February 13, 2024 — Oregon fishermen took a major financial hit with a disaster declared last October for the Chinook salmon fishery from 2018-2020.
Now, more than $7-million from the U.S. Department of Commerce is on its way to provide them with relief.
February 6, 2024 –The $20.6 million allocated for federal relief to California’s Chinook salmon closure is just two-thirds of the state’s aid request, and threatens the survival of fishing businesses, California commercial anglers and for-hire recreational groups said Monday.
In a letter to U.S. Department of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, the Golden Gate Fisherman’s Association, and the Northern California Guides and Sportsmen’s Association called for “immediate full funding of salmon disaster funding assistance” in the $30.7 million figure sought by state officials.
“The State’s economic analysis already falls short of expected needs, and the federal disaster assistance package add insult to injury,” leaders of the fishing groups wrote in their joint letter. “Additionally, nearly a year after the declaration of the complete season closure, not one dollar of relief funds have been made available to affected businesses or their employees.”
February 5, 2024 — The U.S. Department of Commerce has allocated USD 20.6 million (EUR 19.2 million) in financial relief to the state of California following the closure of its Chinook salmon season in 2023.
“Fishery disasters have wide-ranging impacts and can affect commercial and recreational fishermen, subsistence users, charter businesses, shore-side infrastructure, and the marine environment,” U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said. “These funds will help affected California communities recover and improve sustainability.”
January 23, 2024 — The Klamath River in California and Oregon is one step closer to a healthy new beginning.
Officials gathered earlier this month at the Iron Gate Dam in Hornbrook, California, to unlatch a gate at the base of its reservoir. As the water flowed through, it signaled the beginning of the end of the largest dam removal project in United States history, report Erik Neumann and Juliet Grable for NPR.
The gate’s opening, formerly just a crack, was extended to three feet wide. Dark brown waters rumbled through the gap, washing years of sediment buildup downriver. Over the next week, 2,200 cubic feet of water per second were expected to flow, lowering the reservoir between two and four feet per day. Eventually, the channel’s entire width—stretching 16 feet across—will allow the uninhibited passage of water and sediment.
Opening the Iron Gate Dam represents a critical advancement in the historic demolition project, which was approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in November 2022. The effort will remove four aging hydroelectric dams in the Klamath River, restoring hundreds of miles of salmon habitat. The first and smallest dam, Copco 2, was already deconstructed this past autumn, and the rest are slated for removal this year.
January 16, 2024 — The Wild Fish Conservancy has petitioned NOAA Fisheries to list Alaska king salmon under the Endangered Species Act.
The organization claims the petition is a response to “the severe decline and poor condition of Chinook populations” in Alaska.
“For decades, scientists have been sounding the alarm that Alaska’s Chinook are in dire trouble,” Wild Fish Conservancy Executive Director Emma Helverson said. “Despite existing management plans and years of efforts by the state of Alaska, Chinook salmon continue to decline in abundance, size, diversity, and spatial structure throughout the state. Through this action, we are asking the federal government to undertake a formal status review and implement protections warranted under the Endangered Species Act, including designating critical habitat protections, to ensure the survival of these iconic fish.”
January 13, 2024 — A Washington-based conservation group filed a petition with federal regulators Wednesday, requesting that they list Alaska king salmon as an endangered species.
The Wild Fish Conservancy argued in its 67-page petition that king, or chinook, salmon numbers have declined to the point where the species is at risk of extinction in Alaska. The group cites state data indicating that the decline has been predominately caused by climate change, habit destruction and hatchery salmon competing for food with wild fish.
The group is asking that the National Marine Fisheries Service formally review king salmon numbers across the Gulf of Alaska, the Aleutian Islands and Southeast Alaska before considering stricter protections. Those could include critical habit protections and expanding ways to protect king salmon smolt — among other measures the group lists.
The petition is a first step in a process that could take years to be resolved with court challenges possible. But legal experts say there could be broad implications if the request is approved to list Alaska king salmon as threatened or endangered under the 1973 Endangered Species Act.
January 4, 2024 — Yukon River chinook salmon boast the longest freshwater migration in North America, traveling more than 3,000 kilometers (nearly 2,000 miles) from their spawning grounds in Canada to the mouth of the Bering Sea in Alaska. A smolt preparing to enter the ocean is small enough to lay across the palm of your hand. But by the time it returns four or five years later to swim back upriver, it will be about a meter long (more than 3 feet), and weigh 14 kilograms (more than 30 pounds).
Not all Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.) travel as far, or grow as big, as the Yukon River chinook (O. tshawytscha), but they all make the journey from freshwater spawning grounds to the ocean, then return to their natal streams to spawn and then die en masse. Those remarkable journeys connect and nurture distant ecosystems.
That’s because salmon gain most of their body mass in the ocean, and when spawning adults travel back inland to die, they ferry energy and nutrients from marine to terrestrial ecosystems. Those migrating salmon are eaten by bears, eagles and a slew of other predators. Scavengers devour carcasses left rotting in streambeds, or discarded in the forest along streams by other carnivores. Ultimately the nutrients diffuse throughout the ecosystem. The young return to the sea to reinvigorate the cycle, in a dance that has lasted unknown centuries — until modern humans began interfering.
