Saving Seafood

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

Bering Sea heat wave cited as trigger for nosedive in Yukon River Chinook salmon

July 13, 2026 — The intense marine heat wave conditions that began roiling the Bering Sea in about 2016 resulted in the lowest winter sea ice extent measured in 150 years, widespread bird and marine mammal die-offs, a drastic shift in fish populations and a crash of snow crab stocks.

Now new research is tying the marine heat wave to the recent collapse of Yukon River Chinook salmon.

A study published in April, written by scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center and University of Alaska Fairbanks, showed the correlation between the extreme heat wave conditions and the nosedive in Yukon River Chinook stocks. The heat wave was accompanied by a dramatic increase in deaths of older juvenile and adult Chinook that, had they survived, would have returned from the ocean to freshwater spawning grounds, the study found.

The study was published in the journal Ecological Applications.

The Yukon River’s runs of Chinook, also called king salmon, have been in a long-term decline since their past heyday, when they numbered in the hundreds of thousands and the river was one of the biggest sources of that salmon species.

The sharp downturn in recent years resulted in a 2022 return that was the lowest on record. Widespread fishery closures have been in effect for years along the Yukon River system in both Alaska and Canada.

Read the full article at Alaska Beacon

Past heat waves and low sea ice continued to impact Alaska’s waters in 2021

January 18, 2022 — The so-called blob that brought warm surface water temperatures to the Gulf of Alaska between 2014 and 2016 has passed.

But the effects of that blob, and a subsequent heat wave in 2019, are not all in the rearview mirror. And researchers are bracing for more as climate change brings with it more ocean warming.

“For an area like the Gulf of Alaska, definitely this is a topic we need to understand better,” said Bridget Ferriss, a research fish biologist with NOAA Fisheries. She edited this year’s Ecosystems Status Report for the Gulf of Alaska, used by federal managers to inform fisheries policy in Alaska.

Last year, researchers continued to track the impacts of recent heat waves on Alaska’s marine species.

Ferriss said a heat wave happens when the sea surface temperature on a given day is warmer than 90% of the temperatures on record for that same day, for five days in a row.

Read the full story at KTOO

Scientists catch billions of juvenile polar cod under arctic sea ice

October 13, 2015 — Polar cod are a vital food source for whales, narwhals, ringed seals and arctic seabirds, but researchers have had a hard time studying these fish and estimating their numbers.

That’s now changing, thanks to new netting technology. Recently, a team of German researchers were able to catch a large number of polar cod living beneath the arctic sea ice. Their findings suggest billions of juvenile cod prefer the shelter of the arctic shelves and drifting sea ice.

The researchers published their findings this week in the journal Polar Biology.

“For the first time, we’ve been able to use a special net directly below the sea ice to catch a large number of polar cod, and therefore to estimate their prevalence over a large area,” Carmen David, a biologist with the Alfred Wegener Institute and first author of the new study, said in a press release.

Read the full story from UPI