[env-trinity] HCN: States restrict chinook fisheries

Fri Aug 25 14:13:00 PDT 2017

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for people who care about the West

States restrict chinook fisheries

Extreme climate conditions over recent years pummeled the king of Western
salmon.

<http://www.hcn.org/author_search?getAuthor=Elizabeth%20Shogren&sort_on=Publ
icationDate&sort_order=descending> Elizabeth Shogren News Aug. 23, 2017 

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Chinook salmon.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

This is the time of year when commercial and sports fishermen generally head
into the coastal waters off Southeast Alaska in search of the largest and
most prized catch of all - the chinook, also known as king salmon. Most
years, they expect to haul in at least 30,000 fish over just a few days in a
flurry of fishing. Large chinook can weigh more than 40 pounds, and
fishermen get $5 to $8 a pound, far more than they get for other types of
salmon. But in early August, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game made the
difficult and unusual decision to cancel commercial and sport chinook
fishing for the rest of the summer. 

Chinook are born in rivers and spend between several months and two years in
freshwater before heading out to the ocean. There, they bulk up on smaller
fish for two to five years before returning to their home rivers to spawn.

Some of the chinook swimming off Alaska's southeast coast this time of year
started their lives nearby, but others are from British Columbia or as far
south as Oregon and California. Surveys off the coasts of Oregon, Washington
and the Gulf of Alaska indicate that chinook stocks across the region are
extremely low this year. Many of the fish have been hit by extreme climate
conditions during their lifetime.

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A skiff floats beyond the fishing boats docked at the marina in Sitka, in
Southeast Alaska, in 2016. This year, the king salmon season has been
cancelled there.

Education Images/UIG via Getty Images

In fact, it's been a double whammy: When the chinook returning this year
were juveniles, many of their home rivers were suffering from California's
multi-year drought and the
<https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/drought/201513#west-secthttps://www.ncdc.noa
a.gov/sotc/drought/201513> snow droughts that hit most of the West in 2014
and 2015. Both made rivers hotter and drier. Then, when the fish swam out to
sea, they encountered an enormous mass of warm water in the northeastern
Pacific Ocean. This unprecedented phenomenon, which scientists dubbed "the
Blob," developed in late 2013 in the Gulf of Alaska. The next spring, it
spread across the entire North Pacific. "It was warm and basically sterile
water," says
<https://www.nwfsc.noaa.gov/contact/display_staffprofile.cfm?staffid=189>
Laurie Weitkamp, a fisheries biologist who studies salmon for the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Normally, winter storms mix up the
water in the North Pacific, bringing cold, nutrient-rich water towards the
surface. But in 2014, that didn't happen. The lowest levels of nutrients
ever seen in the surface waters of the North Pacific starved the
phytoplankton, microscopic algae at the base of the food web, which in turn
starved zooplankton, tiny aquatic animals that prey on phytoplankton. And
that starved the small fish like herring that eat zooplankton.

Chinook eat those small fish. Surveys off the Washington and Oregon coast in
2015 showed extremely low numbers of forage fish for chinook and coho,
another salmon species that has suffered in recent years. "The whole prey
base got screwed up," says Weitkamp. These warm, depleted conditions
persisted through most of 2016.

Both the drought and the "Blob" are over now, but the extent of the damage
they caused will be revealed as the chinook that survived return to spawn.
"Those climate conditions kind of ended this year, in 2017, but they're
still going to impact our fisheries for several years," predicts Nate
Mantua, who leads the salmon ecology team at the National Marine Fisheries
Service's Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Santa Cruz, California. 

Officials in Alaska believe unusually warm ocean temperatures also played a
role in how poorly chinook fared. The decision to close the chinook fishery
came after state officials determined that only about half as many fish as
are needed to ensure sustainable fisheries were returning to Southeast
Alaska's rivers this year. "If you don't adhere to your conservation
principles, you're destined to exacerbate the problem in following years,"
Charles Swanton, deputy commissioner of the Alaska Department of Fish and
Game, says.

California, Washington, Idaho and British Columbia also have severely
restricted fisheries for chinook and other salmon species in response to
critically low levels of returning salmon. On the Klamath River, poor ocean
conditions, drought and disease all contributed to what are likely to prove
the lowest numbers in more than 30 years. "We've been in a downward spiral
in recent years, because the effects of the drought were building on the
fishery," says Eric Schindler, who manages salmon for the Oregon Department
of Fish and Wildlife. "This year is bad. I don't see next year being any
better."

Tracking the cause of downturns in salmon populations is complex, and some
researchers are not ready to blame the Blob for the dire straits of
Southeast Alaska's chinook. "We don't know yet what the real effect of the
Blob was on chinook salmon,"
<https://fish.uw.edu/faculty/daniel-schindler/> Daniel Schindler, a
fisheries professor at University of Washington, says. "The warm conditions
in the last few years are unprecedented. But it's too early to tell if the
poor returns this year are due to climate or not." The notion that Alaska
chinook would suffer from warmer oceans defies a historic rule of thumb that
salmon from Alaska do better when oceans warm up, which usually increases
prey. And other stocks of Alaska salmon are thriving. "Sockeye salmon in
Bristol Bay were having one of the strongest returns in history," Schindler
says. Silver salmon in Southeast Alaska are abundant, too.

So while the multiyear Blob was harmful, scientists believe that at least
some of Alaska's salmon fisheries won't be injured by the long trend of
gradually warming oceans. But human-caused climate change clearly is bad
news for salmon from California, Oregon and Washington, which contribute to
Alaska's fisheries. "The growing influence of human-caused climate change is
likely to make things tougher and tougher for salmon in southern end of its
range," Mantua says.

It may already be doing so: Scientists believe human-caused climate change
exacerbated California's drought and low snowpacks. The drier hotter rivers
of recent years are consistent with what scientists expect in the future.
Climate change is gradually increasing average water temperatures in the
North Pacific, raising the baseline for extreme heating events like the
blob. But there's no compelling evidence that the three years of persistent
ocean temperature extremes linked to the Blob were consistent with
human-caused climate change, Mantua says.

Although the Blob has dissipated, temperatures in the North Pacific this
summer are still several degrees Fahrenheit above normal. And recent
research by NOAA shows that salmon still are hurting. "We just did our ocean
surveys; it doesn't look good," says Weitkamp. "There weren't many young
salmon out there and there wasn't much for them to eat." The survey results
are expected to be released in September.

Climate models don't project average water temperatures this warm in the
northern Pacific for decades. So cooler, more productive waters likely will
return. The fishing community is hoping that's the case and that the
restrictions on fishing this season will help ensure more robust numbers of
chinook - and less encumbered fishing - in the future. "We strongly support
sustainable management and can only hope that conservation will truly be
served by this action," says Dale Kelley, the executive Director of the
Alaska Trollers Association, which represents the 1,000 or so businesses
that fish for chinook with hooks and lines. In the meantime, though, they're
hurting: She estimates the troll fleet and its processors will lose $6
million this year because of the cancellation of the chinook fishery. 

Correspondent Elizabeth Shogren writes HCN's DC Dispatches from Washington. 

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly characterized
chinook's size.

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