Saving Seafood

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

More than $42 million newly allocated to U.S. fishery disaster relief

January 30, 2024 — More than $42 million in federal fishery disaster relief is being allocated to help U.S. fishermen, from the hurricane-wracked Louisiana Gulf coast to Alaska’s Yukon River salmon communities.

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina M. Raimondo announced the disaster aid packages Monday for Alaska, California, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oregon and the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe and Yurok Tribe fisheries, from 2017 to 2022.

“Sustainable fisheries are essential to the health of our communities and support the nation’s economic well-being,” Raimondo said in announcing the funding. “With these allocations, it is our hope that these funds help the affected communities and tribes recover from these disasters.”

Read the full article at National Fisherman 

Salmon and other migratory fish play crucial role in delivering nutrients

January 4, 2024 — Yukon River chinook salmon boast the longest freshwater migration in North America, traveling more than 3,000 kilometers (nearly 2,000 miles) from their spawning grounds in Canada to the mouth of the Bering Sea in Alaska. A smolt preparing to enter the ocean is small enough to lay across the palm of your hand. But by the time it returns four or five years later to swim back upriver, it will be about a meter long (more than 3 feet), and weigh 14 kilograms (more than 30 pounds).

Not all Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.) travel as far, or grow as big, as the Yukon River chinook (O. tshawytscha), but they all make the journey from freshwater spawning grounds to the ocean, then return to their natal streams to spawn and then die en masse. Those remarkable journeys connect and nurture distant ecosystems.

That’s because salmon gain most of their body mass in the ocean, and when spawning adults travel back inland to die, they ferry energy and nutrients from marine to terrestrial ecosystems. Those migrating salmon are eaten by bears, eagles and a slew of other predators. Scavengers devour carcasses left rotting in streambeds, or discarded in the forest along streams by other carnivores. Ultimately the nutrients diffuse throughout the ecosystem. The young return to the sea to reinvigorate the cycle, in a dance that has lasted unknown centuries — until modern humans began interfering.

Today, researchers can trace the pathway of these nutrients using the “salmon signature,” an isotope of marine nitrogen associated with the migrating fish. John Reynolds, a professor of aquatic ecology and conservation at Canada’s Simon Fraser University, has been searching for that salmon signature in the temperate rainforest of British Columbia’s central coast for more than 15 years.

His lab has published numerous studies showing that nutrient additions from salmon influence wildflower development; the productivity of salmon berry bushes; the territory size of Pacific wrens (Troglodytes pacificus); the density of salmon and other freshwater fish; and more. The salmon signature can even be seen from space: on satellite imagery, the greenness of riparian forests is higher following years of high salmon abundance.

Read the full article at Mongabay

ALASKA: Salmon are vanishing from the Yukon River — and so is a way of life

November 9, 2023 — Serena Fitka sat in the cabin of a flat-bottomed aluminum boat as it sped down the Yukon River in western Alaska, recalling how the river once ran thick with salmon. Each summer, in the Yup’ik village of St. Mary’s where Fitka grew up, she and her family fished for days on end. They’d catch enough salmon to last through winter, enough to share with cousins, aunts, uncles, and elders who couldn’t fish for themselves.

“We’d get what we need, and be done,” Fitka said, raising her voice above the whir of the outboard motor and the waves beating against the hull. “But now there’s nothing.”

The boat skirted the river bank as Fitka glanced out the window, her face shielded from the mid-July sun. Gray water, thick with glacial silt, lapped against the land’s muddy edge below a summer palette of green: dark spruce needles, light birch leaves, and willows a shade in between. A bald eagle soared 10 feet above the river, scanning the water.

“I thought this wouldn’t happen in my lifetime,” Fitka said. “I thought there would always be fish in the river.”

Read the full article at the Grist

Lawsuit accuses Alaska of unconstitutionally mismanaging Yukon, Kuskokwim salmon fisheries

March 22, 2023 — An attorney who successfully overturned a billion-dollar Alaska oil tax credit program is now targeting the state’s management of its salmon fisheries.

