“Unprecedented” is how fishery managers are describing sockeye catches at Bristol Bay, which topped one million fish for seven days straight at the Nushagak district last week and neared the two million mark on several days.
By July 9, Alaska’s statewide sockeye salmon catch was approaching 32 million, of which more than 25 million came from Bristol Bay. The only other region getting good sockeye catches was the Alaska Peninsula, where nearly 4.6 million reds were landed so far.
Statewide, the big numbers will be pinks, which run in distinct two-year cycles, with odd years being stronger. The preseason forecast calls for a total Alaska harvest of 124.2 million pinks this summer.
The timing for peak pink harvests is still several weeks away. Likewise for chums, and most cohos will arrive in mid-August.
Alaska salmon managers are projecting the 2021 statewide salmon catch to top 190 million fish, a 61% increase over last year’s take of about 118 million. By July 9, the statewide catch for all species had topped 41 million fish.
There is still lots of fishing left to go and so far, the most sluggish catches were coming out of Southeast, where only 258,000 salmon were landed by last week.
On the Yukon River, summer chum salmon returns are the lowest on record and state managers will request a disaster declaration for the second year in a row.
Norton Sound
primes for pinks
Chums also are a bust at Norton Sound, where the runs have dropped to less than 5% of what is typical each summer.
“Right now, we don’t see any chum salmon openings. Something happened in the ocean that really knocked them down for this stretch,” said Jim Menard, regional manager for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Nome.
Menard told radio station KNOM that low chum runs have been occurring throughout Western Alaska in general, and it could be a side effect of the high numbers of pink salmon that have been surging into the region.
“Five years running we’ve had incredible pink salmon runs. And the even-numbered year pink runs in Norton Sound are a lot bigger than the odd-numbered years,” Menard said, adding that pink returns to the region’s rivers have skyrocketed to well over 10 million fish.
The shift in fish means a small fleet of Norton Sound purse seiners will test the waters for a new pink salmon fishery this summer. It will be a first try with seine fishing for humpies so far north, and Icicle Seafoods is lined up to buy all the pinks that the local boats pull in.
“If it’s possible to target pinks without adversely affecting the important subsistence and gillnet fleets, this pink salmon fishery warrants pursuing,” Menard said.
As far as the appearance of so many pinks, fish managers say it’s all about the food.
“They’re definitely the colonizers, for sure,” said Sam Rabung, director of the department’s commercial fisheries division. “I’ve had calls from people on the North Slope asking about fisheries because pink salmon are showing up there. I don’t know that they’re going to persist because it still freezes up there, and so the eggs that are deposited in those rivers won’t generally survive. But they’re trying.”
As ocean waters warm, Rabung said it changes the makeup of the plankton the pinks feed upon, and the fish are following their healthier food sources northward.
“As the warmer water moves north, the warm water copepods, which are one of the main foods for salmon, move north with it. The cold water copepods have a high lipid, high fat content, so they’re very energy dense and have a lot of bang for the buck for eating on them,” he explained.
And since salmon are a cold water species, warm waters also boost their metabolism, meaning they need more food to grow, he said.
A changing ocean brings big challenges, he said, and paying attention to the impacts on fish can help managers better react.
Crab and halibut
Catches for Dungeness crab in Southeast Alaska were going slow so far for 163 boats, but prices of $4.20 a pound are more than double last year’s. The crab fishery will run through mid-August and reopen in October.
Kodiak crabbers were getting $4.25 for their Dungeness, also more than double.
Norton Sound opened for king crab on June 15, with a 290,000-pound catch limit. Concerns over the depleted stock resulted in no buyers and only one participant selling crab locally.
Alaska’s halibut catch was nearing 7.8 million pounds out of a nearly 19 million pound catch limit. Continuing demand for fresh fish has kept prices well over $5.75 a pound at most ports, reaching $7.50 across the board at Homer.
New phone app collects
science from fishermen
Fishermen are the ears and eyes of the marine ecosystem as a changing climate throws our oceans off kilter.
Now a new phone app is making sure their real-life, real-time observations are included in scientific data.
The new Skipper Science smartphone app, released June 18, comes from the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island in the Bering Sea as a way “to elevate the thousands of informal yet meaningful environmental observations by fishermen and others into hard numbers for Alaska’s science-based management,” said Lauren Divine, director of ecosystem conservation for St. Paul’s tribal government, whose team created and owns the dataset for the app.
“How do we take what has historically been called anecdotal and create some structure around it that is rigorous and has scientific repeatability?” Divine said told public radio station KCAW in Sitka.
“There is a vast body of deep knowledge that fishermen hold from their experience on the water, indigenous and non-indigenous alike, that they use for decision making and risk evaluation and to execute a likelihood on the water. And we have very much underutilized that knowledge for years, especially here in the North Pacific,” she said in a later phone interview.
The free app, which works on or off the internet, is an offshoot of an Indigenous Sentinels Network started 16 years ago at St. Paul Island to monitor wildlife and the environment in the Bering Sea.
To broaden its reach, St. Paul partnered with advocacy group SalmonState’s Salmon Habitat Information Program (SHIP). Through its surveys and other outreach, SHIP quantifies what is regarded by scientists as fishermen’s “informal observations” and shares the information with fisheries managers and decision makers.
“We have perspectives that go back decades as persons that are dependent on reading correctly what’s going on,” said Sitka troller Eric Jordan, who has been out on Southeast waters for 71 years. “We are tuned in to the utmost degree. We know which bird is feeding on what fish, the water temperature, the depth, the bottom structure, all those things,” he said of the SkipperScience community.
U.S. shoppers learn
to love Alaska seafood
A new national survey reveals that 26% of U.S. consumers said they purchased seafood for the first time during the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly half plan to increase their intake, and nearly 74% plan to continue cooking seafood at home.
That’s according to a 2021 Power of Seafood report by Dataessential, which tracks national market trends. The report was compiled for the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute.
Seafood saw unprecedented growth in grocery sales at nearly 30 % at the height of the pandemic, far exceeding all other food categories.
The top reasons? It’s healthier than red meat and people said they prefer the taste.
Topping the seafood list of favorites was salmon. And by a 5-to-1 margin, responders said they prefer wild over farmed. Having less harmful additives was a top reason they prefer wild-caught seafood.
Over 60% said they want to know where their seafood comes from and that it is sustainably sourced.
Over 70% of 1,000 responders said they are more likely to buy seafood when they see the Alaska logo, and they are willing to pay more for it.
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