Southwest

For years, residents along the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers have accused fishers operating in marine waters north of the Alaska Peninsula of intercepting too many river-bound salmon, sometimes in hidden ways.

Now a trooper enforcement campaign by the Alaska State Troopers wildlife division gives some credence to those accusations.

The campaign, carried out in June and July in the region known as Area M, resulted in nine citations issued to captains and crew members for allegedly dumping unwanted salmon overboard, the Alaska State Troopers said in a statement issued Thursday.

The species of discarded salmon was not disclosed, but it was potentially chum salmon bound for the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers, where there have been devastating chum crashes in recent years.

“I think many people from along the Yukon knew it happened,” Serena Fitka, executive director of the Yukon River Drainage Fisheries Association. “It does occur, and we’re glad it’s finally getting acknowledged.”

Kevin Whitworth, executive director of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, referred to the practice as “chum chucking.” The fishermen want sockeye, and “they don’t want to keep the chum salmon, so they throw it overboard,” he said.

The trooper citations add to the long-simmering dispute over salmon that travel through the Bering Sea to spawning grounds in the Yukon and Kuskokwim drainages. As chum and chinook salmon returns in the rivers have dwindled and harvests have closed, residents have blamed Area M interception for contributing to those problems. But the Area M commercial fisheries are vigorously defended by Alaska Peninsula and Aleutian residents who depend on them.

Attempts to resolve the disputes reached the Alaska Board of Fisheries last February. The board considered proposals to restrict Area M fishing and ultimately approved rules that the Yukon-Kuskokwim advocates characterized as too weak but that the Aleutians East Borough, the regional government for many communities dependent on Area M harvests, deemed appropriate.

The meeting was emotion-charged, with both Yukon-Kuskokwim fishers and fishers from the Alaska Peninsula and eastern Aleutians testifying about the need to protect their well-being, communities’ stability and cultures.

Scientists believe that the Yukon and Kuskokwim salmon crashes have more to do with climate change impacts in the ocean and possibly in the upriver spawning areas than with bycatch, the term for unintended catches of fish during harvests of other targeted species. However, interceptions could be exacerbating the problem, some say.

In a brief statement Thursday, the Aleutians East Borough criticized the cited salmon discards.

“We absolutely do not condone this type of reckless and illegal behavior. We believe the State of Alaska’s enforcement division will handle this to the harshest extent of the law,” the borough statement said.

Area M is a difficult place to conduct fishery patrols, said Major Aaron Frenzel, deputy director of the Alaska Wildlife Troopers.

Unlike the Bristol Bay or Kodiak fisheries, where vessels can be crowded together and where troopers aboard a patrol vessel can easily see practices and behavior, the Area M harvests are conducted by boats separated by vast distances.

A trooper helicopter proved key to the Area M enforcement effort, he said. But availability of that helicopter and other assets limits any enforcement in the region because wildlife troopers need to patrol other fisheries, Frenzel said. That means some strategic movement of ships, aircraft and people to the places where they are most needed, he said.

“It’s kind of like a chess game,” he said.

The outcome of the citations is yet to be determined. The fishers cited, some of them from Washington state, have court appearances scheduled for later this month in Anchorage. The violation is considered a class A misdemeanor punishable by fines of up to $15,000 and jail terms of up to one year, Frenzel said.

The Board of Fisheries is not expected to hold another Area M-focused meeting for three years, according to the meeting cycle. The next scheduled meetings are focused on Cook Inlet and Kodiak fsh.

Citizens may ask the board to consider subjects outside of the normal cycle. The next deadline to request that consideration is Aug. 14, and requests are to be considered at the board’s scheduled October work session.

Aside from their special Area M operation, wildlife troopers conducted their regular summer patrols in the Bristol Bay fishery, source of approximately half of the world’s harvested sockeye salmon. The Bristol Bay operation involved multiple patrol boats and aircraft, the trooper statement said. Over 400 commercial vessels working in Bristol Bay were boarded, with thousands of fishermen contacted, 150 citations issued and thousands of pounds of salmon seized, the trooper statement said.

