Subsistence

Salmon abundance is down and population distributions have changed, according to NOAA’s 2021 surface trawl survey. Besides focusing on salmon, the survey also examined aspects of Bering Sea life such as zooplankton, sediment, sharks, marine birds, pacific herring, capelin and saffron cod.

Like the bottom trawl presentation on Zoom earlier in November, the top trawl presentation examined decreasing fish populations occurring in several Bering Strait species.

According to the survey’s preliminary estimates, young Yukon River chinook salmon populations continue to be low.

“Juvenile abundance was below average in 2021 and has been below average since 2017,” research biologist Jim Murphy said.

Besides lower populations, Murphy also noted the distribution of chinook salmon observed this year was unusual. While one typically finds chinook salmon distributed throughout the Bering Sea area, the area which NOAA typically surveys, most chinook salmon were found near Alaska’s shores.

Like chinook salmon, Murphy’s team observed chum salmon almost exclusively near Alaska’s shores.

“And this is even more atypical for chum salmon as they tend to be much more broadly distributed than chinook salmon,” Murphy said.

Juvenile chum salmon populations have actually been above average since 2018, according to Murphy. 2021’s population is estimated to be one of the largest juvenile populations seen since then. A large juvenile fish population usually correlates with a large returning adult population.

But past observations, the correlation between adult and juvenile chum salmon tends to be more variable than the relationship between juvenile and adults in other fish species, Murphy said.

To illustrate, he pointed out that there was a large population of juvenile chum salmon in 2016 but a significantly low adult population. Murphy and his team postulated that this is because chum salmon are dying at greater rates later in their lifecycle. That would explain the great decline of chum salmon in the Yukon River, despite the high juvenile populations observed in the survey, Murphy said.

Pink salmon saw the same kind of low numbers and near-shore distribution during 2021. Murphy noted that his team combined pink salmon from Norton Sound and the Yukon River into the same graph because of their genetic similarity.

“With this model we are expecting to see low numbers of pink salmon returning to the region in 2022,” Murphy said.

In contrast, NOAA’s preliminary biomass index of coho salmon was close to the highest in the history of the survey. Hopefully, this means a strong run of coho in North Bering Sea salmon next year, Murphy said.

Besides salmon, multiple fish populations surveyed were found to be lower than average. These species include capelin, saffron cod, young pollock and cod and pacific herring.

In general, forage fish populations are low.

NOAA conducts both its bottom and surface trawl surveys annually to study the status of marine life in the Bering Sea.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s office recently announced that it’s setting up a task force to tackle the thorny issue of trawler bycatch.

Bycatch is what fishermen catch unintentionally — fish they aren’t targeting that get caught up in their nets, anyway. Federal bycatch data shows trawl fisheries in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska this year have caught tens of thousands of chinook salmon, millions of pounds of halibut and hundreds of thousands of crabs.

Meanwhile staple species like chinook salmon, red king crab and halibut have been on the decline, forcing subsistence, sport and commercial fishermen to pack up nets or reduce harvest.

“We’ve had a reduction in or closure of the crab fisheries in the Bering Sea. The [North Pacific Fishery Management] Council is discussing how to deal with halibut bycatch, and I think there’s a lot of perception that there are bycatch issues associated with what’s happened with salmon in Western Alaska systems,” said Alaska Fish & Game Commissioner Doug Vincent-Lang.

And, he says, his boss has taken notice.

“I think the governor was hearing loud and clear that there was just a lot of noise around the issue of bycatch,” Vincent-Lang said Friday, “And I think he wanted to get Alaskans together, discuss what the issue is, what we know about it, what we don’t know about and identify different strategies that we all could take to try to reduce bycatch or manage bycatch better.”

The executive order establishing the task force says its goal is to study the impacts of bycatch on what it calls “high-value” state fisheries, recommend policies based on that impact, advise state agencies on how to address bycatch and use science to inform policy-makers and the public about how bycatch is felt in Alaska fisheries.

Vincent-Lang says that “high-value” designation is meant to be more expansive than just cash value.

“It could have value to coastal communities in terms of jobs and collateral benefits of the value back from collecting fish taxes to those communities,” he said. “You can have high value for food security, it could have a high value for cultural purposes.”

The task force will be made up of 13 voting members, nominated by the governor, meant to capture a swath of Alaska fishing interests. That means seats for state administration officials, various fisheries, Alaska Native organizations and the general public.

