Earlier this month, a panel of judges for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals allowed the Chinook salmon season in Alaska to open for the summer while it considers arguments in a lawsuit filed by the Wild Fish Conservancy. The Seattle-based organization sued the State of Alaska, the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Alaska Trollers Association to stop the harvesting of Chinook, also known as king salmon, which is the primary food source for an endangered population of orcas in the Puget Sound. Julia O’Malley is a third-generation Alaskan and freelance journalist based in Anchorage, Alaska. She recently wrote an article for the New York Times that explores how declining numbers of Chinook impact the culture and livelihoods of coastal communities in Alaska and the demand for wild salmon on dinner tables and gourmet restaurants. She joins us to talk about her reporting.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Earlier this month, a panel of judges for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals allowed the Chinook salmon season in Alaska to open for the summer while it considers arguments in a lawsuit filed by the Wild Fish Conservancy. Chinook or king salmon are the primary food source for an endangered population of orcas in the Puget Sound. The Seattle based nonprofit sued to prevent the fishery from operating this year. Julia O’Malley is a third generation Alaskan and a freelance journalist based in Anchorage. She recently wrote an article for The New York Times about the decline of Chinook and she joins us now. Julia O’Malley, welcome.
Julia O’Malley: Thanks for having me.
Miller: I want to start with this legal challenge that threatened to prevent Alaska’s king salmon fishery from opening at the beginning of this month. Why did the Wild Fish Conservancy bring it?
O’Malley: It’s complicated. It’s a pretty technical lawsuit that has to do with Alaska’s ability to operate a fishery that could incidentally catch some salmon that are endangered from Pacific Northwest rivers. We might back up a minute. Most of the fish that fishermen are catching in Alaska come from streams in Alaska, and everybody knows salmon are born in streams, they leave fresh water or they go out into the ocean for a period of time and come back. But the king salmon that are the subject of this suit come from the Pacific Northwest mainly. They’re coming from places in Washington and Oregon that have had really serious habitat problems, mostly because of dams, but there are lots of other problems too.
So, in that population of millions of fish that come up into the Gulf of Alaska, mainly in the part of their life when they’re growing, there are a few stocks that are endangered. In order to open that fishery, Alaska has to just talk about how it would mitigate the loss of any of the fish that might be endangered. Stop me if this is getting too technical.
Miller: No, this is important, and it’s interesting because we’ve talked a lot about the Columbia River runs or other Oregon or Washington runs, but not too much about the way they could intersect out in the ocean with Alaskan runs.
O’Malley: Right, so Alaska’s fishery, this fishery, these fish are managed with an international treaty. Alaska, Canada, Washington, and Oregon get together at various intervals and talk about the health of the runs and how much would be sustainable for harvest, and what indicators there might be in any state when the harvest needs to be suspended or reduced due to low returns. These fish, they monitor them very carefully.
Anyway, in its sort of a technical part of the complaint, the Conservancy complaint, a judge found that the mitigation plan, the description of how the loss of the endangered species fish would be mitigated. The idea was to produce additional hatchery fish, but those hatchery fish have their own impact. The way that that was described, at least this is how it’s been explained to me in this, the government’s plan was not specific enough. Because of that, there was a decision that temporarily effectively halted Alaskan fisherman’s ability to fish.
Of course, that decision was appealed by various parties in the state, and it’s now headed to the court of appeals, and in the meantime, there was a stay that allowed fishermen to fish. The argument there was that, in the deciding time, that it would have been a tremendous economic damage to the state. Does that help clarify things?
Miller: It does, but I want to now zero in on the actual Chinook runs that come from Alaskan rivers, and then eventually spawn and go back to those rivers, because those are declining as well. What’s happening there, and what do we know about the reasons?
O’Malley: Oh man. This is a complicated thing. Fish runs are super variable; if you look at a trend line for the global catch of Chinook salmon, starting in 1925 when we were not regulating anything to now, you’re going to see a pretty good decline over time. If you look at Alaska and what fish are caught in Alaska and sold to processors, you will also see a decline. That is partially due to the abundance of the fish, and partially due to increasingly conservative management schemes. As scientists learn more, they limit the amount that’s caught.
Even so, the fish are facing a myriad of challenges from the Sacramento River to the Yukon River, in the full spectrum of their range. We’ve got dams, we have all these climate change related things. If there’s a big amount of rain, it can wash all of the eggs out of a stream. You’ve got fires, burning down the trees around streams. There’s so many different [challenges]; because of the increase in water temperature, the fish are more susceptible to disease. Heat stress can kill them. Plus, in the parts of the Pacific Northwest where we’ve dammed rivers, it’s just super-duper hard for them to return and spawn. That’s been a pretty significant thing in terms of what’s really messed with these fish in question.
