Saving Seafood

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

Northwest gains support in fight over salmon hatchery funding

July 17, 2026 — A growing effort to restore federal funding for a Columbia River salmon hatchery program is drawing support from Congress as concerns mount over the potential impacts on commercial fishing communities in Oregon and Washington.

Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Wash., announced July 15 that she has asked the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) to explain its decision to end funding for the Select Area Fisheries Enhancement (SAFE) program, arguing the move threatens both salmon recovery efforts and the fishing communities that depend on the fishery.

Read the full article at National Fisherman

WASHINGTON: ‘Real consequences’: Washington congresswoman questions Bonneville for ending salmon hatchery funds

July 16, 2026 — Washington Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is questioning the Bonneville Power Administration after the agency decided to stop funding a Columbia River hatchery program.

On July 7, the congresswoman sent a letter to BPA Administrator Travis Kavulla, requesting more information about the decision to stop funding the Select Area Fisheries Enhancement (SAFE) program after supporting the program for over 30 years.

Since the program began in 1993, the SAFE program has created commercial and sport fishing opportunities in off-stem areas of the Columbia River, the congresswoman’s office explained.

“This is a decision with real consequences,” Representative Gluesenkamp Perez said in a statement. “For decades, hatcheries have made sure there is a healthy population of salmon in the river. This isn’t abstract to people here – commercial and sport fishing is part of our heritage and our way of life. Supporting hatcheries is critical to sustaining the communities whose livelihoods depend on them.”

Read the full article at KOIN

OREGON: Oregon lawmakers push to restore salmon hatchery funding

July 10, 2026 — A bipartisan group of Oregon coastal lawmakers is urging the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) to reverse its decision to cut funding for a salmon hatchery program they say is critical to the state’s commercial and recreational fisheries.

BPA announced in June that it plans to end its more than $2 million in annual funding for the Select Area Fisheries Enhancement (SAFE) program. Which is managed by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, according to reporting by OPB. The funding has covered more than one-third of the program’s operating costs since 1993.

BPA is a federal nonprofit agency under the U.S. Department of Energy that also markets wholesale electricity generated by 31 federal dams and one nuclear plant in the Pacific Northwest.

According to OPB, BPA said it is ending its support because the program has not made sufficient progress toward improving populations of salmon protected under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

OREGON: Oregon coast lawmakers push back on fish hatchery cuts

July 8, 2026 — The Bonneville Power Administration said in June that it would cut funding for a program that raises millions of salmon in hatcheries.

But a bipartisan group of Oregon coastal lawmakers wants the agency to reverse that decision, saying it could rock the commercial and sportfishing industries that their communities rely on.

BPA provides more than $2 million annually to the Select Area Fisheries Enhancement, or SAFE, program, which the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife manages. It has helped cover more than a third of the SAFE program’s cost.

Read the full article at OPB

The Hail Mary Hatcheries

June 3, 2022 — The Russian River represents one possible future—perhaps the most likely one—for many other rivers on the west coast of North America: they will have hatchery salmon or no salmon at all. In this heavily developed watershed, climate change is already escalating droughts, fires, and floods, providing a preview of what may be in store for other regions. As wild stocks decline due to environmental change and other pressures, the hope is that facilities like Warm Springs, often described as “conservation hatcheries,” can keep salmon runs intact until their habitats are restored. It’s a task that sometimes verges on the impossible. As Mariska Obedzinski, who has led California Sea Grant’s coho monitoring program in the Russian River for almost 18 years, puts it, “It can feel like one step forward and five steps back.”

Hatcheries hold up a mirror to the stubborn belief that salmon can exist without intact habitat. On the west coast of North America, they have been used for over a century to supplement wild salmon in places where logged, dammed, and developed watersheds can no longer support abundant runs. But can salmon raised in captivity really replace wild ones? It’s a question I’ve been pondering for years, and, full disclosure, I once coauthored an opinion editorial with a consortium of salmon conservationists encouraging the British Columbia government to restore fish habitat, rather than build more hatcheries.

By the mid-20th century, scientists were finding evidence that artificially propagated fish were struggling to survive in the wild. “There is something wrong with hatchery trout,” a US Fish and Wildlife Service biologist wrote in 1948, suggesting that the fish—close cousins to salmon—were becoming domesticated. Today, hatchery salmon are generally bigger, bolder, and more combative than wild salmon; when produced by the tens or hundreds of thousands, they can outcompete wild fish. Paradoxically, though, nearly all hatchery salmon die quickly from poor life skills—failure to avoid predators or to successfully find food—or succumb to stress in the strange new environment. One facility manager told me that his coho had consumed bits of wood after release, likely mistaking the fragments for commercial feed pellets. “Hatchery fish are animals that are dressed in the skin of the salmon, but they’re missing most of what makes a salmon a salmon,” says Jim Lichatowich, a retired fish biologist and author of Salmon Without Rivers. “They don’t have that 10,000-year study of one place.”

