Saving Seafood

Alaska researchers using tagging data to reduce fishing bycatch

June 11, 2026 — A stream of data more than a decade in the making is helping a team of Alaska researchers’ efforts to boost the health of the local salmon population and the bottom line of fishing trawlers.

A University of Alaska Fairbanks research team has translated a trove of data from a chinook salmon tagging program into a predictive model that could help reduce bycatch by fishing trawlers.

Chinook salmon range from the ocean’s surface to depths where trawl nets target groundfish species. The researchers’ model uses more than 700,000 data points between Southeast Alaska and the Bering Sea to predict how chinook will be distributed across the water column. With that information, trawlers can potentially adjust their operations to reduce inadvertent salmon catches.

Read the full article at Peninsula Clarion 

Chinook salmon tagging data aims to help reduce trawler bycatch

June 11, 2026 — Fisheries scientists at the University of Alaska Fairbanks are on a mission to find out where Chinook salmon are at all times, not to catch them, but to avoid them.

Their research draws on a trove of data from a Chinook salmon tagging program, with a focus on helping commercial trawl harvesters avoid the depths and areas where these fish risk becoming bycatch, and where they may also be adversely affected by naval exercises in the Gulf of Alaska used to train U.S. military forces for combat at sea.

Chinook and chum salmon have been hard hit in recent years by rising ocean temperatures, anthropogenic impacts, and increased microplastic pollution.

Bycatch limits already in place for declining Chinook stocks shut down the trawl fishery in Kodiak in 2024, when two trawl boats caught so many Chinooks over a single weekend that the entire fleet had to stop fishing, leaving most of their total allowable groundfish catch in the water.

Read the full article at the

Salmon tagging data could help trawlers reduce bycatch

June 9, 2026 — A University of Alaska Fairbanks research team has translated a trove of data from a Chinook salmon tagging program into a predictive model that could help reduce bycatch by fishing trawlers.

Chinook salmon range from the ocean’s surface to depths where trawl nets target groundfish species. The researchers’ model uses more than 700,000 data points between Southeast Alaska and the Bering Sea to predict how Chinook will be distributed across the water column. With that information, trawlers can potentially adjust their operations to reduce inadvertent salmon catches.

To develop the model, the team used 13 years of data from tagged Chinooks through an ongoing project led by Andrew Seitz, a professor at UAF’s College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences. The tags collect data every 5-10 seconds and transmit it to satellites. That provides a much more comprehensive dataset than is available from catching tagged salmon.

Tagging data included details such as depth, time of day, temperature and light levels. A separate dataset from Copernicus Marine Service added environmental context.

Graduate fisheries student Marcel Gietzmann-Sanders used machine learning to detect patterns in that massive dataset. He turned them into detailed charts showing the depth where Chinooks are most likely to be found at various times and locations. The project is described in a recently published paper in the journal Animal Biotelemetry.

“It shows what you can find out when you collect enough data about a species over a long enough time,” Gietzmann-Sanders said.

Better tools for reducing bycatch are important for both the health of declining Chinook populations and the economics of the trawl fleet. Fishing for pollock, a type of groundfish that supplies the largest catch volumes in the U.S., can be shut down if bycatch limits are exceeded. As recently as 2024, two fishing boats had enough Chinook salmon bycatch over a single weekend to close the fishery.

Read the full article at University of Alaska Fairbanks News

NOAA researchers use genetic tools to improve understanding of Alaska’s Pacific cod stocks

May 1, 2026 — NOAA researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Alaska BioMap have been working on identifying genetic stocks of Pacific cod in Alaska to build a cost-effective genetic database full of assessments.

Breaking the population into four stocks – Bering Sea, Gulf of Alaska, Aleutian Islands, and Pacific Coast – the assessment found that none of the four have been or are subject to overfishing threats, as measured by estimating the spawning biomass, or the number of females able to reproduce, according to a release by NOAA.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Modified groundfish nets limit killer whale entanglements

November 4, 2025 — A large mesh panel, known as a “killer whale fence,” in Bering Sea deep-water flatfish trawl gear is proving successful at preventing killer whale entanglement in the lucrative commercial flounder and sole fisheries.

The modified gear, first tested fleetwide in 2024, resulted in a single entanglement for the whole summer season.  The fleet’s 2025 season ended without any mortalities, according to an Oct. 28 report by researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

The net modification was developed through a collaborative effort between UAF researcher Hannah Myers and the Alaska Seafood Cooperative, which coordinates a fleet targeting flounder and sole.  For 2023, the Bering Sea commercial flounder and sole fisheries were valued at over $45 million combined. Key species in this fishery complex include yellowfin sole and flathead sole, along with other flatfish managed by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council.

