Saving Seafood

Alaska Supreme Court upholds dismissal of lawsuit challenging Yukon-Kuskokwim salmon management

October 13, 2025 — Alaska judges will not hear a lawsuit alleging that the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has mishandled the state’s valuable salmon returns.

On Friday, the Alaska Supreme Court upheld a lower-court decision that dismissed a case brought by Juneau resident Eric Forrer in 2022.

Forrer had argued that years of declining salmon returns in the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers clearly showed that the department was violating a section of the Alaska Constitution that requires fish be managed for sustained yield.

Forrer, a long-time Alaska resident, has a history of personal-use and commercial fishing, including on the Yukon River.

In his suit, he sought a declaration confirming that the Fish and Game was violating the constitution and sought an injunction directing the department “to fulfill the sustained yield mandate.”

Bethel Superior Court Judge Nathaniel Peters dismissed the case in 2023, but Forrer appealed to the Alaska Supreme Court.

In an 18-page order published Friday, the five-member court said unanimously that because Forrer didn’t challenge a specific policy, law or regulation, Peters was correct and the case should be dismissed.

Read the full article at Alaska Beacon

ALASKA: Indigenous leaders, scientists, and policy makers call for bold actions to address Yukon River salmon crisis

August 5, 2025 — Tribes should be allowed to harvest the same number of Yukon River chinook salmon that trawlers scoop up in the Bering Sea as bycatch, and an independent review is needed to better manage the salmon crisis on Alaska’s longest river. These are just two of the recommendations outlined in a recent policy brief that looks at near-term strategies for addressing the crisis on the Yukon.

Doug DeMaster, a retired biologist who spent nearly two decades with the top federal fisheries agency, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), co-authored the brief published in the journal Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research (AAAR).

“What we tried to do in this brief is put together a document that identifies what’s needed, what’s wanted, and tries to do it in a way that’s easily amenable to Congress, and politicians, and both state and federal agencies,” DeMaster said.

The two-page document was assembled by a mix of tribal leaders, scientists, and policy makers. It boils down potential factors driving crashes for both chinook and chum salmon on the Yukon River. Among them: bycatch and ecosystem changes in the Bering Sea driven by the pollock fishery, warmer water temperatures, competition with hatchery salmon, the Area M intercept fishery, and increasing rates of parasitic infection in Yukon River chinook.

Read the full article at KYUK

ALASKA: Alaska experts recommend management overhaul to rescue Yukon River salmon runs

August 4, 2025 — A management overhaul is needed to address the faltering salmon runs in the Yukon River and the widespread harms that have resulted from shortages of fish along the river’s basin, according to a report by Indigenous leaders and Alaska scientists.

The report, a peer-reviewed policy brief published in the journal Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research, proposes an independent review of Yukon River chinook and chum salmon issues by an entity like the National Academy of Sciences. It also recommends bigger management and science roles for Indigenous residents who live along the river, which flows nearly 2,000 miles from Canada’s Yukon Territory to the Bering Sea.

Building relationships between tribal members and government managers will likely require long-term effort, says the report, which has co-authors from various organizations, including the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

“Trust between Indigenous communities and fisheries scientists and managers needs to be enhanced by continuously, transparently, and equitably combining quantitative fisheries analyses with Indigenous Knowledge,” the report says.

The report recommends a “cultural exemption” for small-scale personal harvests by river residents to help address inequities between commercial and subsistence fishermen.

Read the full article at Anchorage Daily News

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

Yukon cyanide spill raises concern for Alaskan salmon

July 31, 2024 — Concern spread across Canada after a cyanide spill at a gold mine in the Yukon Territory. The incident happened at Victoria Gold’s Eagle Mine, where a heap leach failure and landslide occurred. Energy, Mines, and Resource Minister John Streicker said four water samples were taken from different areas near the mine and had come back positive for cyanide, but levels were primarily low.

According to Alaska Beacon, Alaska salmon advocates say the spill isn’t just an issue for Yukoner. The spill happened upstream of a tributary of the Yukon River, and concerns spread because the Yukon is the state’s biggest transboundary waterway.

