Saving Seafood

ALASKA: After historic crash, Yukon River’s iconic king salmon run shows early signs of rebound

August 18, 2026 — For the past few years, smokehouses in the Yukon River village of Anvik have sat empty.

After salmon populations crashed, dozens of Alaska Native communities along the river faced a stark new reality, one without the fish that fed families and sustained Yup’ik and Athabascan traditions for generations.

This summer, though, smoke once again wafted through Anvik, on the middle Yukon some 350 miles west of Anchorage.

The river’s two main species, chinook and chum, have recorded a surprising uptick in numbers. And in spite of state regulations that bar fishing for chinook, Anvik’s fishermen have caught dozens of the fish this year, plus even more salmon of other species — meaning that there are enough to share with elders, hang in smokehouses and store in freezers.

“It’s the first time I’ve seen the smokehouses smoking in five years,” said Robert Walker, former chief of the Anvik Tribal Council. “I was just amazed. People are so happy.”

The returning fish could represent a remarkable rebound for one of Alaska’s most iconic and culturally important salmon runs, though scientists caution that numbers are still relatively low and that more data are needed before they can be confident about a meaningful turnaround.

The harvest in Anvik, announced by Walker on a public teleconference with fishery managers and local leaders in July, also has inflamed a long-running political debate over fishery closures and government policies aimed at rebuilding the runs.

In 2024, Alaska state officials agreed with the Canadian government to a seven-year ban on harvesting chinook along the Yukon, which flows from northwest Canada more than 2,000 miles through Alaska to the Bering Sea.

Even though many Alaska Native leaders generally agreed about the need to limit fishing, they also criticized Alaska’s government for not formally including tribal governments in the decision-making process.

Read the full article at Alaska Beacon

CALIFORNIA: As commercial salmon fishing resumes in California, the industry faces a murky outlook

August 10, 2026 — When he stares out from the docks on the Feather River, James Stone—a 46-year-old lifelong fisherman—feels a pang of concern.

Fishing for chinook salmon, also called king salmon, had been called off completely for California’s commercial fishermen since 2023 and nearly as long for recreational anglers. While the fishery is open again this year, and the federal government recently announced emergency funding for those hit hardest by the closure, the consequences of multiple canceled fishing seasons continues to have ripple effects that are hard to fully account for.

“We’re losing marinas. We’re losing tackle stores. We’re losing bait shops. We’re also losing infrastructure out on the ocean at the ports for gas pumps … everything’s going away because salmon is the driver,” Stone, who is based in Yuba City and serves as the board president of the NorCal Guides and Sportsmen’s Association, told Inside Climate News.

Without plentiful chinook salmon to support local fisheries, “people won’t always spend the money for other species or for other recreational activities,” Stone said. “Salmon is what drives the fishing industry.”

Fishing guides and anglers with the association, which has 4,000 members and represents more than 500 businesses, are among many who have been hurting for years as the fish dwindles in California.

Cameron Smith, a commercial fisherman for over 20 years, said people who make their living fishing in California have tried to turn to other species—like Dungeness crab and cod—to make ends meet. But it hasn’t been enough amid skyrocketing fuel costs and high inflation, said the 70-year-old captain based in Benicia.

“They can’t pivot. There’s nothing to pivot to,” Smith said.

Fishers with commercial licenses to catch other species are managing better than others, he said, but just barely.

California’s salmon industry spurs $1.4 billion in economic activity and provides 23,000 jobs in a normal season, according to the Golden State Salmon Association, a nonprofit. The industry also contributes about $700 million to the Oregon economy and supports more than 10,000 jobs there.

On June 17, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced $123.6 million in disaster funding for several fishing industries in need of resources. That includes $21.3 million for Sacramento River fall chinook and Klamath River fall chinook ocean and inland salmon fisheries, Michael Milstein, a spokesman for NOAA Fisheries’ West Coast Region, said in an email.

Salmon fisheries in California were allocated close to the same amount, roughly $20 million, in 2024 as part of previous disaster funding.

Most importantly, salmon is once again central to California’s fishing economy after federal managers voted in April to allow the commercial and recreational salmon fishery to resume this year. In 2025, they granted a limited return for recreational fishermen, but Stone said about 95 percent of the recreational inland fishery remained closed in 2025 based on the areas where it was allowed. The first-ever salmon fishing pause in California took place in 2008, with a limited fishing season opening again two years later.

Still, people who rely on California’s salmon for their living continue to face economic stress.

While this year’s revived salmon fishing season in the state has already begun, commercial and recreational fishers are subject to strict limits on the size and number of fish they can catch.

Chinook salmon in decline, worsened by Bering Sea heatwave a decade ago: study

July 30, 2026 — Yukon River Chinook salmon numbers have been in a decline for decades. Despite efforts to help the population recover, it has dropped nearly 90 per cent since the 1980s.

