So if you bought a “Copper River king salmon” caught during the June 14 fishery opening in 2021, the odds were about two in three that you received a “Who Knows from Where king salmon.”

The state genetics study ran from 2018 to 2021, and one of the things the agency discovered while doing the research “is that the “harvest proportions of nonlocal Chinook salmon” increased “due to conservative management actions that closed the inside waters of the Copper River.

“This has served to increase effort outside the barrier islands where migratory fish are more likely to be present. It is assumed that most nonlocal Chinook salmon are foraging during migration. Furthermore, the abundance of foraging fish nearshore in the Copper River District probably plays a significant role in the proportion of nonlocal Chinook salmon present in the harvest.”

The agency’s response to Alaska fishermen picking off greater numbers of nonlocal Chinook outside the barrier islands has been to move the fishery outside of the barrier islands anytime the Copper River Chinook salmon return looks weak.

Since the late 1970s, when the state began a massive operation to farm the ocean with hatchery-raised fish and the Commercial Fisheries Division of the Fish and Game became the operational arm of the Alaska salmon industry, the Divisional philosophy appears to have become focused on producing the maximum harvest of salmon in Alaska and to hell with anybody else’s salmon.

With a weak run of Copper River kings forecast for this year, the 2026 season  opened with the announcement that “waters within the expanded Chinook salmon inside closure area will be CLOSED during this period.” And when the run appeared even weaker than expected, the closure was expanded to block fishing in a small area north of the originally closed area.

These closures lasted until the king season ended on June 4 with a harvest of fewer than 4,300 Chinook. Fish and Game would later express hope that it had met the minimum, in-river escapement goal of 21,000 Copper River kings thanks to “short-duration fishing periods, expansion of closed waters, and extended closures starting in early June.”

There was no breakdown of how many non-Copper River fish were among the 4,244 Chinook reportedly caught off the mouth of the river because of the expansion of closed waters. But when the agency prosecuted the fishery in a similar fashion in 2021, more than 40 percent of the fish caught and sold as “Copper River kings” turned out to be from somewhere other than the Copper River.

The data would indicate that purchasing a “Copper River king” in 2021 and actually receiving a “Copper River king ” was a crapshoot. There’s no reason to believe the situation was any different this year.

All that can be said is that if you paid that $129.99 per pound, you likely had a better than 50-50 chance of getting an actual Copper River king. But it might not have been an all that much better chance.

The ‘Alaska’ scam

Bits and pieces of how the Alaska Chinook fisheries work like this have been known for a long time, though not in the detail they are now known thanks to genetic testing.

Still, Portland magazine way back in 2017 reported that “Chinook salmon caught in Alaska often owe their very existence to power bills and political arrangements along the Columbia River.”  Their information at the time came from Bonneville Fish Hatchery managers who had data on where the tags on their hatchery fish showed up.

They told reporter Chuck Thompson that hundreds of thousands of young hatchery Chinook head down the Columbia River to sea every year, and “within two to four years, many of these hatchery fish will be caught as wild in Alaskan waters. Eventually, at least a few will return to Portland, in the form of dinner.

“In the seafood industry, there may be no word more powerful than ‘Alaska,'” Thompson wrote. “With good reason. In our GMO/Food Inc era, in which the ‘certified’ provenance of everything from tomatoes to chicken to water is subject to scrutiny, Alaskan seafood is one of the last unassailable wild food sources. But when is a ‘wild Alaska salmon’ neither wild nor very Alaskan?”

Thompson at the time questioned the entirety of the marketing of Alaska ‘wild’ salmon.

“Alaska king salmon connotes a foodstuff sourced today the way it’s been since ancient times. Fish born in remote streams are eventually caught in the open ocean and brought to market. Those not harvested by humans – and which manage to escape the cormorants, sea lions, and grizzlies – return to fight their way up their natal streams to spawn as God intended, renewing an almost-mythological life cycle.

“This is the Great Circle of Being version of the story, probable source of any emotional triggers that help steer conscientious diners to splurge for that $40 king special at their favorite restaurant. But in our messy, complicated reality, the Alaska Chinook that lands on Portland plates and in the chilled cases at high-end groceries may actually have started its life packed alongside a couple hundred thousand nearly identical fingerlings at a Columbia River hatchery.”

It’s hard to imagine what Thompson might have thought if he’d discovered that some of these same Columbia River hatchery Chinook were being sold not only as high-priced Alaska king salmon but as ultra-high-priced Copper River king salmon.

One can only wonder how long this charade can continue into the rapidly evolving technological future. Alaska Fish and Game biologists have already demonstrated the ability to identify true Copper River kings from alleged Copper River kings, and rapid genetic testing is coming into play elsewhere in the country.

NOAA Fisheries Office of Law Enforcement officers last year used it to identify illegally trafficked fish from Asia and South America. European researchers are pushing for ever broader use in all sorts of fisheries.

“DNA technology has been shown as an effective tool to monitor seafood trade and improve transparency,” they wrote in the journal Fisheries Research last year. “It has highlighted seafood species mislabelling on a global scale and has attracted the interest of policy makers, government authorities, and other stakeholders.”

“Tools to evaluate catch location are on the rise and offer an unprecedented opportunity to expand investigations of seafood mislabelling. Diagnostic Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) have been used extensively in the context of population genetics and have the potential to reveal trends in seafood fraud.”

Ironically, Alaska Republican Senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan have been big backers of increasing the traceability of seafood, as have many Alaska commercial fishermen. It will be interesting to see whether they will back rapid genetic testing to tie Chinook salmon to their states and/or country of origin.

Especially when it’s clear that such testing could come back to bite the state’s most valuable salmon in the anal fin.