Today, researchers can trace the pathway of these nutrients using the “salmon signature,” an isotope of marine nitrogen associated with the migrating fish. John Reynolds, a professor of aquatic ecology and conservation at Canada’s Simon Fraser University, has been searching for that salmon signature in the temperate rainforest of British Columbia’s central coast for more than 15 years.
His lab has published numerous studies showing that nutrient additions from salmon influence wildflower development; the productivity of salmon berry bushes; the territory size of Pacific wrens (Troglodytes pacificus); the density of salmon and other freshwater fish; and more. The salmon signature can even be seen from space: on satellite imagery, the greenness of riparian forests is higher following years of high salmon abundance.
December 24, 2023 — It’s likely to be another weak year for king salmon returns to the major river systems of Southeast Alaska in 2024.
The Alaska Department of Fish & Game issued its 2024 Southeast Alaska Chinook Salmon forecasts on Monday (12-18-23).
Of the 11 chinook stocks in the region, only the Chilkat River is expected to have an adequate number of chinook returning to spawn. Nevertheless, this number – known as escapement – is still in the middle of the range, and could be lower depending on how many fish are harvested before they get to the river.
The Alaska Department of Fish & Game has adopted action plans to try and limit the catch of king salmon bound for Southeast Rivers, but some are always intercepted.
However, ADF&G assessment biologist Philip Richards says overharvest is probably not the problem.
December 17, 2023 — The atmospheric river that hit the Pacific Northwest in early December took a heavy toll on salmon, biologists working with Puget Sound tribes say.
You might think all the rain that comes with the storm systems known as atmospheric rivers or Pineapple Expresses would be good for fish.
But tribal biologists say major floods have hit salmon-bearing rivers hard two out of the past three autumns, at a time when freshly laid Chinook salmon eggs are incubating in their underwater nests.
“We’ve had two flooding events that, over three years, have hit during this time that we know all the Chinook eggs are in the gravels,” said fisheries researcher Mike LeMoine with the Skagit River System Cooperative, a project of the Swinomish and Sauk-Suiattle Tribes. “It’s right after Chinook complete their spawning.”
Extreme flows can kill salmon eggs in two ways: scouring eggs and their shallow nests out of a riverbed or entombing them in mud.
“A big event will deposit a bunch of sediment over the top of the eggs and smother them, and they call that entombment,” said Jason Griffith, a Stillaguamish Tribe of Indians biologist.
Griffith said a spawning salmon will bury her eggs beneath a few inches of river gravel, enough to protect the next generation from predators but not from the forces unleashed when rivers rage.
“The river will cut down several inches to several feet during one event and could displace those eggs, and that kills them,” Griffith said.
Based on studies of past years’ floods, Griffith said he expected only 2% to 4% of Chinook eggs in the Stillaguamish River to survive this winter, less than a third of the 15% survival rate in a good year.
“High flows basically cause poor survival, especially for Stillaguamish Chinook. So three to five years from now, we will see lower returns of Stillaguamish Chinook,” Griffith said
November 13, 2023 — Abysmal chinook and chum salmon returns to Western Alaska have made the state’s jurisdiction in fisheries management a prominent target on the legal radar again. Though Alaska’s subsistence challenges have been the bane of salmon management in some areas for more than a half century, recent run failures on the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers have rekindled arguments in the courts.
Most recently, a case filed in 2022 has gained momentum and will argue whether the State of Alaska and the Alaska Division of Fish and Game, or the federal government, calls the shots in setting subsistence openings and closures on a 191-mile stretch of the river.
“They’re literally fighting over crumbs here,” says Rep. Mary Sattler Peltola, D-Alaska. “This is a legal battle over crumbs. All subsistence harvesting captures less than 1 percent of Alaska’s resources. When I was growing up it was 2 percent, which was negligible; now it’s less than 1 percent, and when you’re talking about subsistence on federal land, that’s infinitesimal.”
The case is the latest in court gyrations that promise to test the validity of a landmark court ruling that was never settled to anyone’s satisfaction in the 1990s. That case, commonly referred to as “Katie John,” was named after the woman who challenged a state law of 1964 which prevented her from operating a fish wheel for her winter’s salmon. That ruling was supposed to have defined “subsistence priority” in fisheries management.
The suit, originally filed in 1985 by Katie John and other parties, challenged the state management system in a plea for subsistence rights. What ensued since then has been a fight between state and federal courts in defining what constitutes public lands, submerged lands, navigable waters on those lands and which government (state or federal) has rightful management of those waters to comply with language in the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA).
An equally hefty argument has been the definition of who among Alaska residents has rightful access to natural resources – and when. As the Katie John case gained momentum in federal courts, an Alaska state Supreme Court decision in another case, McDowell v. State, had rendered that natural resources are the property of all residents: urban, rural, Native and non-Native, and that relegating rights to specific groups violated the state constitution.