Fisheries

A Petersburg-based commercial crab boat capsized in Duncan Canal on the morning of Sunday, June 16. A spokesperson for the U.S. Coast Guard reported that the two people aboard the 22-foot Mangy Otter survived the sinking unharmed.

The mariners told the Coast Guard that the vessel was pulling crab pots, which they believe shifted the weight of the Mangy Otter and caused it to sink. Then, they swam an unknown distance to shore. Their neighbors picked them up later that day and escorted them home.

A camper at High Castle Island reported the sinking on VHF channel 16 at around 6 a.m. on June 16. The Coast Guard didn’t send any personnel out to rescue the mariners, as they had already made it to safety. The Coast Guard also did not attempt to recover the sunken vessel.

Johnnie Storr grew up fishing with his dad in the hamlet of Aklavik, a small town on the Mackenzie River Delta in Canada’s Northwest Territories. Depending on the season, they looked for Arctic char, Dolly Varden or whitefish.

“We fished for char in the fall time,” Storr said. “Soon as there was enough ice, we walked out and set nets for whitefish.”

Storr is Inuvialuit and Gwich’in, and heads the local Hunters and Trappers Committee, which helps manage Indigenous hunting rights in the region. He said elders say chum salmon have always lived in small numbers in the Mackenzie River, but in the last decade there has been a clear uptick.

“I think it was 2019 where we have seen a big jump,” he said. “I think we had at least 300 salmon brought into the Hunters and Trappers Committee.”

In recent years, all five salmon species have shown up in rivers from northeast Alaska to Nunavut, in Canada’s eastern Arctic. Chum salmon, one of the most cold-tolerant salmon species, are the most commonly found.

Storr said some people eat them, but personally he doesn’t prefer salmon.

“We were releasing them just because we really prefer char around here,” he said.

A research collaboration between local Indigenous fishers, Fisheries and Oceans Canada and the University of Alaska Fairbanks is investigating this jump in salmon in the Canadian Arctic. A study published last week found climate change-driven ocean warming is at the center of the shift.

For salmon to make it all the way from the Bering Sea to the Canadian Arctic, ocean conditions need to be just right, said Joe Langan, a postdoctoral fellow at UAF who co-authored the study.

“We call it a two-part mechanism. You need warm conditions in the late spring Chukchi Sea … we think that salmon are following that north,” Langan said. “And then if the Beaufort [Sea] clears of ice and warms up as well, it kind of opens the door for them.

Langan said the longer this Arctic ocean corridor remains warm and ice free, the more salmon make it to western Canadian Arctic rivers.

Human-caused climate warming is rapidly transforming the Arctic — sea ice is declining, water temperatures are higher and summers are longer, said Karen Dunmall, a research scientist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

“The salmon are really one of the tangible examples of this change,” she said. “They are showing up because the environment is changing.”

Dunmall has worked with Arctic communities to study the impacts of climate change on fisheries for more than two decades. Local fishers offer samples from salmon they catch and their questions drive her research: Where are these new salmon coming from? And will they disrupt the local ecology?

Salmon are born in rivers, spend their adult lives in the ocean, and generally are known to return to their home rivers to spawn and die. Dunmall said the increasing abundance of salmon in the Arctic means that some of these newcomer fish probably originated somewhere else.

“The fact that they’re showing up in the Canadian Arctic in rivers suggests that they may not be able to go back to their natal streams if they get so far north,” she said. “They just follow the urge to spawn and try to find something that might be suitable.”

In recent decades, Western Alaska has seen record low chum runs. Scientists say the decline is at least in part due to marine heat waves and warming rivers.

Could Alaska chums be heading north?

“It’s likely in part some of the same fish,” said Curry Cunningham, a UAF fisheries ecologist who contributed to the study. He said it’s possible that some of these salmon are finding more suitable habitat further north.

“As we see warmer temperatures in the Arctic, there’s at least access for these chum to be moving further north and the potential that some of the freshwater habitats may be becoming more conducive,” Cunningham said.

Dunmall said her team is working on genetic studies of the fish to try to nail down whether they’re the same ones missing from Alaska.

But the new Arctic salmon aren’t exactly a welcome addition in Canada. Storr, in Aklavik, said there’s concern they could be encroaching on the spawning habitats of char and Dolly Varden. And he worries the local fish could be susceptible to unfamiliar salmon parasites.

Storr knows that 300 miles south, families along the Yukon River have been hurting, going many years without a normal salmon harvest.

“If there was a way we could send them back, we would send them back,” Storr said.

The federal government is considering a request that would grant Gulf of Alaska king salmon Endangered Species Act protections. The National Marine Fisheries Service recently found that the petition by the Washington-based conservation group Wild Fish Conservancy, which said that the species are under threat, warrants further scientific review. It’s just the first major step in a longer regulatory process, but many say it could have far-reaching implications.