Read the full story at Hakai Magazine

 

The US has spent more than $2B on a plan to save salmon. The fish are vanishing anyway.

May 25, 2022 — The fish were on their way to be executed. One minute, they were swimming around a concrete pond. The next, they were being dumped onto a stainless steel table set on an incline. Hook-nosed and wide-eyed, they thrashed and thumped their way down the table toward an air-powered guillotine.

Hoses hanging from steel girders flushed blood through the grated metal floor. Hatchery workers in splattered chest waders gutted globs of bright orange eggs from the dead females and dropped them into buckets, then doused them first with a stream of sperm taken from the dead males and then with an iodine disinfectant.

The fertilized eggs were trucked around the corner to an incubation building where over 200 stacked plastic trays held more than a million salmon eggs. Once hatched, they would fatten and mature in rectangular concrete tanks sunk into the ground, safe from the perils of the wild, until it was time to make their journey to the ocean.

Read the full story at OPB

 

World Fish Migration Day 2022: helping fish migrate helps the economy

May 17, 2022 — World Fish Migration Day 2022 is celebrated on May 21. It’s a time to look at NOAA Fisheries efforts to help fish migrate and how that reflects, in an effective way, on the fishing industry.

May 21, 2022 is World Fish Migration Day, a global celebration to raise awareness on the importance of free flowing rivers and migratory fish. Every year, millions of fish migrate to their native habitats to reproduce. They are often blocked from completing their journey by dams and other man made barriers. You may think that this is not a problem for the fishing industry, but when fish can’t reach their habitat, their populations can’t grow… so there is less fish to capture. So, to sum it up: open rivers translate into abundant fish.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

 

Hatcheries produced a third of Alaska’s salmon catch in 2021

March 22, 2022 — Salmon returning home to Alaska hatcheries again accounted for nearly a third of the statewide catch for commercial fishermen with 64 million fish in 2021. It was the eighth largest hatchery homecoming since 1977. And at a payout of $142 million, the salmon produced 25 percent of the overall value at Alaska docks.

An additional 220,000 salmon that got their start in a hatchery also were caught in Alaska sport, personal use and subsistence fisheries.

Nearly 70 million adult hatchery salmon returned last year, according to the annual salmon enhancement report by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Pinks comprised the bulk of the pack, topping 57 million, followed by chum salmon at 9.4 million.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

To Save Its Salmon, California Calls in the Fish Matchmaker

January 15, 2016 — HORNBROOK, Calif. — On a frigid morning in a small metal-sided building, a team of specialists prepared to orchestrate an elaborate breeding routine. The work would be wet and messy, so they wore waders. Their tools included egg trays and a rubber mallet, which they used to brain a fertile female coho salmon, now hanging dead on a hook.

Diana Chesney, a biologist, studied a piece of paper with a matrix of numbers, each one denoting a male salmon and potential match for the female coho.

“This is the bible,” she said of the matrix. “It’s what Carlos says.”

John Carlos Garza, a geneticist based a day’s drive south in Santa Cruz, has become a key figure in California’s effort to preserve its decimated salmon stocks. Using the latest genetic techniques, he and his team decide which individual fish should be bred together. At several major state conservation hatcheries, like the coho program here at Iron Gate, no two salmon are spawned until after Dr. Garza gives counsel — a “salmon mating service,” he jokingly calls it.

His painstaking work is the latest man-made solution to help fix a man-made problem that is about 150 years old: dams, logging, mining, farming, fishing and other industries have so fractured and polluted the river system that salmon can no longer migrate and thrive. In fact, today, owing to the battered habitat, virtually all salmon in California are raised in hatcheries.

Traditionally, the practice entailed killing fertile salmon and hand-mixing eggs and male milt, or sperm, then raising the offspring packed in containers or pools. When they were old enough to fend for themselves, they were released to rivers or sometimes trucked or ferried to release points to find the ocean on their own, a practice that gave them a necessary transition before they hit saltwater and a semblance of the quintessential salmon experience of migrating to the sea and back. To that end, they eventually swam back to hatcheries, where they became the next breeders in the cycle.

While hatcheries have helped propagate the species, they have also created new problems. The salmon they produce can be inbred and less hardy through domestication, hurting their chances for surviving and thriving in the wild.

Read the full story at The New York Times