Katmai National Park has a 24-hour live stream of Brooks Falls every summer. Hoards of bears gather there to catch salmon and it’s a popular spot for crowds to watch them. Bear 480, also known as Otis, arrived at Brooks Falls on July 26, the latest he’s been noticed yet.

Fans feared the bear had passed away, but the elderly ursine just slept in before making his first appearance on the national park’s cameras. Otis has become sort of a fan favorite and a consistent contender for the fattest bear.

Felicia Jimenez, a media ranger for Katmai National Park, said his late appearance is most likely because of a later salmon run in Bristol Bay.

“Things are a little bit slower to wake and we’re definitely seeing that with the salmon run,” Jimenez said. “The water level’s a little bit higher, the water has been colder, so we’re seeing the salmon a little bit slower to arrive – I’d say about a week or two late.”

Bear 480 usually comes out in late June or early July. Some fans thought he might not have survived the winter, but Otis finally showed up on the park’s cameras last week.

Jimenez said most bears that get to that age usually rely more on scavenging or begging for fish from other bears, but the public ought not worry about Otis. Bears usually live to about 20 years old, but she said he’s still pretty spry for a 27-year-old.

“There’s still really good signs that we’re seeing from him,” she said. “He’s super old, but he’s still very active. When he showed up, he was immediately catching fish and those are positive signs. He’s still active, he’s still moving around.”

Viewers of the park’s live cameras can identify him with a few grey and white swirls in his brown coat and some damage to his left ear.

“He is also missing a lot of teeth – he only has about two teeth,” Jimenez said. “So if you see a bear with a floppy left year, who’s pretty old and he’s got like two teeth, that is definitely 480.”

Otis is also a consistent contender for the title of fattest bear at the falls during the national park’s annual Fat Bear Week in early October. Park rangers create a bracket of some of the biggest bears that wander the area and the public can vote online for the fattest bear around.

“That competition is pretty subjective,” Jimenez said. “Some people vote for their favorite or which bear they think embodies fat, healthy bears the most. And so even though he’s not the fattest bear anymore, he’s usually up there in the finalists pretty much every year.”

Otis has won four times so far. Some of his rivals for the title include Bear 747, sometimes called Bear Force One, who won last year, and Bear 435, also known as  Holly.

With a later arrival though, Otis will have his work cut out for him if the old man wants to be declared the park’s fattest bear a fifth time.

Gary Baldwin prefers to find parts for his teal 1953 Willys Jeep pickup truck rather than buying them. It shows when he pops the hood.

“There’s a lot of parts from different vehicles from the dump in here,” Baldwin said. “This air cleaner is out of a Toyota. The cable for the throttle is a Subaru cable. The gas pedal is a Chevy truck.”

Baldwin showed off his truck at Bethel’s first-ever car show, held over the weekend. The Southwest Alaska community is off the U.S. road system, and cars must be shipped in on barges, for a higher price, or flown in.

Baldwin’s classic was the car of a former principal in the Lower Kuskokwim School District in the 1970s, who would drive it on the local trails when the snow wasn’t too deep. Baldwin inherited it in the ’90s.

“People tell me it was driven to Quinhagak, and I know it used to be driven back and forth between Nunapitchuk because he worked in both of those villages,” Baldwin said.

Baldwin, who was the district’s superintendent, said that he drove it daily until he retired.

Henry Peter said that his wife learned to drive on that same model. Peter was born in a log cabin in Kasigluk, a village west of Bethel. He first saw more vehicles when he came to Bethel in 1966.

“When I grew up, there was hardly no drive, no cars,” Peter said. “And those old-time snowmachines.”

It takes a lot of work for a car lover to maintain a vehicle in Bethel, and that’s a big part of why Alaska State Trooper Zack Huckstep decided to organize the city’s first car show.

Huckstep showed up with his 1971 Toyota Brown, which is basically a Land Cruiser. On the morning of the show, he converted its flatbed into a temporary playpen so that he could keep his toddler under control while he did some last-minute polishing.

Visitors who peeked inside got to see its long leather seats — and a perfect LEGO replica of the vehicle.

