Fisheries

Dan Barr is eighty-one and a half years old. He fished Bristol Bay for just about half his life.

“It’s been just such a great part of my life,” he said. “Every year I came home, it was like [I got] to live out something new that got loose in me.”

Barr spent much of his career finding ways to connect different people with each other. For over two decades, he was president of the Bristol Bay Driftnetters Association — an organization formed in the 1980s that aimed to unify the fleet. There, he helped publish newsletters about issues around the fishery, like practices in the Pacific Ocean that affected Bristol Bay.

Throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, vessels in international waters cast nets that were up to 40 kilometers long, collecting millions of salmon that were otherwise on their way to the region to spawn. This is called high seas interception. The practice also results in high levels of bycatch. Nets can trap everything from whales and sharks to seabirds.

Barr worked with interest groups and pushed for federal legislation to address the problem.

In 1992, he formed a coalition that helped pass the High Seas Driftnet Act, which aimed to restrict large-scale driftnet fishing in international waters.

He said he worked with dozens of conservation and user groups like Greenpeace as well as sports and other commercial fishers.

“And so I dreamed up the issue of: ‘let’s get a coalition of sports, environmental, and commercial’ and we got 29 organizations to sign on. And we wrote a letter to each U.S. senator,” he said. Barr said that despite some initial pushback, they garnered the support to pass the act.

The act restricts net size at sea and makes it illegal to import fish harvested with large drift nets. It has brought more visibility to both the bycatch and fish interception issues that affected the health — both ecological and economical — of the fishery.

Barr attributed their success to collaboration. He said he coordinated with people who traveled around the country and internationally to help document the extent of the bycatch and overfishing problem, and later, enforce the act. Barr said team members did everything from discussing the issue with Russian border guards to identifying pirating vessels in Kodiak.

“We live in a world that’s made some gains in some constructive things they’re doing,” he said of the act. “And it’s one of the things that came out of Bristol Bay.”

Barr also worked within Bristol Bay. He started an open radio channel for the Ugashik district where fishers could talk to each other about important issues during slow hours.

“We got on one of the local VHF frequencies and said, ‘spread the word,’” he said. “Every night we’d go through and talk about what we knew about Bristol Bay, what we knew about what was happening in the north Peninsula, what we knew about the high seas, what about safety…”

He said some discussions on the radio lasted three hours.

Barr also helped secure an exception to Coast Guard regulations in Bristol Bay, so that people could substitute personal emergency beacons for regular ones. He said the change made carrying a beacon more accessible, due to its lower price. Personal beacons are registered to an individual.

“It meant that people might buy one where they otherwise wouldn’t just for the extra safety,” he said.

Barr says nearby communities later started using the beacons on snowmachines.

Through it all, Barr said his favorite part about fishing in Bristol Bay was spending time with his family and connecting with friends.

“The greatest part was fishing with my family. We had ten members fish in Bristol Bay,” he said.

Now, he reflects on the people he met here.

“I mean, the amazing people there, and the people that have retired have become longtime friends that are really quality people. It’s the people aspect first,” he said.

Today, Barr is battling cancer in Seattle. His son fishes on his former vessel, the Slam Dunk.

Bering Sea factory trawlers scoop up tens of thousands of pollock at a time, and pressure is intensifying to avoid catching salmon as populations of chum and chinook have plummeted in recent years, causing closures for subsistence harvesting.

The trawlers are not entirely to blame — warming oceans due to human-caused climate change are almost certainly a factor — but they have drawn the ire of salmon advocates from Western Alaska to Washington D.C.

For a recent story in the Anchorage Daily News, in conjunction with the Pulitzer Center, fisheries reporter Hal Bernton visited a Bering Sea factory trawler to see how its crew caught and processed pollock, and also how the captain works to keep salmon bycatch low.

And while Bernton has reported from the decks of much smaller boats, he says the factory trawlers are like floating cities.

Listen:

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Hal Bernton: This is a 341-foot vessel that I went out on, the Northern Hawk, with a crew of 129 people. And most of them work below the deck in a fish factory that, basically when the fishing is reasonable, operates 24 hours a day. Then there are these incredible fillet machines that will fillet 180 fish a minute, and the job of the human is basically to just feed the machine 24 hours a day. And it’s kind of mind-numbing work. Your hands move constantly to make sure the fish are positioned correctly.

