Saving Seafood

ALASKA: Study probes environmental drivers of salmon bycatch in Alaska pollock fishery

December 1, 2025 — NOAA Fisheries scientists are examining how ocean conditions influence Chinook and chum salmon bycatch in the eastern Bering Sea pollock fishery, one of the world’s largest seafood harvests. The new study, led by researchers at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center and partner institutions, analyzes more than a decade of observer data to identify environmental factors linked to salmon encounters.

Alaska’s pollock fleet lands more than 2 billion pounds annually, but unintentional salmon catch remains a longstanding management concern, particularly for western Alaska Chinook and chum stocks that have declined sharply in recent years. These salmon are important to regional communities and vulnerable to bycatch because their migration routes overlap with pollock fishing grounds. NOAA and the industry have implemented multiple avoidance measures, but managers say a clearer understanding of what drives bycatch is needed.

“This is an issue that’s the subject of ongoing discussions at North Pacific Fishery Management Council meetings,” said lead author and fisheries biologist Lukas DeFilippo. “There’s limited information available on how environmental factors affect bycatch, which could potentially be useful for informing ongoing scientific and policy discussions.”

Read the full article at National Fisherman

ALASKA: Inside an Alaska national park, a fight looms over a possible gold mine

November 24, 2025 — High in a mountain valley on the far west side of this tidal inlet sits an unusual plot of land.

It’s a private parcel, with a gravel airstrip and four or five buildings that make up a small worker camp. But there are no towns in sight. Known as the Johnson Tract, the property is fully surrounded by the vast Lake Clark National Park — millions of wild acres marked by the broad white peaks of a volcano, sprawling glaciers and a muddy ocean coastline patrolled by brown bears.

Beneath the Johnson Tract lies a potential fortune. For decades, geologists have eyed gold, copper and zinc deposits thought to be worth billions of dollars. But they’ve never been tapped.

Now, amid surging gold prices and rising demand for metals like copper, the prospect is generating new excitement — and concern.

A prominent Alaska mining company is leasing the Johnson Tract from its Indigenous owners, and the property, some 125 miles southwest of Anchorage, has emerged as one of the most promising mining prospects in Southcentral Alaska.

But conservationists, commercial salmon fishermen and local lodge owners fear a mine, encircled by the federal protected area, could disrupt harvests and harm wildlife, including an endangered population of beluga whales.

Getting the Johnson Tract’s minerals to buyers will require trucking ore through a now-roadless corner of the national park to a future port.

Critics point out that the bay where the mining company, Contango Ore, Inc., wants to build a shipping terminal is an important winter habitat for the endangered belugas. Concern for the whales, among other objections, led mine opponents to sue federal regulators earlier this year over a permit that Contango received to build a short access road and expand an airstrip at the site.

Read the full article at Anchorage Daily News

ALASKA: Trump administration proposes offshore leasing in almost all Alaska waters

November 24, 2025 — The Trump administration has released a plan for offshore oil and gas leasing that would open up almost all Alaska marine waters to development, along with the entire Pacific coast and the Gulf of Mexico.

The Alaska portion of the plan proposes 21 lease sales through 2031, five of them in Cook Inlet, two in the Beaufort Sea, two in the Chukchi Sea and the others in other marine areas. Those include a lease sale in a newly designated “High Arctic” area that lies beyond the 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone and where U.S. territorial rights are not yet clear.

The only federal Alaska offshore area without a proposed lease sale is the North Aleutian Basin, where oil leasing is under an indefinite ban to protect salmon-rich Bristol Bay.

Read the full article at Anchorage Daily News

ALASKA: Prince William Sound commercial season valued below average at $90M

November 12, 2025 —  State fisheries officials are estimating the Prince William Sound commercial salmon harvests to be valued at $90.99 million this year, still 3% less than the 10-year average.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) season summary released on Oct. 31 said the near average value can largely be attributed to Eastern District hatchery pink salmon, Copper River District sockeye salmon, and Port Chalmers Subdistrict remote release hatchery chum salmon commercial fisheries – plus hatchery cost recovery chum and pink salmon fisheries.

A total of 410 drift gillnet, 27 set gillnet, and 216 purse seine commercial permit holders – including 177 primary and 39 secondary – fished in at least one fishing period, according to ADF&G.

The following was released by the Cordova Times

Alaska Supreme Court backs lower court, dismissing challenge to state’s salmon management

October 15, 2025 — The Alaska Supreme Court has ruled that a lower court acted correctly in dismissing an Alaska resident’s challenge to the state’s salmon management, noting that the lawsuit did not actually challenge any government action.