“Did I tell you about the LEGO garage?” Huckstep asked. “So, I didn’t want to geek out too much, but I actually have, like, a LEGO garage with, like, all the tools, and a garage and a lift and everything for that LEGO truck.”

That LEGO garage is actually the only one Huckstep owns. He doesn’t have a life-size one in Bethel. And that has been a problem because Bethel’s dust storms can wreck a paint job. Replacement paint, like everything else that makes its way to town, isn’t cheap. Neither is getting these vehicles to Bethel.

“It was shipped from Australia all the way to, I believe, San Diego. And the funny thing was, it was actually cheaper to ship from Australia to America than it was to ship from Anchorage to Bethel,” Huckstep said.

NAPA Auto Parts, the only car parts shop in town, welcomed the car show. And it was a team effort. Alaska Commercial Company donated hot dogs and hamburgers, then NAPA employees grilled them for visitors.

It wasn’t just cars that showed up. There was a brand new four-wheeler, one of the more popular vehicles in the region, and a cherry-red Vespa.

Trooper Elondre Johnson entered his vehicle to support Huckstep. He had additions, including a panel of fluorescent lights for when he drives to villages on the frozen river in winter.

“Alaska is a dark place,” said Johnson. “And so anytime we get kind of get off-road, running down the river where things are really dark, it’s nice to have the extra lighting.”

Don Roberts brought arguably the most practical vehicle: a new Bobcat. For the show, he put a 6-foot long snowblower on the front of it, which he’s used to plow 20 feet of blown snow off friends’ houses along the tundra. But Roberts said that there are probably 75 different tools he can swap into that spot.

“God there’s so much. There’s numerous attachments,” said Roberts. “You can put grass cutters on here, posthole diggers, backhoes will go on it. Anything that will go on a tractor will go on the front of this. I can’t name all of them. There’s just so many things that will go on this.”

But it was Jimmy Guinn who brought the showstopper: A giant, shiny, sun-yellow truck from 1942. He said that it was a rare find because most of them were shipped off in WWII. He had it shipped up from Seattle. It rarely leaves the garage. It was easy to admire the inside, with its yellow and black stripes and a classic dashboard, but many were struck by how well-maintained it was.

“The reason why I like it is because it’s almost impossible to keep things clean,” said Ava, an 11-year-old spectator. “I wonder how they even got here without getting it dirty.”

“Yeah. This is beautiful,” agreed city mechanic Eddie Fenn. “Oh, this is beautiful. Like a Tonka toy.”

But as much as the Alaskans appreciated the sunny vintage vehicle’s uncanny shine, they’re suckers for trucks.

“The big yellow ’43 truck is by far, you know, the most spectacular,” said Iskandar Alexandar, who works in behavioral health at the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation.

“But I actually feel the best in choice, I voted for this one more kind of conventional-looking guy. [Because] if you just had a suitcase full of money, you could go and buy that off the shelf yourself and imagine yourself driving it. And, you know, it’s Alaska,” Alexandar said. “Chicks dig trucks.”

In the end, when all of the votes were counted, Guinn’s truck won Best in Show.

“Don’t run away too far, Jimmy,” Huckstep said from the megaphone as Guinn collected a bucket of car repair goods donated by NAPA Auto Parts. “You also ended up with People’s Choice and first place.”

Still, Guinn said that the best part of the day was getting to hang out with all of the other gearheads in town.

“All these cars have just lots of love in them,” Guinn said. “Doesn’t matter if they’re beat up, or if they’re brand new or whatever, that owners really love every one of them. So that’s what makes owning a car like this fun, because everybody cares.”

Guinn didn’t even bring his favorite car. It’s metallic gold, with grills in the front and nuggets on the license plate. It seems like a strong contender for another set of awards next year, but who knows what other cars might roll up then.

The Dunleavy administration on Wednesday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to block the controversial Pebble copper and gold mine.

The administration filed what is known as a “bill of complaint” with the nation’s highest court that argues that the federal agency’s use of the Clean Water Act to preclude Pebble development violates the state’s right to use its natural resources. The document details the state’s complaint and also seeks permission to argue the case in full to the nation’s highest court.