Casey Grove: So these are the folks I feel like they could say, “Hey, you know, I just work here.” But there are a lot of folks outside of that, that have pretty strong feelings about trawling. And it kind of comes down to pollock versus salmon, right? And crab also, but a lot of people are talking about salmon bycatch. Can you remind me what that conflict is?

Hal Bernton: Sure. They remove a huge amount of fish every year, more than a million metric tons. It’s up over 2 billion pounds of fish. And this has been happening for decades, first by foreign fleets who fished off the Alaska coast and then more recently by the U.S. fleets. And specifically, in recent years, as the western Alaska chum salmon runs have collapsed, they do catch during the summer months, like when I was out, some chum salmon. And there’s been tremendous concern, as subsistence and commercial harvests in western Alaska have been shut down across a lot of areas in recent years, about that bycatch.

Now it is kind of complicated, because a lot of the chum they catch would actually go back to Asia. But about 18 to 20% of these fish, depending on the year, would be returning to western Alaska. So there’s no cap on how many of those fish they can catch. And there’s a tremendous interest, and pressure, from tribal groups and others to basically set some limits on how many chum can be caught. And the pressure is really on these guys. Now, when I was out, staying away from chum was a big priority for the fleet.

Casey Grove: And that seems pretty tough, right? Because, I think you noted in your story, that often the salmon and the pollock will be kind of at the same depth and in the same areas. So can you talk about that? I mean, how difficult is it to actually avoid salmon when you’re trying to catch pollock?

Hal Bernton: Well, there are cameras, at least in the factory trawler nets. And when you look at these cameras, by the time you see these fish, sometimes you can see the salmon actually coming into the net, but by then it’s kind of too late. When the skipper sees that there are dozens of salmon coming in along with the pollock, they move to another area. It’s not always a sure thing, when they move, that there will be less or maybe there won’t be enough pollock. So it’s been a challenge.

Casey Grove: Maybe another thing that complicates this a little bit further, and I think, you know, some people would say this is a positive for the pollock fishing fleet out there, is that some of those boats are, in a way, owned by Kuskokwim River communities. Can you explain that? How did that come to be?

Hal Bernton: That was a really interesting thing for me that I wanted to explore, to understand, is that increasingly, the pollock fleet, although they may go down to Seattle every year at the end of the harvest for boat work and everything else, and essentially are home-ported in Seattle, increasingly, shares of the boats are owned by six Alaska nonprofits that are invested with shares of the pollock harvests through federal action. And the boat, the vessel I went on, the Northern Hawk, is 100% owned by the CDQ group Coastal Villages Region Fund that represents some 20 communities in western Alaska. So those same communities have been hard hit by the collapse of the chum runs in recent years. So there’s been a lot of pressure and increasingly tension with tribes who feel that there needs to be more restrictions, and they have filed actions, a lawsuit in federal courts, trying to force the federal regulators to reconsider the levels of pollock and restrict the harvest.

Casey Grove: Yeah. Well, in that effort to bring fewer chum salmon aboard as bycatch, what sort of technological innovations did you see?

Hal Bernton: Well, basically, they call it a salmon excluder. It’s a hole in the net with a light. The salmon are strong swimmers, so the idea is that, even if they get in the net, they can swim through this hole, they’d be attracted to the light, and get back out to freedom. And that does save some salmon, but it’s far from 100%. So there’s an effort now, a researcher, to do what’s called a more active excluder, where if the cameras picked up salmon coming into the nets, this sort of ramp would drop down and literally herd the salmon to the hole. And that device could certainly help as long as you were watching the net to see, and the cameras to see, when those salmon were coming in. And that might be ready in a couple of years. There’s also efforts to speed up the genetic testing of the salmon so that you could know right away, at least within a day or so or two, rather than months later, hey, were are these coming from Russia and going back to Russia? So not so big of concern? Or are they going back to western Alaska and, hey, there’s a really big concern, so we need to stay away from that area? Because right now that genetic testing happens, but not until way after the fact.

Casey Grove: Interesting, yeah. So, you know, there are a lot of layers to this, a lot of different opinions. We haven’t even talked about the prospect of an ocean heat wave and kind of that that huge existential problem of climate change, which is clearly at play here. But aside from that, when people talk about salmon bycatch and pollock trawling, where do you see this issue going from here?