The spill happened in late June, and officials from Canada and the U.S. said it was too early to know its full impact and advised residents that there weren’t likely any associated health risks. Still, salmon advocates fear that the pollution that hasn’t been fully contained could worsen matters for the Yukon River’s struggling species. Residents along the area’s shores have depended on salmon for generations. Brooke Woods, a tribal member and salmon advocate in Rampart, told Alaska Beacon, “Now, we have a new threat to our salmon.”

Read the full story at National Fisherman

NOAA recommends $18M to Yurok Tribe-led restoration project

July 19, 2024 — The NOAA‘s Transformational Habitat Restoration and Coastal Resilience program recommends $18 million for a Yurok Tribe-led restoration project.

The project aims to restore critically important segments of multiple Upper Klamath River tributaries.

This follows the progress of the Klamath River Renewal Project taking out four dams along the historic Klamath River.

Read the full article at KOBI

ALASKA: Yukon River communities continue to balance conservation and survival in fifth year of near total salmon fishing closures

June 10, 2024 — As the 2024 Yukon River salmon season kicks off, there will once again be little to no opportunity for communities along the Western Alaska river to harvest any actual salmon.

One small exception is summer chum. If the run hits half a million fish, residents of the lower reaches of the Yukon may have the chance to take to the river with dipnets and other non-traditional gear for a brief window like they did in 2023.

But as Holly Carroll, the Yukon River subsistence fishery manager for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service noted in April, these types of opportunities may not be worth the effort for many along the river.

“Who’s going to spend nine bucks a gallon to go out fishing with a dipnet?” Carroll asked. “It might take them four or five hours to get seven chums. Whereas if they had been given their six-inch gillnet, they put it out for a minute, minute and a half, and they’re done. They’ll have 100. Then they’ll spend the next couple of days cutting and smoking, and they’re done for the season.”

While communities cannot count on these types of heavily restricted opportunities to meet their subsistence needs in 2024, one thing they can count on is a total closure of chinook salmon fishing for the next seven years. Carroll said that the recently signed Alaska-Canada agreement was overdue.

“For me as the federal manager, I see this as the bold step that needed to be taken. We’re just not seeing the returns off those runs that we would have liked. I really felt that it was time,” Carroll said. “I also think we really needed to listen to our tribal stakeholders who have been telling us for years that this annual approach is not a great way to manage.”

Read the full article at KYUK

ALASKA: Canada, Alaska sign 7-year agreement on Yukon River salmon recovery

April 20, 2024 — The Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADFG) and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) have signed a seven-year agreement on rebuilding king salmon stocks in the Yukon River drainage.

Under the agreement, commercial, sport, domestic, and personal use king salmon fisheries will be suspended along the Yukon River and its Canadian tributaries for seven years – the equivalent of the king salmon life cycle.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

ALASKA: Amid salmon crash, Alaska’s Yukon River residents say a new pact with Canada leaves them behind

March 19, 2024 — This reporting was supported by a Carnegie Foundation Fellowship.

Writers Olivia Ebertz and Bathsheba Demuth boated more than 1,000 miles up and down the Yukon River last summer, hearing the stories and perspective of residents and Tribal leaders along the way.

ALONG THE YUKON RIVER — The midsummer air is hot after a long day of sun and stillness in the middle river village of Grayling, and the cutbanks seem to slouch closer toward the Yukon River below. Rachel Freireich says her mother moved here permanently from the Athabaskan village of Holikachuk, up a nearby tributary, in the 1960s to be closer to schools and salmon eddies.

“They came over with steamboats every summer to fish the salmon,” said Freireich, a resident of Grayling her entire 43 years.

In summers while she was growing up, Freireich says the village was a ghost town.

“The whole community would become kind of abandoned, because everybody would bring their whole families out and they went to the fish camp. Everybody was busy,” she said.

But in the summer of 2023, fish camps are empty. The few boats in the lower river are mostly in a search party looking for a missing person. From the mouth of the Yukon at the Bering Sea to the river’s headwaters in Canada, no one is fishing — the consequence of the second-lowest king salmon run on record. The worst was just a year prior, a grim milestone in the wake of decades of ebbing runs that have robbed Indigenous residents of both traditions and nourishment.

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media