Appealing directly to the Supreme Court while bypassing all lower courts is an unusual step, but it is warranted “given the extraordinary decision being challenged,” Alaska Attorney General Treg Taylor said in a statement released by the state Department of Law.

“If EPA can rely on undefined terms and subjective standards instead of sound science to bypass the regular State and federal permitting processes here, it can do it anywhere, from large mining projects such as this, down to a family building their dream home. It’s an indefensible and unprecedented power grab that the U.S. Supreme Court should find unlawful,” Taylor said in the statement.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy, in the statement, echoed arguments made in the brief assert the EPA action effectively confiscates state property and clashes with the Alaska constitution’s mandates.

“Our constitution is clear: Alaska is responsible for utilizing, developing, and conserving all of the State’s natural resources for the maximum benefit of its people,” Dunleavy said in the statement. “Bureaucrats in Washington D.C. are exercising unbridled and unlawful power to choke off any further discussion on this important decision affecting so many Alaskans.”

The EPA on Jan. 30 announced its decision to invoke a little-used provision of the Clean Water Act to prohibit development of the Pebble Mine or any similar metals mine in the area. That announcement capped a process that ran for over a decade, starting with requests made in 2010 by Native organizations for the federal agency to use the Clean Water Act to prevent permitting of the mine. The law’s Section 404(c) authorizes the EPA to prohibit a project that would cause dredge or fill having an “unacceptable adverse impact” on municipal water supplies, fisheries, wildlife or recreational areas.

During the Obama administration, the EPA put together a Bristol Bay watershed assessment that was completed in 2014. Through the regulatory process, the Obama administration’s EPA proposed a Section 404(c) prohibition on Pebble or a similar mine in the watershed, citing what it concluded would be irreparable losses to salmon habitat important to both people and wildlife. That process was delayed by litigation and suspended by the succeeding Trump administration before being revived by the Biden administration.

The 91-page brief filed by the state on Wednesday describes the EPA decision as depriving the state of economic value – specifically, the mining potential of the land in question. The Pebble deposit contains copper, gold and other minerals.

“Due to its remoteness and lack of infrastructure and development, the only economically productive use for the land is mining. But by making it impossible for the State to utilize the land’s mineral resources, the EPA has effectively confiscated the land and created a de facto national park contrary to federal prohibition,” the document says.

But to mine opponents, the territory eyed for Pebble is valuable for its role supporting the Bristol Bay ecosystem, home to the world’s biggest sockeye salmon runs and the base for important commercial and subsistence fish harvests.

The proposal to build the huge open-pit mine has stirred opposition for many years from fishing, environmental and Native organizations, including the regional Bristol Bay Native Corp. Polling conducted by the Bristol Bay Native Corp., has shown consistent statewide opposition to the mine since 2012 and even stronger opposition within the region.

On Wednesday, representatives of the groups that have fought against the mine – and celebrated the EPA’s decision earlier this year — said they were surprised and disappointed by the state’s appeal to the Supreme Court.

“Today’s legal filing from the Governor is a slap in the face to Bristol Bay. Contrary to his false narrative, it was our Tribes, Alaska’s First People, who requested this action because politicians like Governor Dunleavy slammed the door in our face and put the interests of a Canadian Mining company above our rural villages and our world class salmon fishery,” Alannah Hurley, executive director of the United Tribes of Bristol Bay, said in a statement.

Hurley said the EPA action “is grounded in sound science” and predicted that the Dunleavy administration’s attempt will fail. “The Governor is once again ignoring the will of Alaskans and legal process by filing an action directly in the Supreme Court. Nevertheless, our Tribes will continue to defend EPA’s Clean Water Act protections for our region. We will use every tool at our disposal to protect our waters, our salmon, and our people,” she said.

Nelli Williams, Alaska director of Trout Unlimited, also released a statement.

“The Governor is ignoring Alaskans and science with this lawsuit. And even more appalling, he is using public funds to prop up out-of-state mining executives at the expense of Alaska’s salmon and all the people who rely on them. It’s anti-Alaskan,” she said.