Hal Bernton: Well, clearly, the federal council is wrestling to put some limits on the fleet. And I think the fleet knows that, one way or another, and they’re saying, “Give us this sort of flexibility to sort of do it ourselves.” Because there are these cooperatives, there’s information sharing, there’s hotspots that are developed fairly quickly, where the fleet can know, hey, don’t go there, because there’s a lot of chum. And they’re sort of saying, “Hey, let us continue along this path.” And the tribes are saying, “We don’t trust you. We think there needs to be a hard cap, and much more serious restrictions on what you do. We’ve, our people, our communities, have sacrificed so much, and now it’s time for the trawl fleet to feel some pain.”

And of course, the CDQ groups and the tribes, some of them are representing the same regions and in very different capacities now, so there’s a lot of more tension between CDQs and the tribes that plays out in these meetings of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, which is set up by Congress to go ahead and recommend and set harvest rules that are then finalized through NOAA Fisheries. Unfortunately, it’s a long convoluted process. There’s a lot of people who are very, very frustrated with the council process. There are industry officials that serve on the council, and it’s including one representative now, a council member, from Coastal Villages who was just appointed, so there’s increasing tension and frustration in some of these meetings.

There’s a nearly 100-year-old wooden boat in Petersburg that’s become a staple of the tight-knit local music scene. Musicians in town have a few performance spaces to choose from, a lot of them in bars. But the crew of the Roedda brings a unique option with them when they come to town — transforming the boat’s fish hold into an improvised sound stage.

It was a brisk Thursday night in September in Petersburg’s South Harbor. The chill was already starting to set in, and the people were starting to pour out of town. Alex Deacon is the captain of the Roedda. But tonight, she’s also the master of ceremonies for an open mic on board — the last of the season.

“We got all sorts of accommodations, lots of debauchery — but good heathens, we are!” Deacon called out to a crowd gathered on the deck of the Roedda. “We don’t have amps, but we have music and people who want to play, so get comfortable — and there’s instruments down there. None of us are perfect. I would love to just encourage anyone who’s brave enough to volunteer. Anybody…?”

At Deacon’s invitation, a handful of people started tuning their guitars, banjos, and mandolins. The Roedda is an 80-foot wooden tender boat painted black and white. It’s used for moving seafood and ice between fishing grounds and the local processor, OBI Seafoods. The fish is stored in large holds below deck. But tonight, that space is for creating sound.

Husband and wife duo Robyn and Daniel Cardenas were the first to climb down into the hold using a narrow metal ladder. Spectators on deck could just see the tops of their heads. The music bounced off the steel walls, reverberating up and out towards the audience.

The rest of the boat has a lot of character too. Roedda crew member Aaron Gore-Rife — who is also Deacon’s partner — said the crew likes to think that of all the creaks and pops the old boat makes is just her “putting her two cents” into the conversation.

“Sometimes, you’ll be making a point — and she’ll go off,” said Gore-Rife. “And as I see it, the boat agrees with me!”

“She purrs!” said Deacon.

The Roedda was built in 1931. In addition to fish, she’s held mail and freight in her hold throughout her long life. According to Deacon, she also put out a house fire in Sitka sometime in the late 30s with her deck hose.

Deacon said being a part of that legacy is important to her.

“You’re talking about 96 years of different people maintaining this piece of machinery,” said Deacon. “We want to do the company and the history of the boat proud by carrying on the same habits.”

But the Roedda of today is breaking with the past in some ways. Deacon is proud to be one of just a handful of female captains in the local fishing fleet. And the crew is starting new traditions – like the fish hold open mic. And they don’t just host the music — they’re making it too.

“There’s a mixture of jazz, of country, of ragtime…” said Deacon. “The fun part is that playing around with other musicians kind of molds itself into something unexpected.”

Gore-Rife said the band is pretty resourceful — they like to use what they have onboard.

“What we like to do is we create a lot of junk instruments,” said Gore-Rife. “Just instruments that are random things that you can put into someone’s hands, and anyone can pick it up like. Like the gut bucket!”

True to its name, the gut bucket used to hold actual fish guts.