Mark Roberts is docked in Petersburg, getting his fishing boat ready for the July 1 king salmon opener. He’s painting the exterior of the Cape Cross, his 46 foot long wooden troll boat that was built in 1948.

Roberts took a break from fishing for several months, because he just had one of his heart valves replaced. But he said he’s pushing through the pain this summer, because it would be financially impossible for him to sit out a whole season.

“Because of my heart situation… Well, I paid for it. I got to do twice the work this year. But, you know, I’m putting it back together. I just need sunshine!” Roberts said, gesturing towards the rainy sky over Petersburg.

Roberts has fished in the Gulf of Alaska for about 30 years. But he came very close to skipping the whole summer season last year, when the Wild Fish Conservancy sued the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to halt commercial trolling for kings in Southeast Alaska. The conservation group, which is based in Washington State, argued that a closure would protect a declining population of killer whales near Seattle. The Ninth Circuit Federal Appeals Court issued a stay on the lawsuit, keeping the fishery open.

“I was basically ready to tie my boat up to the dock and not fish until August,” said Roberts. “But once they announced it… Boy. I started my engine and took off and went fishing and I was very grateful about it.”

That lawsuit is ongoing. But now, Roberts is staring down the barrel of another move against king salmon fishing by the same group, which filed a petition to list the fish with Endangered Species Act protections in January. NOAA announced it would move forward with its regulatory process for considering the request in late May.

The request could have a huge impact on how Alaskans fish across the entire Gulf. The petition asks for protections for an area more than a thousand miles wide — or, just a little longer than the distance from New York City to Orlando, Florida.

Roberts said it feels like another attack on his fishery, which he considers to be low-impact, and sustainably-managed.

“I want the salmon to come back too, and so it really surprises me that these people are coming after us, when we already are doing things to bring back the salmon,” said Roberts. “This will hurt everybody. It really surprises me that they’re coming after us like they are.”

But Emma Helverson, the director of the Wild Fish Conservancy, said it’s not personal. She said the petition folds in feedback from a lot of people across the state who are afraid the resource won’t be around for future generations.

“[There are] people throughout the state who, maybe aren’t even sure how they feel about Endangered Species Act protections,” said Helverson. “But they’re seeing these problems and they know something has to change.”

Helverson has heard from Alaskans like Willard Lind. He’s a citizen of the Chignik Lake Tribe, and he’s lived next to the Chignik River, on the Alaska Peninsula, for all of his 63 years.

Salmon runs collapsed on the Chignik in 2018. Sockeye salmon have slowly been returning to the river, but kings are still scarce.

Lind said he wants fishing for kings to stop — even in Southeast Alaska, hundreds of miles away.

“When I was a kid, the river used to be loaded with kings, man,” said Lind. “Holy cow — they’d be swarming all over the place. But nowadays you don’t see one king in a shallow waterhole anymore. I’m all for what they’re trying to do there, with the petition to stop these king fishers. I hope it goes through.”

Not all conservation groups are on board with the Wild Fish Conservancy’s request, though. For instance, the Alaska based environmental group Salmon State has come out against it.

Tim Bristol, executive director of Salmon State, has his eye on the decline. But he said the Endangered Species Act petition isn’t the right tool for the situation, and that this move will push away fishermen who are also sympathetic to the plight of king salmon.

“Frankly, it really upsets us, as longtime conservationists, to see the Endangered Species Act used in a way that I don’t think is appropriate,” said Bristol. “And it’s clearly going to cause all kinds of blowback from thoughtful people that maybe support the ESA. But it definitely will move them into the opposition category when you start using it.”

The Alaska Department of Fish & Game, which manages all king salmon stocks in the state, has also been one of the petition’s loudest critics. Doug Vincent-Lang is the department’s commissioner.

“It really was, of all the petitions I’ve ever seen come in for a listing of a species — by far the most poorly written petition I’ve ever seen,” said Vincent-Lang.

And the National Marine Fisheries Service did note in its findings that while the petition included numerous factual errors and unsupported conclusions the numbers were concerning.

Vincent-Lang said that if the petition is pushed through, it would effectively federalize management of king salmon as a resource in Alaska.

And, he said, if king salmon are endangered, the federal government will have to establish what’s called “critical habitat.” Which means any river or lake in Alaska where king salmon spawn could be subject to more federal oversight too.

“This [has] fairly far-reaching implications in terms of how salmon, or king salmon, could potentially be managed into the future,” said Vincent-Lang.

But the commissioner isn’t the only one thinking of the future. The Metlakatla Indian Tribe in Southeast Alaska recently reopened the doors of their century-old cannery, the Annette Island Packing Company, to buy king salmon. Albert Smith, Metlakatla’s mayor, said the tribe has always subsisted on king salmon. It’s been part of their way of life since the beginning of time. “Especially now, with how much it costs to go to the grocery store,” he said.

