As king salmon failed to show up in Alaska this summer has affected the village economies severely. It is informed that one Alaska river after another has been closed to king fishing this summer because significant numbers of fish failed to return to spawn. Leslie Hunter, 67, a store owner and commercial fisherman, said that it is going to be a tough winter.
Federal and state fisheries biologists are looking into the mystery. King salmon spend years in the Bering Sea before returning as adults to rivers where they were born to spawn and die. Biologists speculate that the mostly likely cause is a shift in Pacific Ocean currents, but food availability, changing river conditions and predator-prey relationships could be affecting the fish.
Villagers along Yukon River blames pollock fishery for such decline in salmon numbers. The pollock fishery, the nation’s largest, removes about 1 million metric tons of pollock each year from the eastern Bering Sea. Its wholesale value is nearly $1 billion. King salmon get caught in the huge pollock trawl nets, and the dead kings are counted and most are thrown back into the ocean. Some are donated to the needy.
Nick Andrew Jr., executive director of the Ohagamuit Traditional Council, said that the pollock fishery is slaughtering wholesale and wiping out the king salmon stocks out there that are coming into all the major tributaries. He added that the pollock fishery is taking away our way of living.
Efforts to reduce bycatch are not new. In 2006, bycatch rules were adopted allowing the pollock fleet to move from areas where lots of kings were being inadvertently caught, thereby avoiding large-scale fishing closures. It is true that the loss of the kings is devastating village economies. These are the same Yukon River villages where spring floods swept away homes, as well as boats, nets and smokehouses. There’s no money to buy anything, opined villagers.
Diana Stram, a fishery-management plan coordinator at the council, said that it is crippling the economy in all of the rivers where we depend on commercial fishing for income. He added that bycatch plays a role but is not the only reason for the vanishing kings.