“Yeah, it had a job,” said Deacon. “Now it has a different job.”

Now, it’s an instrument, played by many who come aboard.

“I’m pretty sure it’s derived from the old washtub bass,” said Gore-Rife. “It’s just a way to get music in people’s hands — it’s not a big fancy instrument.”

“It’s very easy to build,” Deacon added.

“All you need is a five gallon bucket, a washer, any kind of string with some stretch to it, and a stick — and that’s it,” said Gore-Rife. “And then [you] just kind of find wherever you feel most comfortable pulling it and tweaking it, and then you get this lovely… THOOM.“

In fitting with Roedda’s DIY theme, Gore-Rife uses an old cigarette lighter to pluck the string.

Deacon said the gut bucket is just one of many manifestations of the crew’s creativity, fueled by life at sea. They all take turns practicing on wheel watch: the window of time when they’re running their product to town, which typically takes 12 to 24 hours.

“Alaska offers a vast amount of inspiration from the scenery, so it can really help with art,” said Deacon. “I think some of my best music has come from being on a boat for too long.”

That artistic space Deacon and her crew have cultivated is just a temporary one. The crew is hanging up their guitars — and their buckets — for the season. And guests say they’ll miss being part of the weird little community around the Roedda’s fish hold.

“Well, singing in a fish hold for an open mic night is pretty darn special,” said visiting musician Tonia Whitethorn, who is also the vocalist for local band Rockfish. “[It] doesn’t seem like that happens in very many places, right? Welcome to Alaska.”

Bubba Schill is a regular at the Roedda.

“I want to tell you how happy I am to be playing music with all these folks down here on this boat,” said Schill. “[I come here] every time they got an open mic! [It’s] where the music’s at. I love the fact that… you can’t always just go be yourself in a musical, artistic, creative environment. And here, you can. So, accolades.”

Deacon said there’s no rest for the useful. She and Aaron will spend the winter in Washington state retrofitting a short bus as a travel home. And the Roedda will sit at the docks, songless, until summer returns.

In the short term, Alaska crab fishers and the communities that depend on them will get a slight reprieve from the disastrous conditions they have endured for the past two years, with harvests for iconic red king crab to open on Sunday.

In the long term, the future for Bering Sea crab and the people who depend on it is clouded by environmental and economic upheaval.

The decision by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to open harvests of Bristol Bay red king crab after an unprecedented two-year shutdown was a close call, a state biologist told industry members during a meeting on Thursday.

Red king crab are the largest of the commercially harvested crab species, and their meat is prized as a delicacy.

The department’s decision to allow a small harvest, announced on Oct. 6, was based on preseason surveys by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service.

Biologist Mark Stichert said the surveys suggest that the crash that forced two years of closure in the Bristol Bay red king crab fishery, the major Alaska source for that highly prized seafood species, has bottomed out.

“The decline has stopped. But whether or not we’re seeing a rebound in the biomass is hard to say,” Stichert said during the Thursday briefing. He is the Department of Fish and Game’s Kodiak-based groundfish and shellfish fisheries management coordinator.

A red king crab harvest returns, but at much lower levels than the past

The allowable harvest that opened on Sunday, as set by the state, is 2.15 million pounds, a little less than the 2.6 million pounds allocated for harvest in the 2020-21 season, the last time Bristol Bay red king crab was fished. It is considerably lower than in past years; in the 2016-17 season, for example, the total allowable harvest was nearly 8.47 million pounds. Those totals were dwarfed by the annual harvests four decades ago, which peaked in 1980 at nearly 130 million pounds.

The conclusion that crab numbers are now adequate to support a Bristol Bay area harvest hangs on a slender thread — the discovery of 382 adult female crabs in the preseason surveys, 121 more than were pulled up in last year’s surveys, Stichert said. The bulk of the adult females found this year were in a single spot, he said.

“One single 30-minute tow dictated whether you meet the threshold or do not meet the threshold,” he told crab harvesters.

The positive signs for high-value red king crab, as tenuous as they may be, are not yet emerging for Bering Sea snow crab. That marquee Alaska fishery, which in the 1990s supported harvests in the hundreds of millions of pounds, was closed last year for the first time ever, after stocks crashed by about 80%. It will remain closed for the coming year because the stock is continuing to decline, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced on Oct. 6.