On Monday in Bethel, attorney Joe Geldhof argued that the state is managing those fisheries so poorly that it is violating the Alaska Constitution. Article VIII, Section 4 of the constitution says that fisheries should be managed “on the sustained yield principle,” and Geldhof — representing a Juneau man, Eric Forrer — argues that declining king and chum salmon returns in the Kuskokwim and Yukon rivers “illustrate a failure to adhere to the constitutional directive regarding sustained yield.”

An unprecedented collapse in those fisheries has resulted in orders banning traditional subsistence fishing along the river.

In a lawsuit filed last year against the state and the commissioner of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Forrer asked a judge in Bethel to issue a ruling declaring that the state is unconstitutionally managing the Yukon and Kuskokwim salmon fisheries and for a “mutually agreeable consent decree” outlining an as-yet-unwritten new management system.

Geldhof’s case is one of the first challenging the state in court over the failure of the Yukon and Kuskokwim fisheries, and he isn’t sure what a fix would look like.

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media

ALASKA: Tale of two salmon fisheries: Bristol Bay breaks record, but Yukon River collapses

July 25, 2022 — In the Bristol Bay region, the sockeye salmon run and harvest amounts set new records, as was predicted in the preseason forecast. As of Monday, the run had totaled over 73.7 million, with a harvest of over 56.3 million. The previous record was set just last year, with a 67.7 million run of sockeyes and a third-biggest-ever harvest of nearly 42 million of the fish.

But along the Yukon River, a prized salmon run is heading toward a worst-ever season.

The number of Chinook counted by sonar while swimming up the river at Pilot Station, a village near the Bering Sea coast, was the lowest on record for this time of the year, the department said. Things are looking grim for the rest of the summer, Fish and Game said in its most recent update; “the drainage-wide run may be under 50,000 fish, which is so small that escapement goals may not be met in any tributaries,” the update said. Chinook fishing has been closed all along the river and its drainages.

Opponents of the controversial Pebble Mine say two consecutive years of record sockeye runs demonstrate the value of protecting the Bristol Bay watershed, site of the world’s biggest sockeye runs, from that proposed development. They are urging the Environmental Protection Agency to invoke a rarely used provision of the Clean Water Act to preclude any wetlands-fill permit for the mine.

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media

ALASKA: Management council declines action on Bering Sea bycatch to address Yukon-Kuskokwim salmon subsistence worries

June 22, 2022 — Despite hours of testimony from residents of the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers who called for urgent action to curb the salmon bycatch by Bering Sea trawlers, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council decided to approach the problem more methodically.

In a unanimous vote near the end of its five-day meeting in Sitka, the Council recommended further study of salmon declines in the Bering Sea, and a closer look at their connection to climate change.

Salmon abundance in the Yukon River, the third-largest river in North America, has dropped sharply in the past two years.

The forecast is no better this season.

Many Yukon and Kuskokwim River residents voiced concern during last Monday’s call.

“At this point, there should be alarm bells going off all over not only in our communities, but all over the state and federal government agencies,” said Vivian Korthuis, the chief executive officer for the Association of Village Council Presidents, a consortium of 56 federally-recognized tribes on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media

Salmon travel deep into the Pacific. As it warms, many ‘don’t come back.’

March 30, 2022 — During a typical fall, almost a million chum salmon pour into Alaska’s Yukon River, a torrent of wild fish that has sustained the economy and Indigenous culture in the far north for generations. Last year, that run collapsed, with salmon trickling upstream at a 10th of normal levels, forcing the state to airlift frozen fish from other regions to feed the population.

About 400 miles to the south, in Bristol Bay, the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery set a record last year, with more than 66 million salmon returning to the rivers in the watershed. That total is expected to be broken again this year.

Salmon in the Pacific Ocean face dramatically different fates from one river system to the next. As the planet warms, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, scientists say changes in ocean conditions are helping drive these wild swings and collapses of key stocks. These North Pacific fish account for most of the world’s wild-caught salmon, and their survival has implications for economies and cultures around the Pacific Rim.

During her three decades as a government scientist, as climate change has intensified, Laurie Weitkamp has watched these fluctuations in salmon numbers become bigger and the models that predict how many salmon will return from sea become more unreliable.

“Salmon will go out, in what we think is a really good ocean, and then it collapses,” said Weitkamp, a fisheries biologist with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration based in Oregon. “They don’t come back.”

Read the full story at The Washington Post