The Alaska Department of Fish and Game answers questions here regarding poor Chinook salmon returns to certain parts of the state.
The FAQ says the science team looking into the matter will hold a symposium Oct. 22-23 at the Egan Civic and Convention Center in Anchorage.
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The Govenor's 2012 Chinook Disaster FAQ sheet asks the question: "What is causing low returns of Chinook in Alaska?" Sadly it neglects to admit that over 20 years of massive unregulated bycatch from the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska pollock fleets have had a significant detrimental effect on the salmon populations. ADFG's lack of will to correct the situation has been devastating: salmon abundance has plummeted, the fish camp culture has nearly disappeared, the oldest age class of Yukon King Salmon is extinct, and subsistence and commercial salmon harvesters go without. Meanwhile the pollock fleet keeps on fishing. At this point all we can hope for is that our grandchildren and generations beyond them will have the chance to subsist on King Salmon.
Sincerely, Gervais Family Ruby,AK
I agree with the first blogger; there is no mention of bycatch contributing to the decline. It also appears ADFG has already concluded cold water temperature in the ocean is the cause.
How about competition from millions of hatchery fish?
How about competition from millions of hatchery fish? It's just another of the many untested hypotheses floating around.
Google on "Correlation does not imply causation".
The bycatch numbers from the Gulf are worse than meaningless. Any "biologist" that cites them as real should be laughed out of the room.
Trawlers "game" the 30% coverage fishing safely when observed and do whatever unobserved. They have banned cellphones on board after vid clips of btcatch were given to the tholepin site.
Shame on everyone connected with the farce that is the ADG&G symposium.
Response to blogger at 8:04 am.
It has been my observation that the "millions of hatchery fish" help feed the few kings that are left in the ocean.
Ocean acidification, climate change, too much sea ice/lack of sea ice, mining run off, predators (other than C/P's), cool water/warm water, Fukushima nuclear waste, natural biological cyclical event, moon phases, hatchery fish, rising sea level, stock market flucuating, Honey Boo Boo getting her own tele show, world coming to an end - see Mayan calendar...that's a big damn Sea out there. No one can categorially say that C/P's have been the single cause to this problem - have they been part of the problem - yes, but scientists can't even categorically say that C/P's are THE problem. Have any of you talked to the Coast Guard about illegal/unreported/unregulated fishing in the Bering sea? Do you really know how many foreign boats were dragging and still drag miles of nets catching whatever - how long they have been doing it - raping the ocean of every specie that got in that nets way? Point is, there are MANY variables at play here and much of what is going on out there in the Bering Sea isn't observed because the cost to study is so damn high. Further, countries don't always want to conduct research together so garnering a better understanding of what is actually happening out there becomes that much more difficult. The industry has made a concerted effort to avoid bycatch. Ask them what they've been doing to avoid bycatch - don't just ask on this stupid blog; ASK THE INDUSTRY WHAT THEY'VE BEEN DOING! Now get out there and come up with constructive solutions.
Constructive solution #1) Reduce pollock trawl bycatch meaningfully and see what happens.
Mother Nature is driving the bus here regarding abundance, a point that most seem happy to ignore.
Greed and Evil are driving the bus and most salmon people are not happy about it.
If the salmon culture people get involved in this ADF&G Oct. 22-23 meeting in Anchorage, maybe, just maybe we'll finally be able to convince this group of state employees to do the right thing for which the state is paying them high wages for in the first place!
Two days designated for a highly controversal issue isn't much time for the thousands of peoples lives that has been negatively affected by this lack of salmon.
Don't cry about 'how it use to be' - their ears are closed to whining. Tell them what you expect them to do to help save this important resource for thousands of Alaska's poorest people. Hold them accountable. It's their job.
What do you expect ADF&G to do? What's the right thing?
The king salmon may just be the indicator species that shows there is something going wrong in the ocean. It could be climatic or it could be man made.
We should immediately stop or limit the by-catch by trawlers and draggers and clean up and get rid of all harvest in or near the spawning areas.
Tim, there are billions and billions, not millions of Hatchery chums and pinks that are out there swimming and competing with our wild Alaska king and chum salmon for food.
The last report I read showed more than 8 billion from the North Pacific. Japan, Russia, Canada and the USA.
Is Ocean carrying capacity a problem for King salmon? Too much hatch fish eating all the food?
Nobody has any probative data on high seas competition. All they have are correlations. As the price of Apple stock has gone up, salmon numbers in some stocks and size at sexual maturity has gone down. Does that mean that the high price of Apple stock is affecting salmon? Maybe is all you can say without data showing cause and effect.
These things are not easy to study but jumping to conclusions based on correlation alone is unprofessional.