Carole Holley, Alaska regional managing attorney for Earthjustice, said that the effort “goes against the wishes of most Alaskans.” She added: “It’s a highly unusual legal move, and also a highly unpopular one.”

But Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd., the Vancouver-based company that owns the Pebble Limited Partnership, applauded the administration’s move and pledged to assist in the legal effort.

“The Bill of Complaint filed by Alaska is a welcome development in the long Pebble saga,” Ron Thiessen, the company’s president and chief executive officer, said in a statement. “Northern Dynasty strongly, and I mean very strongly, supports all of the arguments set forth by the State and we congratulate the State for bringing these claims directly to the U.S. Supreme Court. Northern Dynasty intends to prepare and file with the Supreme Court appropriate briefs to support the State’s case.”

The state action comes as the Bristol Bay commercial salmon season is nearing completion. As of Wednesday, 38.6 million salmon, almost all which is sockeye, had been harvested by commercial fishers this summer, according to preliminary figures from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

This year’s harvest so far is well short of the more than 60 million salmon harvested last year from a record Bristol Bay sockeye run of 79 million fish, but it is above the recent 20-year average, according to Department of Fish and Game data. Bristol Bay sockeye runs have been particularly strong in recent years, according to the department.

The Supreme Court will not be in session until October.

By 9 a.m. Thursday, over 100 boats were anchored in the Naknek River entrance, some after a night of fishing the Naknek-Kvichak. Ivan Basargin of the fishing vessel Top Notch was one of them. He was there to join the demonstration against this year’s low price.

Basargin has fished in Bristol Bay since the late 1980s and builds fishing boats in the offseason. Standing in the wheelhouse of a boat he built, he said this year’s low-price hit hard.

“I’m going to pay my workers. I’m going to pay my bills. As far as living expenses, I haven’t decided yet. This fifty cents that I get, when I get home, it’s going to be a wash. I’m not going to have any money in the bank saved,” he said.

Organizers of the protest are calling on processors to reconsider and improve the base price this season from fifty cents per pound — less than half of last year’s price.

Without change, many fishermen say it’s unsustainable for the industry, and some say they will go home in debt. Basargin said he was out on the water protesting because he feared accepting this year’s low base price will set a precedent.

“If they know we can fish for fifty cents, we’re going to get paid thirty cents next year,” he said. “That will happen if we don’t do anything. Like today — this is a peaceful protest. We’re not trying to block people or anything. We’re just trying to show the world that we’re hurting, and we need some help.”

Basargin said processors claim they are struggling financially, too, but he hasn’t seen evidence of this struggle.

“After a record fish catch last year, processors are complaining they are losing a lot of money. I see processors expanding. I see them buying other companies out,” he said. “If you look at the scenario, it kind of seems like they are putting a burden on us. They’re adding up their profits and expanding operations.”

Trident Seafoods was the first to post that base price on Sunday, with some handling incentives: fifteen cents for refrigerated seawater and ice, and for the drift fleet five cents for floating and ten cents for bleeding. North Pacific Seafoods announced the same a few days later, along with Peter Pan Seafoods, who is also offering a twenty cent bonus for “late season” fishing beyond July 18.

Protest organizers also called for processors to resume posting a base price ahead of the season. In recent years, Peter Pan Seafoods posted a price in mid-June, which was welcomed by fishermen. This year, processors did not release a price in Bristol Bay before fishing started. Fran Kaul, a longtime captain, says with prior knowledge of the low price, fishermen may have planned differently.

“It’s very interesting that the price came out pretty much at the very end of the season. They had all our fish, right? The fish had been caught. And then Trident posts fifty cents a pound,” she said.

Cheyne Blough has been fishing in Alaska for 35 years. He fishes for Trident and helped organize this protest, prompted by Trident’s price announcement letter to the fleet. His children crew on his boat in the summers, but he has discouraged them from buying into the fishery.

“The last thing you want is your children to get strapped to hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debt, and then have the rug pulled out from under them,” he said. “And that’s what’s going on. I didn’t think it would happen quite this way, quite this fast.”

