August 31, 2021 — Bill Alstrom lives in St. Mary’s on the lower Yukon River. It used to be that if he wanted fresh salmon for dinner, he’d throw a net in the river to catch a couple. But with fishing closures this season, he can’t do that anymore.
“It’s hard to comprehend that this is happening in my lifetime,” said Alstrom. “It makes me sad just thinking about it.”
Chum salmon stocks have sharply declined over the last two years in Western Alaska. It’s a major problem because people in the region, like Alstrom, depend heavily on the fish for food and for work. With chinook salmon low for decades, chum were the fish that families could depend on until last year, when the summer chum run dropped below half of its usual numbers. This year, the run dropped even further, to record lows. The State of Alaska has closed fishing for chum to protect the runs.
Scientists are in the early stages of trying to understand the crash.
Biologist Katie Howard with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game said that the chum declines are not just occurring in the Yukon River.
“When we talk to colleagues in the Lower 48 and Canada, Japan, Russia, they are all reporting really poor chum runs,” she said. “So it’s not just a Yukon phenomenon. It’s not just an Alaska phenomenon, but pretty much everywhere.”.
So why are the chum numbers so low? The short answer is that no one really knows for sure. But there are a lot of theories.
Every week during the summer, subsistence users, biologists and fishery managers gather on a weekly teleconference hosted by the Yukon River Drainage Fisheries Association. They share information and ask each other questions, and the subsistence users bring up one theory for the decline again and again: bycatch.