Just received an email from salmon guru Jon Rowley: "There won't be any Yukon kings. Somber time in the Yukon Delta villages."
Says Jack Schultheiss of the native cooperative, Kwikpak Fisheries, "Life is not good here. The fish are not running. And things are going from bad to worse." Only half as many fish as expected, not enough to replenish the run.
What happened? Blame the demand for fish sticks and "krab," both made from pollock, a billion-dollar fishery that indiscriminately traps migrating salmon as about 100 pollock trawlers troll the shallow mouth of the Yukon River. Tens of thousands of Yukons have been lost, half the run, and a run that was unusually low to begin with.
I can understand that Jon Rowley and his client Kwik'pak Fisheries are disappointed in the poor 2008 Yukon River run and the impact of that on promoting their fish in the market, but lashing out at federal fishery managers and the Alaska pollock fishery is both wrong and short-sighted.
One reason the nation's largest fishery, the 2.2 billion pound Alaska pollock fishery, was among the first fisheries in the world to be certified as sustainable by the World Wildlife Fund-backed Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) was because of the progressive approach of federal fishery managers and Alaska pollock fishermen to minimizing fishery impacts on the environment, including the incidental catch of non-pollock species. Unlike most fisheries, government observers are stationed onboard all but the smallest Alaska pollock vessels to record incidental catches. That's how we know how "clean" this fishery has been over the years and why the fishery deserved to be certified and to maintain its certification through annual audits.
In addition to management measures, the pollock fishermen also work voluntarily to avoid catching salmon, including observing voluntary closures, funding research on nets that allow salmon to escape, and supporting a program that provides real-time bycatch data so fishermen can quickly move out of areas where salmon are found.
Despite all the management measures and voluntary actions by pollock fishermen, Chinook salmon bycatch in the 2007 Alaska pollock fishery reached unacceptable levels. However, that bycatch has little, if any, bearing on this year's poor Yukon Chinook run. Also, there's little evidence to suggest that all or even most of the intercepted Chinook was bound for the Yukon. And if one is going to cite a single year and draw cause and effect conclusions, what about this year? The Chinook bycatch in the first half of 2008 is one-quarter of last year's total, in part, because of the pollock fleet's proactive efforts to deal with fishery management problems when they arise.
In the past few years, we have seen unsettling changes in the pollock fishery, particularly the distribution of fish stocks farther and farther north in the Bering Sea. (Contrary to the blog reports, the pollock fishery is conducted far from shore and nowhere near the mouth of the Yukon River.) The scientific community, including fishery managers, is trying to understand the effects of global warming on fishery and other marine resources. Also, scientists are only beginning to examine the sharply increased acidification levels in the waters off Alaska from the oceans' absorption of one-third of all the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere over the past 100 years. Rowley might be comfortable ignoring the significant variations in ocean temperature, currents, ice, wind, and acidity in the Bering Sea and North Pacific and placing blame for a poor salmon run on one factor, but no scientist, fishery manager or reasonable layman would.
Rowley has spent enough time around the seafood industry to understand that there are seldom simple answers to the challenges we face. It is tempting to simplify issues by blaming someone or something, but that won't make the fish return. Jon doesn’t mention that in addition to salmon, many communities in western Alaska, including those on the Yukon River, are participants in the Alaska pollock fishery. Through their ownership of vessels that catch and process pollock, millions of dollars are available to these villages for economic development and other community improvements. It would unfortunate that while we all work to improve the returns of salmon to the Yukon that we end up bringing down the other major fishery which supports those same communities.
Pat Shanahan
Genuine Alaska Pollock Producers