The task force will also include two non-voting members from the state legislature, nominated by the leadership of the House and Senate. The chair and vice-chair of the task force aren’t set yet — they’ll be selected by the governor once the voting seats are filled.

Bycatch critics warn that the task force’s effectiveness will depend on its composition.

“That task force initiative is definitely welcome,” said David Bayes, a longtime sport charter business owner in Homer. “It shows a level of commitment from the governor’s office which we’ve rarely seen.”

In addition to his charter business, Bayes is also an online activist of sorts, moderating a Facebook group called STOP Alaskan Trawler Bycatch that has more than 15,000 member.

“We’ve seen, a lot of times, especially at the NPFMC, that undercurrents of the trawl industry run pretty deep in Alaska commerce and politics,” he said.

Bayes is talking about the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, which has been criticized for giving too much clout to big-money industry trawlers who are responsible for much of Alaska’s bycatch.

“One of the named seats or positions [on the task force] is a representative from the NPFMC,” Bayes said, “There’s also a trawl rep on [the task force]. Again, it’s kind of this question of: Are they speaking towards conventions and practicability in the industry? Or are they going to try and derail the conversation by saying it’s all a facade, or something that we shouldn’t worry about in the first place?”

Bayes says he’s planning to apply for a seat on the governor’s task force. He says he’s optimistic that this could be a new opportunity for fisheries users to have a voice.

Most bycatch happens in federal waters, beyond the 3-mile line. Vincent-Lang says the Dunleavy administration hopes the bycatch task force will have an impact on federal fisheries management.

“I have a seat on the North Pacific Fishery Management Council,” Vincent-Lang said, “[So] hopefully the information we collect will be used to inform federal decision making — Council decision-making regarding bycatch moving forward.”

But he also says that bycatch in state waters deserves scrutiny, and ideas that come out of the task force could inform decisions at the state Board of Fisheries or within the administration.

The bycatch task force won’t have funding to allocate towards research. Vincent-Lang says that’s a piece of the puzzle that will come once it issues recommendations to policymakers next year.

“Funding will probably be some joint effort between industries associated with bycatch, users, as well as state and federal efforts,” he says. “But before we identify the money for it, we need to identify what it is we want to do.”

Vincent-Lang says he hopes the administration can convene the group early next year to meet on a monthly basis, as outlined in the governor’s order. The task will be dissolved on Nov. 30, 2022.

The deadline to apply to serve on the task force is Dec. 3.

Through the weekend of Nov. 13, sea ice extent in the Chukchi Sea was well above the average from the last thirty years.

“So far, Chukchi Sea ice is developing much quicker this year than it has in all recent years,” climatologist Rick Thoman explained.

Thoman, with the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy, or ACCAP, has Chukchi Sea ice data going back to 1979. Current sea ice extent in Northern Alaska waters is the highest it’s been since November 2001, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s sea ice index.

https://twitter.com/AlaskaWx/status/1459928137077182466

As of Nov. 13, the main ice pack had already reached the northern coast of the Seward Peninsula, Thoman said.

“What we have right now is fairly typical in the sense that ice tends to start to grow out from the Alaska and the Chukotka coast. This year it’s actually kind of met down towards the Bering Strait, so there’s really no open water now just north of the Bering Strait, between Chukotka and the Alaska side,” Thoman said.

Thoman suspects the rest of open water in the Chukchi Sea could be ice covered by the end of November.

As of Nov. 17, sea ice in the Bering Sea has covered much of the Eastern Norton Sound along the coastline of the Seward Peninsula except for an area in front of Nome. Sea ice had also started forming on the southern edge of St. Lawrence Island.

This is much more favorable for Western Alaska compared to the sea ice conditions the region experienced last year. The last couple winters in the Bering and Chukchi Seas have featured record low sea ice extents.

Thoman says all the pieces for sea ice growth, like colder surface temperatures and sustained northern winds, came together this year in the Bering Strait region.

“Really since early October, we’ve been in a persistently cold pattern,” he said. “Not quite every day was below normal, but most days below normal (temperatures). And so we didn’t have our thumbs on the scales with very warm waters that had to be extracted out, and we’ve had a weather pattern that has been conducive for ice formation.”