Tim Smith All they have are correlations? Apple Stock? You want to compare meaningless to meaningful? These things are not easy to study so unless we spend a billion and shoot a snowstorm of data at ya we're unprofessional?
A really strange thing takes place when our salmon somehow get wiped out; folks out there who were NOT PAYING that much attention to the historic run levels, somehow just seem to accept the new lower levels as being normal or maybe just "A Natural Widespread Decline". Then they view those who remember the way it used to be as being non-scientific; their memories are non-scientific. As the years go by those people just seem to lower their fisheries expectations to match whatever is left of a fisheries resource. This is the general attitude of destruction the public has taken as it has watched most of our truly great natural resource disappear. If you incorrectly claim this is a natural decline, you have ZERO hope of ever correcting the problem.
If you incorrectly assume the decline is caused by factor x, your efforts to reverse the decline by altering factor x will be misguided.
It is important to not do that but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do something now even though we don't have all of the answers.
There are two things that should be done immediately.
1. Everyone who cares about salmon should read "King of Fish: The Thousand Year Run of Salmon".
2. Stop wasting the kings we have.
All I see is butts in the air and a dessert of sand.
This Tim guy reminds me of JT without all the quotes!
And the King Salmon question, like the King Crab report, too many answer's, from the Petersburg Office. Area A, where A is not related to anything in biology except for the obvious.
The estimate of available harvest, based on 2012 stock assessment survey results is approximately 15,600 lbs., well below the minimum threshold.
To the lowest level in 22 years...
Petersburg Area Office P.O. Box 667 Petersburg, Alaska 99833 Date: September 14, 2012 Time: 4:00 p.m.
"In 2009, the department initiated a collaborative study with the commercial crab industry to ground truth department pot survey-based biomass estimates using mark/recapture techniques."
Collaboration...to wipe off the map...
Hey Tim, get real:
Carrying-capacity is an ecological FACT -- a ecosystem can only produce x amount of biomass, the specific amount, of course, depends upon various factors, but at the most fundamental level, carrying capacity is limited by primary productivity.
Given this fact, it is neither unreasonable nor illogical, but rather eminently reasonable and logical to suggest that the ocean's Chinook-salmon,carrying capacity IS limited, with he Chinook prey- base being the ultimately limiting factor; therefore the amount of Chinook salmon biomass that is and can be produced in any given year is limited (dependent) upon the prey available, which means that if other critters (including hatchery fish) are eating the prey, less wild Chinook biomass will be produced.
Of course, it is also possible that the prey base is not THE limiting factor affecting wild Chinook production (or at least returns), e.g. the limiting factor might be illegal ocean capture, but for you to suggest that carrying-capacity is an unlikely cause is just silly and disingenuous.
Limiting hatchery production during low production of wild Chinook makes a whole lot of sense, as it is one factor that we cause and can control for.
Also, meant to say that by-catch as well is another factor "we" (humans) cause and can control.
To the guy who posted the king crab thing, there is 15k# within a ten mile radius of Petersburg. Nobody, and I mean nobody on this planet is more inept at finding king crab than the f&g.
I personally think the king salmon decline has something to do with the fact you have a year round commercial troll fishery. Winter kings, hatchery access openings in the spring, have by-catch and a unknown mortality of undersized king salmon. I think if you want to correlate something, correlate the increased effort in the winter and the special hatchery access openers in the spring with the decline and see where we are.
F&G has excellent management of Southeast troll. Down to an exact number of fish. HAHAHA
You never see a picture of a troller standing on a river bank holding up a giant "Red Skin" king that was destined for the spawning beds, like you see in the magazines, and on the wall at the local sporting goods establishment. Just because a person likes to sport fish, and its good for the economy in small towns means you should have a right to fish those fish. Trollers in southeast get cutback all the time.They have a specific quota that gets set by a treaty we have with Canada, F&G knows where these fish came from and where they are going. You can't blame the troller for what is happening in the rest of the state. You can blame the draggers and the sporties. If you want to catch kings buy a permit and you too can have the right. Other than that quit whineing!
after years of the the southeast seine fleet under reporting bycatch of king salmon!what do you expect a healthy king salmon run on the chilkat taku or stkine river systems get real!when was the last time you heard of an in season closure of seining due to king salmon bycatch!it might take you awhile.this and the fact that canadian residents can still drive down to haines and get ther share of the chilkat river kings is amazeing to me why we question where have the king salmon gone?
Post the credentials of ADF&G's "science team" and how they worked their way up the ladder as state employees. Most will have the minimum requirement of a degree in Biology. Most will show that they received this degree anywhere from 15-20 years ago. Since then, scientific study methods have gone beyond making return predictions and counting the returns to check your predictions. This "science team" of ADF&G employees is nothing but smoke and mirrors.