Climate change looms, threatens future harvests

Scientists are questioning whether full recovery is possible in a warming world for these ailing crab populations that have supported some of the world’s most lucrative fisheries.

Snow crab appear to be particularly vulnerable to climate change, scientists say.

“They stand out because they are a true Arctic species,” said the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Gordon Kruse, a professor emeritus in the College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences.

There are already signs that Alaska’s snow crab range is shifting north – as expected by NOAA Fisheries scientists –  which means ocean currents carry the larvae even farther north, he said. But the growth appears to hit a barrier north of the Bering Strait, he said. The Chukchi Sea does have a population of snow crab, “but they’re stunted,” he said. The Chukchi and the Beaufort Sea to its east appear to be unable to support what might be commercial stocks, he said.

Stichert, in his presentation to industry members, described how climate change may be creating some “bottlenecks” for Bristol Bay red king crab in their early life stages.

The females lay their eggs in time for the spring algal bloom that emerges from the underside of the sea ice, he said in his briefing. But reduced ice affects the bloom of plankton on which the larvae depend for the two to three months they are floating around in the water, he said. If they survive that period, the larvae’s fate depends on where they land on the seafloor, he said.

“There are a lot of risks and a lot of opportunities to die for a larval king crab,” he said.

In briefings during the October meeting of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, biologists described some of the risks to young red crab survival. They include ocean acidification, which inhibits shell growth, and a more robust population of sockeye salmon, which feed on crab larvae when they are at sea.

Another risk comes from the trawl nets used to catch pollock in the same areas used by crab.

The problem is not bycatch in the usual sense, or the unintended harvest of crab caught in nets used to harvest pollock, Kruse said. Those numbers are very low and “do not rise to the level of making a population effect on snow crab or other crab species,” he said.

Rather, the danger is from pollock trawl gear that touches the seafloor, which fishery managers and biologists said happens more frequently than previously believed. That contact can harm crab habitat or injure or kill the crabs themselves, which often are in the vulnerable shell-less molting phase at the same time trawlers are fishing for cod.

“We now know that this gear’s on the bottom a majority of the time,” Kenny Down, a North Pacific Fishery Management Council member, said on Oct. 10, the last day of the October meeting. He noted that the council banned bottom trawling for pollock more than two decades ago, in 2001. The objective of that ban “is currently not being met,” he said. “This gear is in the bottom, it’s in areas that we’ve designated as sensitive, and we’ve prohibited bottom trawling in those areas for a variety of reasons.”

The council is now preparing to consider additional protections for a 4,000-square-nautical mile section of the eastern Bering Sea that has since the mid-1990s been designated as the Bristol Bay Red King Crab Savings Area. Although the council in December rejected a request from crab harvesters for a complete closure of the area to trawling during the first half of the year, it is set to revisit the issue at upcoming meetings.

Another regulatory response to the crab crisis is expected to come in a mandatory review of the quota system that divvies up the Bering Sea crab harvests among fishers and processors. The system of assigned Bering Sea crab quotas, part of a process called “rationalization” that is taking hold in fisheries globally, began in 2005. Rationalization is intended to preserve the safety of fish stocks and people by eliminating the race to harvest that can happen in open-access fisheries. The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act requires period reviews of quota systems; the crab review has now come due.

The Bering Sea snow crab and Bristol Bay red king crab fisheries are the first rationalized harvests in the nation to suffer such massive collapses, industry representatives said repeatedly.

“One of the main goals of the program is to create economic stability, and we’re seeing anything but that right now,” Jamie Goen told the council. Goen is the executive director of the Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers, the industry group for harvesters.

There are some other crab harvests that are proceeding this year in Alaska’s Bering Sea, but they are relatively small. A harvest of Bering Sea bairdi tanner crab, a species related to snow crab, got the go-ahead from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, with a total allowable catch of about 2 million pounds: similar to that authorized a year ago. A relatively small harvest of the prized red king crab has been taking place farther to the north, in Norton Sound near the Bering Strait, with a little over 350,000 pounds caught over the summer. But harvests of rare blue king crab continue to be closed, as they have been for the past several years.

Alaska faces competition

While Alaska’s Bering Sea crab populations struggle, stocks and fisheries are flourishing elsewhere.

