Yukon River king salmon subsistence fishery curtailed
Originally published Monday, June 23, 2008 at 7:17 p.m.
Updated Tuesday, June 24, 2008 at 12:00 a.m.
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Stumble It!FAIRBANKS — So few king salmon have returned to the Yukon River that state and federal fisheries managers are cutting subsistence fishing time, a sign that this year’s chinook run could be one of the worst on record.
“This is really a serious situation,” Russ Holder, a fisheries biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said on Monday. “If the run does not significantly improve, folks upriver are going to have difficulty reaching 50 percent of their subsistence harvest goals this year for chinook salmon.”
And it’s the oil-rich Yukon kings that most people along Alaska’s biggest waterway want to put up for the winter.
“That’s what most people are targeting,” Holder said.
The low return of Yukon kings prompted state and federal fish managers to cut subsistence time in half, a restriction that took effect Monday. Fishermen in the lower river are also being restricted to a smaller net size so they catch summer chum salmon, not kings.
As of June 22, the sonar count at Pilot Station was just 30,200 king salmon, Yukon area manager Steve Hayes of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game said. The average sonar count for that date is about 63,000, he said.
At this point, biologists are projecting a run of fewer than 100,000 kings at Pilot Station, he said. The minimum number required for escapement purposes — in both Alaska and Canada — and subsistence harvest is 130,000, he said.
“It’s cause for concern,” acknowledged Hayes of the low return.
Based on a below-average run last year, fisheries biologists were bracing for another weak run this year, but the return appears to be worse than experts predicted. Test fisheries near the mouth of the river, sonar counts farther up the river at Pilot Station and reports from subsistence fishermen on the lower and middle Yukon all point to an exceptionally weak chinook run this year, Hayes said.
The Yukon king run usually consists of three to four pulses of kings, with the first two typically making up the bulk of the run, he said. The fact that the first pulse of salmon, detected June 14-17, resulted in only about 10,000 fish passing the sonar counter at Pilot Station is not a good sign, he said.
“We would have liked to see 30,000 or 40,000 fish,” Hayes said.
Even more disconcerting is the fact that managers have not seen any sign of a second pulse yet. Normally, the second pulse hits the river within two or three days after the first wave of kings.
“To have four or five days of poor entry between pulses is really abnormal,” said Holder, who spent more than 20 years studying and managing the Yukon king run for the Department of Fish and Game before moving over to the Fish and Wildlife Service. “Usually it’s just a day or two, and then we see another pulse coming in.”
Making matters worse for people living on the upper portion of the river is the fact that the first two pulses of kings usually contain a high proportion of fish bound for Canada, while later-arriving fish tend to be Alaska stocks. Last year, Alaska came up 31,000 fish short of meeting its obligations to Canada as part of the Yukon River Salmon Agreement, an international treaty between Canada and the U.S. regarding management of Yukon River king salmon.
“Those first two pulses really do contribute to a much greater number of folks along the river,” Holder said.
If the run doesn’t improve, further restrictions will probably be placed on subsistence fishermen in the middle and lower Yukon, Hayes said. Fishermen may be required to man their wheels or employ live boxes to let any kings they catch go.
The summer chum salmon run, meanwhile, is “so-so,” according to Holder. The sonar count for summer chums at Pilot Station is about 240,000, and it should be somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000, he said.
Managers were hoping for a bigger summer chum run to make up for the lack of kings, but it doesn’t look like that will be the case. And even if it was, summer chums don’t reach the upper Yukon, where subsistence fishermen will need them most.
Community Discussion
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Ouch.
Not only does the Interior have an energy crisis on it's hands, it looks like there might be a food crisis too, for people living a subsistence lifestyle.
I don't know much about fisheries, but aren't there also commercial and sports fishing? Why weren't these mentioned in the article? Will they be restricted, too?
Commercial and sport fishing play a much greater role in southeast and southcentral Alaska than in western Alaska, where the Yukon River drains. Likely the largest commercial threat to western salmon runs is the Bering polluck fishery, which pulls what, about 100,000 chinook (?) out of the water every year as a "byproduct" of their fishing activity. They are not allowed to keep them, so they usually get dumped back in the water (dead). Damn shame, really.
Everything possible will be done to limit restrictions on commercial and sport fishing, as that is where the money lies.
Am I missing something from the Fairbanks paper? The cover story of the Casper Star-Trib Science Section yesterday was headlined "Climate-linked disease infects way of life" and it was all about how the salmon coming out of the Yukon at Tanana are infected with Ichthyophonus hoferi -- a parasite that causes "white spot disease."
"At the mouth of the Yukon, where the commercial gill netters operate, 25 percent to 30 percent of the chinook salmon were infected, Kocan (fish disease expert at the U of Washington) found. But the fish usually did not show signs of the disease. The same proportion were infected at midriver near Tanana, about halfway to the Canadian border. But here, nearly a third of the fish showed the salt-like flecks on their hearts and other organs, and their mealy flesh released the telltale smell of putrid fruit."
So, what's up? You're cutting back subsistence fishing AND nearly a third of the fish will end up inedible? Yikes....
I have yet to see one fishery in the world that is doing well. There is something going on in the oceans. There has been dumping of salmon, no doubt it does the fishery no good, but there is something much worse out there. Where are all the fish going, and will this continue? The runs may only get worse no matter if we stop fishing all together, and right now it's going to be hard for us to pull our nets when we have not caught a single fish on the Koyukuk yet. But we will do what is right, and limit what we catch because it makes sense. We need to at least try and save a run for the future, whatever future it is that comes. Maybe the fall chum run will be good, no one knows, but I doubt it.
I should mention that Kocan said the incidence of white spot disease and its getting worse corresponds to a rise in temperature of the Yukon River -- apparently the warmer water temperatures are allowing the parasites to gain more of a foothold (ganglia-hold? What do these thing look like???). The article just sort of ends (in the paper), but there is something about how the fish that make it to the spawning grounds don't have these parasites because the parasites weaken the fish to the point that it just dies along the way and never makes it to the end.
How's Chitina going? Any better?
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