Now, a new study from the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says a four-year heatwave in the Bering Sea that started about a decade ago has been connected to a more recent drop in population.

Curry Cunningham, one of the co-authors of the study and an associate professor with the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said researchers have noticed two periods of decline in the Chinook salmon population between 2003 and 2023.

Cunningham said before 2013, the salmon experienced a short decline followed by a few years of recovery.

But by 2016, conditions started to change again.

“That’s led to this very depressed state we currently find ourselves in,” Cunningham said. “[It] seems to be associated in time, at least with the onset of this marine heat wave that we saw in the eastern Bering Sea.”

Read the full article at CBC News

ALASKA: Bristol Bay comes off decade of historic runs with moderate and early returns in 2026

July 28, 2026 — Bristol Bay’s sockeye salmon run is coming to a close, and it just surpassed the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s pre-season forecast of 44 million fish.

The thing that stands out most this year was that early run timing, said Curry Cunningham, an associate professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and part of a team that creates pre-season and in-season forecasts for the commercial fishery.

“If we look at the large-run-size years in Bristol Bay, we’ve seen generally since about 2015 they’ve been predominantly on time,” Cunningham said.

The last two years have bucked that trend, he said.

“In 2025 and this year in 2026, we’ve seen earlier run timing to Bristol Bay,” he said. “So a bit of a shift back towards run timings we hadn’t seen in quite a while.”

One of the variables that correlates most strongly with run timing is the extent of sea ice in the late spring, Cunningham said. Bristol Bay sockeye tend to return earlier during years with more sea ice in May.

This year’s run was about three days earlier than the long-term average, according to Cunningham, with a midpoint around July 3 or 4. While three days might seem like a small difference, he said it can have big impacts.

“In Bristol Bay, where the vast majority of the run comes through and arrives inshore over the course of two or three weeks, it actually makes a huge difference,” he said.

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media

ALASKA: For Yukon River residents, salmon shortages have health consequences

Juky 24, 2026 — When 26-year-old Tirzah Bryant was a kid, she knew how to watch the cottonwood trees along the Yukon River for the sign that it was time to fish for salmon.

“We know that the fish are coming when the cotton’s flying from the cottonwood,” she said.

But run collapses and successive fishing closures along the river have rendered the cottonwood signal meaningless.

“I remember that first summer that we couldn’t fish, watching the cotton flying and being like …what it felt like, I was drifting. I’m like, ‘What am I doing?’” she said. That drifting feeling includes interactions with members of her extended family who had moved to cities but used to gather in Galena during fishing season. “They don’t have a reason to come home now,” she said.

Bryant described that odd feeling during a presentation in March at an Anchorage tribal environmental conference. A 2025 graduate of the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Center for One Health Research master’s degree program, which focuses on the human-animal-environmental health connections in Alaska and the Arctic, she described the One Health concept as fitting perfectly with her family’s traditions.

“Everything is related. So a healthy environment equals healthy animals, which equals healthy humans,” said Bryant, who also holds a biology degree from UAF and is now the environmental and education coordinator for the Louden Tribe, the Galena-based tribal government.

That makes the collapse of runs in the Yukon River — where Indigenous residents’ culture is tied to communal salmon harvesting, preparation and eating — “very detrimental to our people,” she said.

On the Yukon River, salmon runs that used to support a thriving and lucrative commercial harvest have collapsed. The runs of Chinook, also called king salmon, that have been in steady decline since the early 2000s, took a nosedive in recent years; by 2022, Chinook abundance was down 81% below its long-term average, according to fishery biologists. Harvest closures that began in 2020 were extended, and in 2024 an Alaska-Canada agreement established a seven-year moratorium on Chinook salmon fishing in the river to preserve Canadian-origin stocks.

Runs of chum salmon, a species that is generally more abundant in the river, suffered a similar but more sudden crash. A series of chum-harvest closures, even for subsistence purposes, started in 2020, and by 2022 abundance had fallen 92% below the long-term average.

Several factors, working in combination, are blamed for the declines. Scientists cite multiple climate change effects in both the ocean and freshwater bodies used by salmon. Those changes have not only affected the raw numbers of fish but also contributed to the shrinking size of salmon, resulting in smaller egg loads carried to spawning grounds by females.

Other factors cited are interceptions at sea by trawlers targeting groundfish species like pollock, changes forced by increasing loads of Asian hatchery fish in the ocean, past fishery management practices and the parasite Icthyophonus, which thrives in warmer conditions and has a more detrimental effect on Yukon Chinook than on any other type of salmon.

Salmon-protection activists say there is not much that can be done in the short term in Alaska to address those factors, other than to adjust fishery management to cut down on at-sea interception, also known as bycatch.