Adjusted for inflation, this year’s base price is the lowest recorded price in nearly 40 years, since 1984. Without adjustment for inflation, this year’s price is still the third lowest — the lowest was in 2001.

But Blough says he’s seen the quality of the fish sold to processors improve over that time. That’s due to fishermen’s investment in equipment and labor, according to Blough, but it’s not reflected in prices offered by the processors.

“We’ve been asked to make expensive capital improvements — a regular RSW (refrigerated seawater) system, we hire an extra deckhand so we can bleed the fish. They have quality control people on every tender going ‘your fish is good, your fish is bad, you need to do better,’” he said.

Blough says fishermen bear the cost of these improvements, but don’t benefit from the resulting revenue.

“And what do we get in return? We get half the price. And in my opinion, the processors need to do better. I cannot believe I’ve been fishing for 35 years, and I’m fishing for less base price than I did when I was in my teenage years,” he said.

Kelly Stier on the F/V Honey Badger says processors are taking advantage of fishermen, knowing they have few choices for buyers in the region.

“We’re out here, and the processors know that. They have us, and it does take a lot of infrastructure and they do have expenses on their side of things, but I think they’ve taken advantage of us because they know they have us backed into a corner,” he said.

Anna Mounsey is a new skipper on the fishing vessel Syren. She says younger members of the fleet, like herself, are questioning if this industry is worth buying into.

“As a new fisherman, new skipper, trying to make it in this fishery just starting out, the unsustainability with overhead and the price fluctuations, (we’re) just seeing if it’s even worth it,” she said. “With how much it fluctuates, not being able to count on making boat payments and all the other expenses that come with just starting out, being young. Watching this graying fleet leave, what hope do us young fisherman have with the vulnerability of this market?”

KDLG made repeated email and phone call requests for comment with the largest processors — Trident Seafoods, OBI Seafoods, North Pacific Seafoods, Silver Bay Seafoods and Peter Pan Seafoods — but did not receive a reply.

Some fishing crews heard the news about prices and ended their season. Others continued fishing, in an otherwise strong season with harvests over 36 million fish to date.

Bristol Bay sockeye populations are booming, but what is the tipping point?

This summer is a colder, rainier and buggier season in Bristol Bay, and across Alaska. Meanwhile, last week the world faced four straight days of the hottest temperatures on record, marking Earth’s extreme warming.

The biggest challenge of climate change for Bristol Bay salmon isn’t necessarily warming temperatures right now. Bill Templin, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s chief salmon fisheries scientist, says it’s variability.

“You know, climate change isn’t just directional. It’s not just that things are warming, it’s also that there’s greater variability in the systems,” he said.

Templin believes these cold, wet, stormy summers are a product of climate change too.

“There can be a wider swing of hot and cold or dryness, drought, flooding, excessive water in the systems,” Templin said. “That variability makes it hard for an organism to adapt to the changes which can lead to reduced productivity from systems that are otherwise healthy, with healthy habitats and low fishing pressures.”

What does that mean for salmon?

There’s some good news. Starting in freshwater, where salmon return to spawn and remain the first year of life, Bristol Bay’s deep lakes provide a natural buffer to temperature changes.

“So it seems like the lakes are really this big buffering mechanism,” said fisheries ecologist and researcher Daniel Schindler with the University of Washington’s Alaska Salmon Program. That’s critical for the salmon’s success.

Freshwater lakes are deep and stratified, meaning temperatures of the water are warmer at the surface going down to cooler at the bottom. Salmon can dive deep and escape warmer surface temperatures. According to Schindler, that means they can return to spawn earlier if ocean temperatures are too warm, like the birth ward at the hospital.

“That allows them to adjust when they migrate in from the ocean, and basically chill out until it’s time to spawn, which is much later in the season for fish that spawn in warm sites within watersheds,” he said.

In other words, the lakes and rivers above Bristol Bay can withstand a bit of temperature change. Salmon can’t regulate their own heat but they are very good at adjusting their depth to find the most comfortable water temperature.

Bristol Bay’s spawning grounds are also seeing a boom in what sockeye are eating – zooplankton.