The Wild Fish Conservancy acknowledges the criticism lobbed against the petition. But Helverson, the Wild Fish Conservancy director, said that, regardless, the process will generate data that could lead to important localized recovery for king salmon. But it’s likely that if Alaska’s kings do make the list, the protections would be applied in a piecemeal fashion in specific places across the Gulf.

The National Marine Fisheries Service’s findings will set off a more rigorous scientific review, and the public has until July 23 to share their thoughts on the potential endangered species listing.

As the 2024 Yukon River salmon season kicks off, there will once again be little to no opportunity for communities along the Western Alaska river to harvest any actual salmon.

One small exception is summer chum. If the run hits half a million fish, residents of the lower reaches of the Yukon may have the chance to take to the river with dipnets and other non-traditional gear for a brief window like they did in 2023.

But as Holly Carroll, the Yukon River subsistence fishery manager for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service noted in April, these types of opportunities may not be worth the effort for many along the river.

“Who’s going to spend nine bucks a gallon to go out fishing with a dipnet?” Carroll asked. “It might take them four or five hours to get seven chums. Whereas if they had been given their six-inch gillnet, they put it out for a minute, minute and a half, and they’re done. They’ll have 100. Then they’ll spend the next couple of days cutting and smoking, and they’re done for the season.”

While communities cannot count on these types of heavily restricted opportunities to meet their subsistence needs in 2024, one thing they can count on is a total closure of chinook salmon fishing for the next seven years. Carroll said that the recently signed Alaska-Canada agreement was overdue.

“For me as the federal manager, I see this as the bold step that needed to be taken. We’re just not seeing the returns off those runs that we would have liked. I really felt that it was time,” Carroll said. “I also think we really needed to listen to our tribal stakeholders who have been telling us for years that this annual approach is not a great way to manage.”

The seven-year agreement calls for rebuilding chinook stocks to the point that at least 71,000 of the fish cross into Canada each year. It is technically not a moratorium, as meeting this number at any point in the next seven years would in theory lift the closure. But in 2024, fewer than 15,000 fish are expected to complete the journey.

Many believe that trawler bycatch plays an outsized role in keeping chinook and chum from returning to the Yukon River. But Carroll said that the fish are up against a lot in terms of a changing environment.

“I think they’re dealing with a lot more climate changes, certainly warming oceans, different food sources, the food is moving to different areas,” Carroll said. “We’ve seen less healthy fish. Their gas tanks are less full when they go to make that migration. We’re seeing heat stress, we’re seeing warm temperatures when they come into the river.”

Since 2019, Carroll said that chinook numbers recorded on the upper Yukon River at Eagle have fallen drastically below corresponding numbers far downriver at Pilot Station. Biologists believe one thing that may be killing them off somewhere along that nearly 1,100-mile journey is the disease-causing Ichthyophonus parasite.

According to a 2022 report by federal and state biologists to the Alaska Board of Fish, the severity of Ichthyophonus infections has been found to peak somewhere near the midway point of the river in Alaska. But going further upriver, severely infected fish were rarely found, the report said.

Carroll said that scientists are also researching chinook salmon eggs to try and identify potential threats to future stocks. They want to know whether low levels of the vitamin thiamine that have been linked to early salmon mortality are further impacting the fish.

In 2024, the clock is ticking as scientists try to understand what is happening to Yukon River salmon. But as Carroll acknowledged, the clock is also ticking when it comes to communities along the river simply being able to feed themselves.

“How can we get people more food? And if it is with selective gear, how do we get people using them? Because they’re not traditional, they’re not easy, they’re not efficient,” Carroll said. “We all need to get to the table and figure out how to get people some food while still protecting the chinook while we rebuild them.”

The first chinook of the season are likely entering the lower Yukon River at this moment. With luck, they’ll make it to their natal streams, protected by the efforts of communities with whom they are inextricably connected.

A federal lawsuit over fishing rights for the people of Alaska’s only Native reservation is likely heading for trial. The case could have broad implications for fishermen throughout Southeast Alaska.

Metlakatla is a community of about 1,500 people at the southern tip of Southeast Alaska. Its federally recognized tribe, Metlakatla Indian Community, sued the state in 2020, saying the law that created the reservation included an implicit right to fish in nearby waters outside the reservation’s boundaries. That’s based on a long history of the tribe fishing in those areas after emigrating from British Columbia in the late 1800s.

Because Congress was aware of the tribe’s reliance on fishing when it created the reservation, the tribe argues its fishermen shouldn’t need state permits to fish in areas near Ketchikan and Prince of Wales Island in what are now designated by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game as Southeast Alaska Districts 1 and 2.

