July 23, 2026 — When Stan Zuray began noticing white spots, a mushy texture and a weird “sour watermelon” smell in the Chinook salmon he was pulling from the Yukon River, he knew something was going wrong.
That was back in the 1980s. By about 1990, he and others just stopped fishing what he calls “the ass end of the king run” because the fish were so low in quality, he said.
Everyone stopped fishing earlier than normal, he said. “You just get tired of the bum-looking fish,” said Zuray, who lives in the village of Tanana but still has his Boston accent after spending half a century in the Alaska Bush.
It was an ominous turn for a river famous for producing some of the world’s biggest and most prized wild salmon. Chinook salmon, also known as king salmon, is so exalted among the five Pacific salmon species that it is designated Alaska’s official state fish. And the Yukon River Chinooks were traditionally considered among the best of the best.
The culprit in the mushy, weird-smelling salmon was Ichthyophonus, a parasite found in oceans around the world, but a particular menace to the health of Yukon River Chinook salmon.
Zuray is known nationally as a featured character in the reality TV show “Yukon Men” and from his own YouTube broadcasts and a biographical documentary. Within Alaska fishing circles, he is well known as a former subsistence representative on the Alaska Board of Fisheries.
In the science community, he is known for his work as one of the early Yukon River Ichthyophonus researchers. He set up a program and documented infection rates at Rampart Falls, a spot on the river near the tiny Alaska village of Rampart, collecting data that has become critical to current studies.
Zuray said he could smell the infection as fish dried on racks in the traditional way and the parasite multiplied rapidly in the warm sunlight. He dissected samples and documented how Icthyophonus attacks a salmon’s heart. “I squish it in my hand by closing my fingers, and the heart will ooze out through my fingers,” he said.