Western Alaska villagers have endured the worst chum salmon runs on record, several years of anemic Chinook salmon runs in the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers, harvest closures from the Bering Sea coast to Canada’s Yukon Territory and such dire conditions that they relied on emergency shipments of salmon from elsewhere in Alaska just to have food to eat.
Many of those suffering see one way to provide some quick relief: Large vessels trawling for pollock and other groundfish in the industrial-scale fisheries of the Bering Sea, they say, must stop intercepting so many salmon.
Advocates for tighter rules on those interceptions, known as bycatch, made their case over the past several days to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, the organization that manages fish harvests in federal waters off Alaska. The council met in Sitka last week.
“The numbers are really low. There’s nothing out there. It’s like fishing in the desert,” Walter Morgan, of the Yup’ik village of Lower Kalskag, said in online testimony to the council.
He described how conditions have deteriorated since his childhood in the 1960s, when his family could put a single net in the water and pull out enough fish to fill their boat. “It’s getting even harder to go out and fish and catch those one or two salmon that we need,” he said. “We need it. That’s our identity. That’s been my identity since I was born.”
The council declined to impose any new bycatch rules that would affect the current season. Instead, they approved what members characterized as a rigorous research program to include the formation of a working group with tribal representatives and others from affected communities. The research will also consider recommendations from a bycatch task force formed by Gov. Mike Dunleavy.
The council also urged more voluntary bycatch reduction by the pollock industry, the nation’s largest single-species commercial harvest and supplier of the ubiquitous whitefish found in fish sticks, fast-food fish burgers and imitation crab meat.
The issue is tough, said Bill Tweit, the Washington state representative on the council. “This is certainly one of the hardest natural resource issues that I think I’ve ever dealt with. It doesn’t look like it’s going to get any easier, at least in the near future,” he said.
But he, like the other council members, backed the idea of more research and consultation over new mandates.
Bering Sea bycatch of salmon has increased dramatically in the past two years, especially for chum salmon, a species that has traditionally been a dietary staple in western Alaska.
Last year, the Bering Sea and Aleutians Island trawl fishery caught 546,043 chum salmon in nets intended to harvest pollock, twice the 10-year annual average, according to a report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Analysis of genetics revealed that 9.4% of the chum were from Western Alaska and the Yukon River. The majority of the chum salmon netted in bycatch turned out to be from Asia, according to the report.
In absolute volume, nonetheless, the Alaska-originating chum dwarfs the harvests along the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers. On the lower Kuskokwim last year, only about 50,000 salmon in total were harvested, and only about 4,220 of them were chum, according to the Kuskokwim River Intertribal Fish Commission, with the remainder nearly evenly divided between sockeye and Chinook salmon.
Commercial harvests last year were likewise paltry — only 5,845 chum and 2,582 chinook in the Kuskokwim and absolutely no commercial harvest on the Yukon, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
Salmon are classified as a “prohibited species catch” in the trawl fishery, and the bycatch must be either donated or thrown overboard.
Shannon Erhart, deputy director for tribal development for the Tanana Chiefs Conference, advocated in favor of a zero-bycatch approach. She said trawlers cast thousands of salmon overboard at the same time that villagers are not allowed to fish.
Erhart expressed frustration as families in villages sit idle while salmon is being wasted as a bycatch of high seas trawling. “It hurts. Last summer was very hard on people not being able to fish at all,” she said.
But scientific analysis so far points to something much larger than bycatch as the force behind Western Alaska salmon declines, experts told the council.
Fishery scientists from both NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, in presentations to the council, described a myriad of problems related to warming conditions and climate change.
Those include marine heat waves that scrambled food supplies, forcing salmon at sea to switch from high-quality food like oil-packed capelin to low-quality food like jellyfish; low fat reserves carried over from summers to winters; skewed growth rates and smaller fish sizes for both chinook and chum; and heat stress in rivers that triggered large die-offs of fish before they were able to spawn.
The disruptions to Western Alaska runs coincided with the arrival six years ago of a multiyear marine heat wave in the Bering Sea, said biologist Katie Howard of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
But of all the factors, bycatch is the one that the council can control, said advocates for stronger action.
“The council doesn’t have the jurisdiction to take action on climate change. The council is supposed to be taking care of the fishery,” said Lindsey Bloom of the nonprofit organization SalmonState.
What SalmonState and similar organizations wanted, Bloom said, was a firm cap on bycatch to be in effect this year, full coverage of the industry in the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska by onboard observers who can monitor catches, and some mandates for specially designed nets used on some ships that trap pollock but allow 30% to 40% of salmon to escape.
Representatives of the pollock industry have pushed back against the idea that they’re responsible for the salmon crashes.
Stephanie Madsen, executive director of the At-Sea Processors Association, a trade group of operators of huge ships that both harvest and process fish, said that although the situation in Western Alaska is “heartbreaking,” bycatch is “clearly not the driver of the decline.”
“You can put your hand on the dial and you can turn it down and hope there will be an impact to those that are in crisis,” she told the council on June 11. But that will not address the real culprits, she said, listing climate change, lack of food and possible competition with hatchery fish.
As the council wrapped up its June meeting, there were more developments showing the dismal state of salmon in the Yukon and Kuskokwim areas. Early returns into the Lower Yukon River have been consistent with the forecasts of another poor season. And the governor on June 13 announced the first 2022 shipment of emergency salmon to the Yukon-Kuskokwim region, continuing a series of deliveries that started last year.
The AlaskaBeacon.com is a donor-funded independent news organization in Alaska.
The Sitka Sentinel contributed to this report.
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