July 1, 2023 — Every year, the state sets a range of projected sockeye salmon that will ideally evade a fisherman’s net bound for upstream spawning grounds in order to sustain the fishery. Often, kings are swimming hidden among the surging sockeye, like needles in a writhing, riverine haystack. In the hopes that more king salmon may survive to see the lakes upstream, Sands also explained that the Nushagak King action plan widens the season’s total escapement goal range by 15% of the forecasted run. They’re called optimal escapement goals and they mean that if the sustainable escapement goal was 900,000, the optimal goal adds a little over one million fish on top.
“Instead of fishing to control the sockeye escapement down to 900,000 on the Nushagak, we’re fishing less, which means we’re allowing for more sockeye passage, but also more king passage. It’s trying to strike this balance of how many sockeye we’re willing to forego harvesting to try and protect kings,” said Sands.
Daniel Schindler is a professor in the University of Washington’s Alaska Salmon Program, and is part of the research team monitoring the Nushagak runs – which have been under biologists observation since the 1950s. According to Schindler, the declining king populations are not specific to the Nushagak but until the cause for the dwindling species can be determined, something has to be done.
“We know that king salmon are suffering throughout the range. And the action plan is one attempt to reduce interceptions of Nushagak kings in the commercial fishery, so that more of them can make it into the watershed to spawn. And the hope is that more abundance in the watersheds may lead to some recovery in the populations,” he said. “So how this one plays out is anyone’s bet. But the reality is management has to try something because kings are lower now than they have been in a long time.”