Groundfish captains working in the summer fishery first began noticing significantly more killer whale activity around their nets starting about 2020. Then, in 2023, there was a sudden rise in the entanglement of orcas in their nets.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Warming water has varied impact on salmon populations

October 8, 2025 — Wild salmon are super weird for a variety of reasons, including response to warming climate conditions, says fisheries researcher Peter Westley of the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

“Salmon have really evolved in places with changing conditions, including volcanoes blowing up, glaciers melting and making really good salmon habitat,” Westley said on Wednesday, Sept. 24, in a webinar from his office on the Fairbanks campus. “Salmon are experiencing the front lines of (environmental) changes. Trends across the globe since 1991, the rate of warming is much, much faster in the Arctic. Salmon are experiencing warming and rapid change of warming.”

To maintain healthy salmon populations, the fish need cool, complex, connected, clean habitat, said Westley, an associate professor and Wakefield chair of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences at UAF’s Department of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences.

Connectivity is important so that the salmon have the ability to move around, he said. It is also important to protect the processes important to the fish, like the way groundwater comes up to cool the water, and gravel has to come into the streams, he said.

“Salmon bury their offspring alive and leave them in the gravel for months on end, nine to 10 months under the gravel.  They are born in fresh water, and then they decide freshwater is not for them and migrate to the ocean, and then they come back,” he said. “They can fill up streams in very high density and go back to their natal streams. They fight their way back home, and their bodies decay and become nutrients for others, including bears. Salmon are weird, but also awesome.”

Read the full article at National Fisherman

Trump administration is ending NOAA data service used to monitor sea ice off Alaska

May 8, 2025 — The Trump administration is ending National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration services that monitor Arctic sea ice and snow cover, leading climate scientists said Tuesday.

NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information has decommissioned its snow and ice data products as of Monday, the National Snow and Ice Data Center announced.

The data collected by that NOAA office is critical to the daily updates provided by the Colorado-based center, which tracks one of the most obvious effects of climate change: the long-term loss of Arctic sea ice.

It is also critical to the regular sea ice reports produced by Rick Thoman at the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy, as well as to research done by his UAF colleagues.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

How long can North Atlantic right whales live? Scientists may finally have an answer

December 26, 2024 — North Atlantic right whales currently only live to about 22 years old, but a new study finds they should be able to live to over 130.

Researchers from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and other institutions involved in the study say that only 10% of North Atlantic right whales reach the age of 47. The median age at death for the species is about 22.

In contrast, southern right whales, a closely related species, have a median lifespan of about 73 years, and 10% are expected to live to nearly 132 years of age.

Read the full article at GBH

Small fish size linked to poorer runs of chinook in Alaska’s biggest rivers

December 9, 2024 — The shrinking size of Alaska salmon, a decades-long trend linked in part to warming conditions in the ocean, is hampering the ability of chinook in Alaska’s two biggest rivers to produce new generations needed to maintain healthy populations, a new study shows.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks-led study shows how the body conditions of chinook salmon, also known as king salmon, combined with extreme heat and cold in the ocean and freshwater environments, have converged in the Yukon and Kuskokwim river systems to depress what is termed “productivity” — the successful reproduction that results in adult spawners returning to the same area.

The study examines 26 different populations of chinook in those two river systems in areas from Western Alaska to the Yukon River uplands in Canada. Chinook runs in those rivers have faltered in recent years, and the situation has been so dire on the Canadian part of the Yukon that U.S. and Canadian officials earlier this year suspended all harvests of Canadian-origin chinook for seven years.

The analysis of multiple factors and conditions revealed that fish size was a major factor that determined productivity, defined as adult salmon returning to spawning grounds successfully producing a next generation of adults to come back to the same spawning area.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

UAF study links declining salmon to extreme climate, smaller size

December 4, 2024 — A new University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) study published in the scientific journal Global Change Biology, says extreme climate and smaller body size have led to declining Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers’ King Salmon populations.

Over the last decade, the lower number of certain salmon species making it to rural Alaska villages, along the two tributaries, has led the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to impose catching restrictions.

UAF researcher Erik Schoen said the study began in 2020, and examined 26 different spawning areas across the two river basins.

“Across the board, there were a few big drivers that affected all of these populations. Some of those were out in the ocean. So ocean climate, extreme conditions like really cold winters and really hot summers in the ocean had big negative effects,” Schoen said.

Read the full story at Alaska’s News Source