Based on current forecast models, the entire Norton Sound could be covered in ice by the end of November. There’s also a good chance of sea ice extending all the way south to the Pribilof Islands this winter, which hasn’t happened in recent years, according to Thoman.

It’s no secret that climate change has affected how — and when — Alaskans harvest subsistence foods.

But what are the biggest impacts? How much has the warming climate changed things? And how are subsistence harvesters dealing with that change?

Well, a new study in the journal Ecology and Society aims to answer those questions, specifically as they pertain to the Northwest Alaska communities of Kotzebue and Kivalina.

Kristen Green is a co-author on the study and an Alaska-based Ph.D. student in environment and resources at Stanford University. She says a lot of research on subsistence adaptations due to climate change has been theoretical, so she and her fellow researchers went to interview the harvesters themselves.

Listen here:

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Kristen Green: Well, since we were working with Alaska Native communities, it was really important to us to partner with them through every step of the research project. So, as we were first coming up with the idea, we started conversations with the Native Village of Kotzebue first and then later Kivalina, and trying to understand what questions might be meaningful to the community. From there, we started to focus on this idea of access and harvest, and developed a research protocol where we decided that we would interview expert harvesters throughout the region and ask them about what was most impacting the ways that they got to where they hunted and harvested. We asked them what changes they were seeing with respect to animal availability. And we also asked them how they’re responding to those changes and what their ideas were going forward.

Casey Grove: Just to be clear, what animals are we talking about?

Kristen Green: We asked people what was most important to them with respect to harvesting and caribou. The people there often refer to themselves as caribou people. It’s a symbolic animal for cultural and nutritional sustenance. So that was a of course a very important species. Ice seals, especially bearded seal, beluga whale are also really important. And as you get out to Kivalina, marine species become even more important based on their location. So marine mammals and fishes as well, particularly things like chum salmon and sheefish.

Casey Grove: So a pretty big range of things it sounds like.

Kristen Green: That’s right. harvesters in the region definitely have a range of food sources that they rely on because they do harvest seasonally throughout the year. And when you look at the seasonal harvest, you do see in every month of the year, people are harvesting things. And that’s actually one thing that we’ve found: some of those harvesting seasons are shifting a little bit relative to the past. And we believe that’s correlated with sea ice retreats.

Casey Grove: The season changing and how much?

Kristen Green: We saw changes in three key species. For bearded seal, harvest is now beginning in early May instead of late May. For chum salmon, harvest is now starting sometime in June, mid-June, when it used to start in early July. And for beluga whale, it’s now beginning in mid- to late May. And anywhere from two to three weeks earlier for all those species in that total window of harvest is also often more narrow and more unpredictable with some of the changes in the weather.

Casey Grove: Is the quantity of pounds of food is changing too?

Kristen Green: We didn’t specifically ask about pounds of food harvested in our study, it was outside the scope of our work. But we did hear from the two years that we asked people questions about this, that there were some years where it was much harder for them to get bearded seal. And we suspect that people are relying on other things to fill in for food that they’re not able to get — sometimes relying more on the fish in a year where they can’t get seals or they’re trading more with other communities or their families.

Casey Grove: And it kind of stands to reason if you have to spend more energy, more time or money trying to harvest the same amount of food that that’s just an overall greater difficulty than in the past.

Kristen Green: Absolutely. And that’s one of the things that we found is the amount of time you have to harvest, the amount of financial resources you have — whether it’s gasoline to be able to travel farther to find animals, or whether it’s access to multiple types of transportation. So having a snowmachine and boat and a four-wheeler, if you have access to all those, you may be able to access harvest more than someone who can’t.

Casey Grove: This study, it strikes me as very intensive on the talking, almost in a journalistic sort of way, that you’re you’re getting a lot of information by talking to people. And I wonder what was that like? I mean, it sounds like a lot of interviews and a lot of direct communication with folks?

Kristen Green: It was a really meaningful aspect of this study that people in Kivalina and in Kotzebue were so willing to share their stories with us and we spent time at people’s houses and fish camps, having coffee with folks and really hearing the stories of change that they’d experienced and also some of their optimism for the future. We also did look at some of the quantitative environmental trends to see how they compare to what the harvesters’ stories were and they both had similar stories about climate change. But I think the nuances, that when you’re talking to people, you’re able to gather a much broader context for climate change and potential ways to adapt to them than when you just are looking at the numbers.