In eastern Canada, snow crab harvests are high and quotas have been increasing. There, Kruse said, the population has the advantage of an ocean current that sends cold water down from Greenland: the Labrador Current.

“That southern-flowing cold water is very, very favorable to the Arctic population snow crab,” he said. In contrast, the Bering Sea has warm water flowing north from the Pacific Ocean through the Bering Strait, he said.

In the Barents Sea on the Atlantic side of the Arctic, snow crab are recent arrivals, but they are thriving and supporting commercial harvests.

“The thinking is that it’s a natural extension of snow crab in the oceans in the northwest Atlantic, around Canada,” Kruse said. “They’re growing in an area that hasn’t had snow crab in the system, so as invaders, they’re doing quite well.”

Though Alaska is famous for its big crab, those other sources could take away market share, particularly as the Bering Sea enters its second consecutive year of snow crab shutdowns, Kruse said.

“If you turn off the spigot and have no crab to catch, that’s going to be replaced by something else, and probably snow crab from someplace else in the world,” he said.

John Sackton, a Massachusetts-based fishery analyst and consultant, gave a sobering assessment of the Alaska crab industry’s position in global markets.

The interrupted harvests make it difficult for buyers who previously bought and advertised the Alaska product, he said.

“It definitely changes the behavior of people who would normally be the consumers of Alaska crab,” he said. And once consumers have switched to other sources of crab, Canada or Norway, for example, they will not easily switch back to Alaska products. If and when Alaska stocks recover and harvests return to normal levels, it will take a long time to regain those markets, he said.

The allowable bairdi tanner crab harvest is a consolation, as bairdi is an excellent product that many chefs and knowledgeable consumers prefer to snow crab, he said. But there is a downside even to the bairdi harvest, he said. “The problem is bairdi has been that over the last 10 years or so, the harvests have been very erratic. Because it’s been erratic like that, it’s been very hard to know what might be available.”

Yet more concerning, Sackton said, is that the troubles that have plagued Alaska’s crab stocks have wider reach beyond those shellfish.

“I personally feel that there’s a severe threat with the warmer temperatures in the Bering Sea and fisheries becoming erratic. It’s not just crab,” he said. Other species are affected, too, notably salmon runs outside of Bristol Bay – resulting in bitter fights over salmon crashes along major rivers, allocation decision and at-sea bycatch, he said.

“All of that does make people, to be honest, lose faith in Alaska fisheries,” he said. “I think the Alaska brand is damaged, no question about it.”

This story originally appeared in the Alaska Beacon and is republished here with permission.

Chum salmon, a species that has faltered in the Interior Alaska river systems, are now reproducing farther north in some North Slope rivers, researchers have confirmed.

A University of Alaska Fairbanks team last month found about 100 chum salmon that were spawning or had just spawned in the Anaktuvuk and Itkillik rivers. The rivers are tributaries of the Colville River, which flows into the Arctic Ocean.

The discovery of salmon that far north was not a surprise since all five species of Alaska salmon have been spotted in the Arctic, said Peter Westley, an associate professor at UAF’s College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences and leader of the project.

But the discovery of so many spawning chum in the Colville tributaries was gratifying and supports scientists’ hypothesis that salmon are shifting their range north as climate change warms their more southern habitat, he said.

“I was just really happy to see it all come together,” said Westley, who is studing salmon population shifts. “It felt like we were kind of looking for a needle in a haystack.”

The findings confirm local reports of chum salmon swimming in North Slope rivers. And the UAF work follows a previous discovery of a single juvenile chum salmon in a Beaufort Sea lagoon, an earlier piece of evidence that the species is starting to reproduce at that high latitude.

Yet to be determined, he said, is the success of the chum spawning that his team found. The question is whether the salmon found on the North Slope are occasional strays or part of a more permanent change, he said: “Are they now a fixture in the ecology, or some years they’re there and some years they’re not?”

The team is doing follow-up work to track the results. That includes chemical and genetic analysis and readings from temperature sensors placed in the spots where the spawning chum were found, he said.

If liquid water remains there throughout the year, there is support for a more permanent chum salmon presence, he said. “If they freeze solid, it’s pretty much the end of the road,” he said. “Salmon eggs can’t survive if they freeze.”