Anonymous 9/21 @ 5:59PM "carrying capacity is limited by primary productivity."
Agreed and the rest is just detail I suppose. But the devil is in the details.
"Of course, it is also possible that the prey base is not THE limiting factor affecting wild Chinook production (or at least returns),"
Bingo.
There is currently no good way to know where we are with respect to marine carrying capacity for king salmon. It is a very complex question that will probably never be fully understood. It is extremely unlikely that multiple stocks would be subject to the same limiting factors and we don't even know the home ranges of any of the stocks. Top predators like king salmon are so heavily fished that it is hard to believe that any of them could be able to escape capture in numbers high enough to bump up against food limitations but anything is possible I guess. Empirical data is a lot better than speculation but unfortunately, we don't have much of that.
"for you to suggest that carrying-capacity is an unlikely cause is just silly and disingenuous."
It would be but then I'm not the one suggesting that. What I have said is that no one has the data to do much more than speculate about carrying capacity for king salmon. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. Hey if you have references to scientific reports that do more than rehash the correlations between hatchery fry releases and wild king salmon stocks please cite them.
"The King of Fish" and "Cod" should be required reading. A very good argument for the decline can be as simple as over harvest by the users. They run and mingle with other targeted salmon and other targeted species and are caught at the same time and in many cases are not reported and probably always under reported. For a Cook inlet set net fisher or a trawler, or an Area M or BB or western chum fisher to report a Chinook caught is like driving another small nail into their own coffin. And take a look at some of the walls in the lodges and Kenai guide's homes and see the thousands of chinooks held up for pictures. Someone told me that Bob Penny's mansion sports over a thousand pictures of one or more big wigs holding large dead salmon. No, i really believe that the Chinooks are about to go away as far as any big numbers are concerned and will be a fish that we will about from the 'good old days'
It was fun this summer watching the department manage kings. After careful calculations, they needed to catch 80k more. When it opened, they struggled mightily to find some fish. It stayed open forever, finally closing, but only after the department opened high abundance areas. The lack of fish, the king salmon abundance index, the departments moronic management style, which flies in the face of the abundance based management approach, all collided for a perfect storm of lunacy. Trollers get cut back all the time. Puhleese. Summer trolling will close, except in a few small areas, where it already did close for wild coho consevation, on September 30th. It will open for winter kings on October 11. It will remain open until April 15th. The day winter kings closes, special hatchery access areas will open throughout southeast. These will remain open until the July 1 opener, the beginning of the summer season, which will have a short opener to allow Patty Skannes to count fish. Then it all starts up again. The fishery that never sleeps.
It may be that adult Chinook (top dogs in their food web) are no up against a limiting prey base, but on the other hand, juvenile Chinook (not the top dogs at this stage in their lives)are limited by prey base due to competition from hatchery juveniles as well as other factors.
Of course, data to support this hypothesis is limited (pretty much non-existent) because research has not been and is not being funded (so much for the industry paying its way).
So, to reiterate, given the lack of information, we need to control those factors we can control and in this situation at least two factors that can be controlled are by-catch and hatchery production.
Just to be clear: when I suggest that juvenile Chinook's prey base may be limited by competition from hatchery juveniles, I am not limiting that competition to just hatchery Chinook juveniles.
Hatchery production can be limited how?
The speculation is that fish produced by hatcheries around the Pacific Rim are competing on the high seas. If that hypothesis is true and I'm not saying that it is, reducing hatchery production in one area would only create an opportunity in another.
Convincing all of the countries that release hatchery produced salmon into the North Pacific without a solid scientific foundation for doing it is inconceivable.
The competition hypothesis is unproven, reducing mortality from directed harvest and bycatch in the pollock trawl fisheries is a lot less speculative.
Right,reducing hatchery production would require a multi-lateral agreement among the nations of the Pacific Rim. Nonetheless, as I indicated above, the competition hypothesis has two components, one of which is competition among juveniles in the marine environment, particularly estuaries (mortality remains high at this life stage, once juveniles reach a certain size mortality falls dramatically). So, if competition among hatchery and wild juveniles is a significant contributor to the decline in wild adults returning to their natal waters, then reducing hatchery releases does not require other nations to cooperate, just requires Alaska hatcheries to reduce production.
So only two minor tasks to accomplish before you get your way.
You need to prove that nearshore competition between hatchery and naturally spawning juvenile salmon reduces the total numbers of salmon available for harvesting.
Convince people that the goal should be to maximize wild stock production even if it means fewer fish for harvesting.
Neither of these tasks will be easy.
You got that right: protecting hatchery salmon seems to be job #1.
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