Schindler believes it may be the “Goldilocks zone” of favorable conditions for sockeye right now. He said the things that salmon eat love that warmer top layer of lakes in Bristol Bay. That means more food for juvenile sockeye, which means salmon leaving for the ocean as big, well-fed fish, which means relatively high survival rates on average.

“So if we look where this might be going over the next 20 years, I think it’s safe to say that the lakes probably are not going to get any colder. Our best estimate is that the productivity of the lakes will continue to increase. This probably won’t translate into any differences in runtime, that’s really most likely affected by conditions they encounter at sea, not conditions they encounter in the lakes,” Schindler said.

That buffer for spawning salmon can only go so far though. What happens when climate change alters water temperature past that “Goldilocks zone?” Schindler suggested we should expect to see changes in the behavior of sockeye.

“Over the long term, with more climate change and more adaptation, we might see changes in spawn and run timing,” he said.

There’s a sci-fi movie trope where someone goes back in time and accidentally does something miniscule that alters the course of space-time in an unforeseeable way. In a way, the cascading and unpredictable effects of climate change in southwest Alaska could be like that. Our ecosystems are unimaginably complex and researchers don’t know what will happen when one factor is tweaked. A snow cap can prematurely melt miles away and flood the watershed, a lake can get a little warmer and suddenly entire industries have to adapt.

For the Bristol Bay sockeye fishery estimated at more than $2 billion, that butterfly effect of climate change could have massive impacts for fishermen and the communities dependent on the fishery.

Templin said most likely, those climate change effects could be seen in the open ocean where sockeye spend most of their life.

“So, we would expect water temperatures in the ocean to have a bigger effect on their size, their survival, and the age that they return,” Templin explains, “because the ocean is a very productive place, and they do most of their growing there. So we would expect temperatures in the ocean to potentially have a bigger effect than freshwater temperatures.”

Of course, there is no open-and-shut case. Templin referenced recent research from the University of Alaska which shows that different species of salmon are associated with different temperatures and locations at sea. This may provide part of the reason why some salmon species are booming while others, like chinook, are under threat. As sockeye are pushed to the top of that climate bubble, other species that respond less favorably to warmer sea surface temperatures begin to tip over the edge.

But what is that tipping point for Bristol Bay sockeye?

Templin believes we have to go back to the lakes to understand what a tipping point may look like.

“Tipping points have been seen in other systems, maybe not the way that we often think of them. But kind of a point where – not a point of no return, so to speak – but where systems flip into a new mode.”

Templin used this example: “You notice how the top foot or two of water is a lot warmer? And when you dive down and get into some really cold water? That stratification of the lake water can be disturbed by a lot. When they get a big windy event and it mixes the water, that changes the way the ecosystem acts. So there’s a tipping point in many lakes. There’s a time during the year when enough of the sun and the wind has stirred it up enough that that stratification breaks down. And the water column becomes more uniform in its temperature.”

When that buffering system in the lakes breaks down, Templin said, so does the ecosystem. Glacial melt, cold water inputs, algae, silt, these are all factors that could contribute to a potential tipping point, the straw that breaks stratifications back.

Templin assured it’s not all doom and gloom yet, the tipping point won’t be tomorrow. Bristol Bay rivers are short and cold and the lakes are hardy.

“But the lakes do provide a lot of buffer. They form kind of these cold water reservoirs, as well as the ability for lots of fish to to survive, thrive and grow juvenile salmon within these lakes,” he said.

When asked if Fish and Game is keeping an eye on climate change and the future volatility of Bristol Bay watersheds, Templin said the department is more focused on management.

“The department is not necessarily a research organization like a university. Our responsibility is to manage and to manage for the benefit of the people in the state and the sustainability of the systems. So most of our research has to do with improving management and understanding the species.”

Alaska fisheries managers are tasked with managing the fast-paced, dynamic Bristol Bay runs each year, and that will also mean adapting to climate changes in the future. The only thing we know for sure is that tomorrow, for better or worse, whether a fisher or a fish, Bristol Bay industries and ecosystems must adapt together.