The state says allowing Metlakatla fishermen to circumvent the state’s permitting system would make it difficult or impossible for wildlife officials to manage fish populations.

The state also argues that the community has no historical fishing rights in its current home. That aspect of the case went to the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which disagreed with the state in 2023, saying the case rests not on the tribe’s long history but the circumstances surrounding Congress’s creation of the reservation.

The three-judge Ninth Circuit panel hearing the case wrote that the 1891 law creating the reservation, called the Annette Islands Reserve, doesn’t explicitly mention fishing rights, but a 1918 U.S. Supreme Court decision recognized that, without off-reservation fishing rights, the community would not be able to sustain itself.

The state brought the issue up again at the district court level after the Ninth Circuit ruling. The appellate court wrote that “Metlakatlans and their Tsimshian ancestors asserted and exercised a a right to fish in these waters since time immemorial.” The state argued the Ninth Circuit panel’s use of the phrase “since time immemorial” meant that the tribe had to prove that its members historically fished in the southern panhandle to the exclusion of others.

But District Court Judge Sharon Gleason disagreed, writing in a footnote to Friday’s ruling that, in a legal context, the phrase “simply means ‘[a] point in time so far back that no living person has knowledge or proof contradicting the right or custom alleged to have existed since then,’ or ‘[a] very long time.’”

“Simply because the Circuit Court discussed the Metlakatlans’ historical use of off-reservation fishing grounds — which it noted that it should do to determine the reservation’s purposes — does not transform this case into one which requires proof of aboriginal rights given that the implied fishing right here stems from the 1891 Act,” Gleason wrote.

However, precisely where members of Metlakatla’s tribe should be allowed to fish without state permits is in question. That’ll be the subject of a trial in the coming months.

Metlakatla Indian Community Mayor Albert Smith said he’s confident the tribe will be able to prove its fishermen have long plied the waters of the southern panhandle.

“We know that the facts are on our side,” Smith said. “This long battle is ongoing, but we are fast closing in on restoring the fishing rights Congress gave to our people.”

The state Department of Law did not respond to a request for comment.

Attorneys for the state and Metlakatla are scheduled to meet in an Anchorage courtroom on June 25 to set a trial date. The parties could settle in advance of a trial, but Smith said he’s not aware of any active negotiations.

Alaskans eat a lot of fish. So many, in fact, that the federal government announced Thursday that the state needs to update its water quality standards.

The Environmental Protection Agency is giving the state Department of Environmental Conservation six to 12 months to come up with new or revised standards for more than 100 pollutants in state waters. That’s based on data showing that Alaskans eat 30 to 60 times more fish than the state’s water quality rules currently assume.

“Alaska needs to revise its limits on toxic pollutants in the state’s waters to ensure that fish-eating and use of its water bodies for other uses support healthy people and communities,” said Caleb Shaffer, the acting director of the EPA’s water division for the Pacific Northwest, reading from a prepared statement. “New standards will reduce the amount of pollution that industries and wastewater treatment plants will be allowed to discharge from their pipes into local waters.”

The state’s water quality rules, last updated in 2003, assume Alaskans eat about seven ounces of fish per month. That’s based on a national average calculated in 1992.

But the EPA cites studies from a variety of sources, including the Sun’aq Tribe of Kodiak, the Seldovia Village Tribe and the state of Alaska itself, that say Alaskans eat at lot more: seven to 14 ounces per day.

Maggie Rabb leads the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, which, alongside the Chickaloon Village Traditional Council, petitioned the EPA to force the state to update its standards in 2015.

“If you’re eating a lot more seafood, your seafood needs to have less pollution in it,” she said in a phone interview. “You need to be more thoughtful about what you’re allowing into the water here in Alaska, because we’re eating a lot more of the seafood that’s coming out of that water.”

Rabb said the state has long known that its water quality standards underestimate how much fish Alaskans eat, and Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation spokesperson Kelly Rawalt said the EPA’s findings were not a surprise.

“There’s nothing in the EPA’s release today that we didn’t know,” she said by phone. “We’ve been working on updating that criteria for several years now to reflect current science and science policies pertaining to the protection of human health and state water quality standards, so we’re absolutely working with the EPA on this topic.”

Rawalt said the state is “committed” to meeting the EPA’s six- to 12-month timeline. She said the state sought feedback on new rules in 2023 and plans to submit a new plan to the EPA soon. The new standards would then go out for public comment before they’re implemented.

“We’ve got lots of very capable subject matter experts in our department that have been working for many years on this topic and care a lot about it,” Rawalt said. “We’re hoping to come up with a plan that balances all those that are impacted and is the best solution for Alaskans.”

But if the state fails to address the issue, the EPA said it’s prepared to step in and issue its own rules.