“He did not challenge any specific policy, regulation, or action by the state,” the Alaska Supreme Court said in its opinion. “The superior court ruled the claims were nonjusticiable and dismissed the suit for failure to state a claim on which relief can be granted. We affirm the superior court’s ruling that the resident failed to state a justiciable claim.”

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Alaska Supreme Court upholds dismissal of lawsuit challenging Yukon-Kuskokwim salmon management

October 13, 2025 — Alaska judges will not hear a lawsuit alleging that the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has mishandled the state’s valuable salmon returns.

On Friday, the Alaska Supreme Court upheld a lower-court decision that dismissed a case brought by Juneau resident Eric Forrer in 2022.

Forrer had argued that years of declining salmon returns in the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers clearly showed that the department was violating a section of the Alaska Constitution that requires fish be managed for sustained yield.

Forrer, a long-time Alaska resident, has a history of personal-use and commercial fishing, including on the Yukon River.

In his suit, he sought a declaration confirming that the Fish and Game was violating the constitution and sought an injunction directing the department “to fulfill the sustained yield mandate.”

Bethel Superior Court Judge Nathaniel Peters dismissed the case in 2023, but Forrer appealed to the Alaska Supreme Court.

In an 18-page order published Friday, the five-member court said unanimously that because Forrer didn’t challenge a specific policy, law or regulation, Peters was correct and the case should be dismissed.

Read the full article at Alaska Beacon

Warming water has varied impact on salmon populations

October 8, 2025 — Wild salmon are super weird for a variety of reasons, including response to warming climate conditions, says fisheries researcher Peter Westley of the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

“Salmon have really evolved in places with changing conditions, including volcanoes blowing up, glaciers melting and making really good salmon habitat,” Westley said on Wednesday, Sept. 24, in a webinar from his office on the Fairbanks campus. “Salmon are experiencing the front lines of (environmental) changes. Trends across the globe since 1991, the rate of warming is much, much faster in the Arctic. Salmon are experiencing warming and rapid change of warming.”

To maintain healthy salmon populations, the fish need cool, complex, connected, clean habitat, said Westley, an associate professor and Wakefield chair of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences at UAF’s Department of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences.

Connectivity is important so that the salmon have the ability to move around, he said. It is also important to protect the processes important to the fish, like the way groundwater comes up to cool the water, and gravel has to come into the streams, he said.

“Salmon bury their offspring alive and leave them in the gravel for months on end, nine to 10 months under the gravel.  They are born in fresh water, and then they decide freshwater is not for them and migrate to the ocean, and then they come back,” he said. “They can fill up streams in very high density and go back to their natal streams. They fight their way back home, and their bodies decay and become nutrients for others, including bears. Salmon are weird, but also awesome.”

Read the full article at National Fisherman

Conservation groups to sue over hatchery salmon in Columbia River

September 24, 2025 — The Wild Fish Conservancy (WFC) and The Conservation Angler (TCA) have announced plans to sue the federal government over the damage they claim hatchery fish are doing to wild salmon, steelhead, and orca populations.

“Mitchell Act hatcheries are causing harm that we know how to prevent. We’re taking this action today as part of our long-standing commitment to hold the federal government accountable and prevent further violations that imperil these species and the ecosystems they depend on,” WFC Executive Director Emma Helverson said in a release. “It’s time for NOAA to stop prioritizing maintaining harmful hatchery practices over their responsibility to protect wild fish for current and future generations.”

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Raising the idea of salmon farms in Alaska, Gov. Dunleavy swims against a tide of skeptics

August 25, 2025 — Amid the hubbub of President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Alaska summit last week, Gov. Mike Dunleavy, posting on social media, posed a provocative question.

“Alaska is a leader in fresh caught wild salmon. We could also be a leader in the farmed salmon industry. Why not do both instead of importing farmed salmon from Scotland?,” he wrote, sharing an article about the value of fish farming in Scotland, where Atlantic salmon are raised in net pens in the ocean. “This would be a great opportunity for Alaska.”

The answer from scientists, wild salmon advocates, restaurant people and regular salmon-eating Alaskans has come swiftly, full of alarm and often along the lines of one of the early commenters on his post, who wrote, “Are you insane?”

Read the full article at Anchorage Daily News

ALASKA: Alaska salmon harvest tops to 129 million fish

August 15, 2025 — Alaska’s 2025 commercial salmon harvest reached over 129 million fish through Aug. 12, with sockeye, keta and coho catches appearing on pace to reach total annual projections.

Those projected 2025 harvests would add up to 214.6 million salmon, including over 138 million pink, 52.9 million sockeye, 20.8 million keta, 2.3 million coho and 144,000 kings.

Data compiled by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game showed the statewide pink harvest at 62.3 million fish, followed by 51.3 million sockeyes, 14.5 million chum, 888,000 coho and 150,000 king salmon.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman