Saving Seafood

A River Reborn: Restoring a Stronghold for Hood Canal Summer-Run Chum Salmon

August 28, 2026 — Threatened Hood Canal summer-run chum salmon represent a bright spot in Pacific salmon recovery. According to preliminary data from the Hood Canal Coordinating Council, average annual returns have nearly tripled since 2022. They’ve climbed from about 11,600 fish per year between 2018 and 2021 to roughly 32,600 between 2022 and 2025. That’s up from a low of less than 1,000 spawners in the early 1990s.

Scientists say several years of favorable ocean conditions have contributed to the recent rebound. Cooler ocean temperatures increase the food available to salmon and improve their survival at sea. But those conditions won’t last forever. Experts believe restoring river habitat will help summer chum remain resilient when the Pacific Ocean inevitably shifts back to a warmer phase in its natural cycle.

One of the healthiest summer chum populations is returning to one of the region’s most degraded rivers. The number of chum spawning in the Big and Little Quilcene rivers has quadrupled in the last 4 years. This despite 2 miles of the Big Quilcene being straightened, scoured of spawning gravel, and cut off from its floodplain.

NOAA Fisheries’ Office of Habitat Conservation, the Hood Canal Salmon Enhancement Group, and the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe are restoring salmon habitat at two locations on the Big Quilcene River–Moon Valley and the Lower One Mile. The projects will:

  • Create spawning and rearing habitat for Hood Canal Summer chum and threatened Puget Sound Chinook salmon and steelhead
  • Improve the Quilcene Bay estuary, where juvenile salmon make their first transition to salt water
  • Stop the flooding that has plagued the town of Quilcene for generations

The restoration should finish by September, just as the summer chum return to spawn.

“Restoring the Big Quilcene River has taken tribes, nonprofit organizations, local communities, state and federal agencies, and NOAA all working toward the same goal,” said NOAA Marine Habitat Resource Specialist Chemine Jackels. “Together, we’re giving one of Hood Canal’s most important summer chum populations a healthier river and a better chance to thrive for generations to come.”

Read the full article at NOAA Fisheries

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

ALASKA: Beyond bycatch: The bigger story of Alaska pollock

August 14, 2026 — Alaska pollock is the biggest catch in the United States. But the fish drawing the most attention are the ones the fleet never meant to pull up.

For Sam Murphy, vice president of the Alaska Pollock Fishery Alliance (APFA), the focus on bycatch misses a much larger story.

That argument comes at a pointed moment for the fishery. In February, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council (NPFMC) voted 8-3 to recommend the first mandatory limit on chum salmon bycatch in the Bering Sea pollock fishery, an annual cap of 45,000 Western Alaska chum, paired with a corridor closure near the Alaska Peninsula between June 10 and Aug. 31, apportioned among the at-sea processor, catcher vessel, mothership, and Community Development Quota (CDQ) sectors.

The NPFMC heard testimony from more than 170 people over four days, including tribal leaders, subsistence fishermen, CDQ groups, and pollock industry participants. The new rules are not expected to take effect until June 2028 at the earliest.

Murphy didn’t dismiss the difficult conversations about salmon bycatch or the challenges facing Alaska’s fisheries. Those discussions are necessary, he said. But after spending the past year and a half aboard fishing vessels, touring processing plants, and visiting fishing communities across Alaska, he believes the conversation had become too narrowly focused on a single issue while overlooking the broader role pollock plays in the state’s seafood economy.

“I don’t really see it as an argument,” Murphy said in an interview with National Fisherman. “To me, it’s simply the reality that I hope more people start to recognize.”

That reality, he said, was one of interdependence.

Murphy described Alaska’s seafood economy as a three-legged stool. Commercial fishermen harvest the resource, processors transform that harvest into products consumed around the world, and coastal communities provide the workforce, ports, and infrastructure that allow the system to function.

“Remove any one of those three legs, and the whole thing starts to wobble,” Murphy said.

That connection, he said, was why framing Alaska’s fisheries as rivals missed the point.

“Pollock doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Neither do salmon, crab, cod, or halibut,” Murphy said. “These fisheries are connected economically, operationally, and culturally.”

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

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

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

ALASKA: Summer troll update, Fish scarce, catch low

July 14, 2026 — On Friday morning, the 10th day of the summer king salmon troll opening, the catch was less than half of the harvest target of 83,700, fishery officials said. The opening, which was initially projected to last seven to ten days, will continue until further notice.

Department of Fish and Game troll fishery management biologist Grant Hagerman said that since July 1 fish abundance, fleet effort and catch rate have been low.
“Fewer fish, fewer boats, and fewer fish per boat,” Hagerman summarized for the Sentinel.
Hagerman says the fishery will stay open until further notice. Last year, the summer troll opening lasted four days. As of Friday morning, Fish & Game estimates that trollers had caught fewer than 35,000 chinook in nine days in this opening, compared to 40,000 chinook harvested in four days in 2025.
There is a higher treaty allocation this year; Southeast commercial trollers can harvest up to 146,000 treaty chinook. Last year the limit was a record low of 92,730.

ALASKA: Alaska’s wild salmon harvest climbs to over 14.5 million fish

July 7, 2026 — On the eve of July 4 and a plethora of holiday barbecues, Alaska’s commercial salmon harvest had already brought in over 14 million wild sockeye salmon, with the big surge coming from Bristol Bay.

Silver Bay Seafoods and Trident Seafoods posted $1.60 a pound for chilled, bled sockeye, 30 cents more than last year’s pre-season price and considered a conservative starting price for the 2026 season, said Janis Harsilla, business manager for the Bristol Bay Fishermen’s Association.

Retail sales were steady, with prices ranging between $16.99 to $18.99 a pound at King Soopers supermarkets, between $23 and $29.99 a pound at some online direct-to-consumer shops, $15.99 a pound at Anchorage Fred Meyer, part of the Kroger chain, and $20.99 a pound at Anchorage Carrs-Safeway supermarkets. The best deal in town was still $14.99 a pound at Costco warehouses in Anchorage for fresh Copper River reds. 

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Commerce Department releases $123.6 million in fishery disaster aid

June 24, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Commerce announced June 17 the allocation of $123.6 million in fishery disaster relief funding to address a series of commercial fishery collapses that struck Alaska, Oregon, California, and Washington’s Squaxin Island Tribe between 2019 and 2023. The money was appropriated by Congress through the American Relief Act, 2025.

The funding covers six previously declared fishery resource disasters: the 2023–2024 Bering Sea snow crab fishery in Alaska; the 2023 Oregon ocean commercial salmon fishery; the 2022 Chignik salmon fishery in Alaska; the 2023 Upper Cook Inlet East Side Setnet salmon fishery in Alaska; the 2024 California Sacramento River Fall Chinook and Klamath River Fall Chinook ocean and inland salmon fisheries; and the 2023 Squaxin Island Tribe Puget Sound Fall Chum salmon fishery in Washington.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Hilborn: respect indigenous, western fisheries knowledge

June 19, 2026 — A prominent University of Washington professor of marine biologist and fisheries scientist says respect for every form of knowledge is needed to find solutions to the decline of Pacific salmon.

“The impact of the decline of Chinook salmon and chum salmon to western Alaska communities is a concern to all, and every form of knowledge needs to be brought to bear to understand what has caused it and help to find solutions,” wrote Ray Hilborn, a professor of aquatic and fishery scientist at the University of Washington, in an article published in May by the Oxford University Press.

Hilborn noted that research published previously by Antoinette Lavoie, of the Department of Human Dimensions of Natural Resources at Colorado State University and others made a good case that Native people have been largely excluded from decision making in management of federal fisheries, especially as those fisheries may impact subsistence users.

Read the full article at National Fisherman