Read the full article at Alaska Beacon

Can killing seals save salmon? Conservationists and Washington lawmakers disagree

July 23, 2026 — A marine wildlife hospital based in the Pacific Northwest is worried about an alarming trend: seals coming to them alive, but gravely injured.

Earlier this month, the organization treated its third seal in less than a year with a gunshot wound. That seal pup, named Waffles, was found over Fourth of July weekend. It had to be euthanized once it was determined its injuries were too severe.

“It’s not uncommon for us to see animals that have been shot,” said Casey Mclean, executive director and veterinary nurse at SR3 SeaLife Response + Rehab + Research. “Historically, we often found those animals dead. Now we’re starting to see more of them alive and suffering from gunshot injuries.”This trend, Mclean believes, is being fueled by misinformation about the role marine mammals play in Washington’s continually struggling salmon populations.

Her concern is amplified by a congressional bipartisan bill from two Washington lawmakers, U.S. Rep. Michael Baumgartner, a Republican, and U.S. Rep. Emily Randall, a Democrat. The Northwest Endangered Salmon Predation Prevention Act (H.R. 9621) would expand the ability of federal, state, and tribal authorities to remove seals and sea lions, known collectively as pinnipeds, from Washington waters in an effort to boost salmon recovery.

In statements to KING 5, both sponsors of the bill lambasted the shooting of the seal pup as illegal, but insisted it should not be confused with what they’re proposing.

“Joe Schmo or any person off the streets shouldn’t be shooting seals or sea lions,” Randall said. “What we have proposed is a robust process to figure out how we can have responsible management of a population that’s decimating our salmon.”

“No one should be illegally poaching sea lions,” Baumgartner said. “I hope the perpetrator is identified and brought to justice. This does not have anything to do with my bipartisan bill to try to save and restore our endangered salmon populations.”

Supporters of the proposal, like the representatives, argue reducing pinnipeds could help struggling salmon populations. However, critics like Mclean say the bill ignores more significant threats to salmon and risks repeating decades-old mistakes in wildlife management.

Read the full article at KUOW

ALASKA: A parasite that thrives in warm conditions adds to Yukon River salmon woes

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.

Read the full article at Alaska Beacon

US Senate bill would provide more funding for restoring salmon along the San Joaquin River

July 20, 2026 — The U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources advanced legislation providing additional funding for restoring salmon in the San Joaquin River, clearing the bill for a vote from the full Senate.

If passed into law, the bill would triple the cap on funding available under the San Joaquin River Restoration Settlement Act from USD 250 million (EUR 219 million) to USD 750 million (EUR 656 million). The original legislation was passed in 2009 as part of a settlement ending an 18-year-long lawsuit filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council, which blamed government policy and dam operators for causing local extinction of spring-run Chinook salmon in the San Joaquin River.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

ALASKA: Alaska salmon catch swells to 29.5 million

July 16, 2026 — Alaska’s commercial salmon catch jumped from 21.2 million to 29.5 million for the seven days through July 14, as retail prices generally held, with 24% of the projected annual harvest now met.

Silver Bay Seafoods has adjusted its 2026 Bristol Bay sockeye price to $2 a pound for chilled, floated, bled fish, the Bristol Bay Fishermen’s Association said on Tuesday, July 14. The company will continue to evaluate the season’s financial results, with the final profit share to be calculated and reviewed by the fishermen’s board at the spring meeting, said Janis Harsila, business manager for the BBFA.

On July 15, Trident Seafoods announced a base price increase from $1.25 to $1.65 a pound, bringing its Tier 1 chilled price to $2.

Consumers found fresh fillets of red salmon on sale at Costco warehouses in Anchorage for $14.99 a pound, down $2 from a week earlier. Seafood managers at New Sagaya in Anchorage had Alaska red salmon fillets for $12.95 a pound, while 10th & M held firm at $16.95 a pound. Carrs-Safeway customers with a store card could purchase those fillets for $16.99 a pound, but the regular price was $38.99 a pound.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

ALASKA: Commercial troll fishery stays open with half of allotted kings remaining

July 15, 2026 — Southeast Alaska’s commercial king salmon fishery will remain open until further notice. The July 1 king opener for trollers, who fish with hook and line, is usually over quickly– it typically lasts anywhere from a handful of days to a week. But this year, with two weeks down, trollers are only at the halfway mark toward catching their target.

Grant Hagerman is the Southeast region’s commercial troll management biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. In an interview with KCAW on Monday (7-13-26) Hagerman said in the past two weeks, trollers have caught roughly half of the 84,000 allotted Chinook salmon.

“Fishing is a little bit slower, definitely,” Hagerman said. “But we have fewer boats. There’s less effort this year as well. So a combination of those two has has prolonged this longer than what we’d anticipated, preseason.”

Read the full article at KCAW