So far, pink salmon have been the species most frequently observed in higher latitudes, Westley said. Pink salmon have short life cycles, only two years long, so that makes quicker population shifts more feasible, according to scientists.

Chum salmon, though they spend multiple years in the ocean, have a trait in common with pinks that might also make a northward range shift more feasible, Westley said. Like pinks but unlike sockeye, coho or Chinook salmon, chum salmon spend very little time in freshwater. “They really only use the rivers for spawning,” he said.

The catalyst for the spawning-salmon project was an Arctic salmon workshop held by the Alaska Sea Grant program in Anchorage last December.

One North Slope resident who participated in the workshop, Robert Thompson of Kaktovik, confirmed the growing presence of salmon on the North Slope.

“When I first came here, if someone got a salmon, it was the talk of the town,” said Thompson, who began living part-time in Kaktovik in the 1970s and moved there permanently in 1988. Now, he said, salmon are caught regularly, albeit in low numbers.

“I’ve caught a fish of each species — king, silvers, reds, chum and pink,” he said, using alternate names for Chinook, coho and sockeye.

The emergence of salmon on the North Slope is similar to another change in the waters where local people harvest whitefish, Thompson said. “We’ve got a species that’s moving in, the saffron cod,” he said.

Research led by the U.S. Geological Survey found that saffron cod, a more southern fish species than Arctic cod, have increased up to 19-fold in the past three decades in Beaufort Sea lagoons near Kaktovik.

There is some concern that saffron cod might crowd out other fish species on which local people depend, Thompson said.

“They could, when you have only so much food for them,” he said.

For salmon, there are also varying opinions as to whether the northward shift is good or bad.

In Nome and the rest of Western Alaska’s Norton Sound region, commercial fishers are taking advantage of the increasing pink salmon numbers. Last year in Norton Sound, more pinks were harvested commercially than any other salmon species, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.  That followed an unexpectedly large pink salmon harvest in 2021.

But in Norway, pink salmon are considered an invasive species. There, pink salmon compete for food with the more prized Atlantic salmon, and rotting post-spawning pink carcasses are seen as sources of pollution.

On the North Slope, the presence of salmon might be beneficial, Thompson said. He is planning to use a large-mesh net next year to try to catch more of them, he said.

“It would be nice if they would get established up here because they’re going away in other places,” he said.

Thompson referred to salmon collapses farther south, in the Yukon and Kuskokwim river systems and elsewhere, and he blamed the warming climate.

“I don’t think people are taking climate change seriously enough,” he said. “When you’ve got the whole Yukon River shut down and they’ve been fishing there for thousands of years, that’s really serious.”

Correction: The photos were incorrectly dated in the original version of this article. They were taken on Sept. 14.

Salmon runs on the Yukon River continued to be anemic this year, federal and state agencies reported, and there are far too few fish reaching Canada to meet goals set in a treaty between that nation and the United States.

The ongoing fall chum salmon run is the fifth lowest on record for the nearly 2,000-mile river, and the coho run has turned out to be the second lowest on record, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game reported on Tuesday.

There are enough fall chum salmon to allow subsistence fishing in one upriver area, the department reported: the Teedriinjik River, also known as the Chandalar River, a Yukon tributary. A subsistence harvest opened there in mid-September.

However, all other areas of the upper Yukon River basin, whether in Alaska or Canada, remain completely closed to chum or coho salmon fishing, the department said.

The Yukon River’s fall chum run followed a summer run that, though low, was substantially better than those of the past two years, according to a report issued jointly by the state Department of Fish and Game and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The summer chum run, as measured by sonar at Pilot Station near the Yukon River’s mouth, was about 846,000 fish, within the range of the preseason forecast and within the goals for “escapement,” the term used to describe salmon returns to spawning grounds, said the report, issued Sept. 30. It was enough to allow for some subsistence harvest in Alaska this summer, and it was a marked improvement from the record-low 153,497 summer chum salmon counted at Pilot Station in 2021 and nearly twice the 463,806 summer chum counted there in 2022.

Chum salmon, one of Alaska’s five salmon species, return to spawning rivers in two general pulses categoried as summer and fall runs.

Unlike chum, chinook salmon failed to show significant improvement this year in the Yukon River, according to the joint state-federal report.