Then there are factory trawlers out in the Bering Sea. That is, geographically, really far from this fishery, but some of those fish from the Pacific Northwest may range out there, and they could be caught by the trawlers. Trawlers are after specific species, they’re permitted to catch specific species that are not salmon. Salmon are caught incidentally, and those salmon are thrown back to sea, wasted. Scientists will tell you that there is no one smoking gun.
The other thing, another big issue, is hatchery fish. A lot of the fish that are caught in the Alaska fishery are actually born in hatcheries, and in the past, those hatchery runs were not carefully managed, and some of those strains hurt the wild strains. They were able to out-compete the wild strains. It’s surprising, but I heard in the reporting of the story that, for those Pacific Northwest runs going up and to the Gulf and coming back down, that like 75% of those fish are hatchery. In Alaska, a good percentage of the Alaskan king salmon are also hatchery fish.
Miller: You note that it’s not just a question of fewer king salmon than there used to be, it’s that the remaining ones are a lot smaller. Can you give us a sense for the difference in size?
O’Malley: This is kind of what got me on the story to begin with; when I was growing up, it wasn’t a big deal to catch a king salmon for one thing. But the fish are really big, like somebody could catch a 60-pound fish. Just to give you a sense, like red salmon, if you were to go to New Seasons today and go to the fish counter and buy some red salmon, one of those filets is like 2 pounds, maybe. So a 60-pound fish is just this crazy, tremendous, powerful fish. Now, I was in a small fishing town when I was reporting this story called Pelican and they were having a fish derby. People were bringing out their coats from when they had won the derby previously, and on the back of the coat it says how much the fish was. Embroidered, it says how much the fish weighed in.
Miller: Like a varsity jacket.
O’Malley: Yes, totally. It’d be like 58 pounds or whatever. But winning fish when I left Pelican, I actually don’t know who won the derby, was under 30 pounds, if that gives you a sense. I think they’re even smaller in the Pacific Northwest. I was hearing 11 and 12 pounds…
Miller: Everything is smaller here.
O’Malley: Yeah, they still look pretty big, but it’s hard to look…there’s also a lot of reasons people gave me for that. One of them was just that everybody, from apex predators to fishermen, are looking for those bigger fish, especially in the sport, and sport fishing is a total dynamic. There’s whole towns in Alaska that were built as an international destination to go sport fish for these massive salmon trophies. Everybody wanted those big fish, that’s one thing.
Also, the dynamics in the ocean have changed. The fish are not spending as long of a time out there. King salmon spend the longest time in the ocean before they return, and they’re coming back earlier, so something is signaling them to return earlier. They don’t have as long of a time to grow. There’s just a lot of things going on…
Miller: You mentioned Pelican. I was really struck by one of the quotes you got from a fisherman there, Ajax Eggleston, who said the health of the species, meaning these Chinook, he said, “It’s doomed, man. I’m not optimistic about the future of trawling. We’ll be eating bugs and farmed fish from New Zealand.”
O’Malley: Yeah.
Miller: What else did you hear from fishermen, from processors, from Native Alaskans, about what this means for the future?
O’Malley: Well, we’re not at that point, this is a slow decline. Also, importantly, scientists do not say, the people managing these fisheries do not say, that they cannot be fished at this point, that there are not enough fish to sustain them, but we are looking out into the future. If we continue along this trend line, which I imagine that we will, eventually kind of giving this up, not being able to do it.
The thing that’s important to understand, and what an environmentalist I talked to in the process of reporting this told me, is that when people are not connected directly to the fish, they lose their stake in it. When people are not eating it and fishing it, they lose their stake in it. In Alaska, this wild food, these king salmon, are so important to people’s ability to live in place, and that matters for non-Native people, but in particular, it matters for Native people who are also supporting many of their communities with commercial fishing. These are places that hold language, they hold culture, they hold memory, they hold identity. In Alaska, you cannot really separate how people see themselves and the place that they live, but if you cannot economically live in a place, you lose all of this cultural stuff. So there’s a lot at stake for these people in fishing, in not being able to fish.
Miller: You mentioned New Seasons earlier, and it wasn’t just an offhand comment; you note in your recent article that the biggest customer for one processor that you talked to was Portland’s New Seasons grocery store, but he also said that New Seasons stopped buying Chinook in 2020 because of, I guess, questions from customers, or concerns about orcas, or concerns about the sustainability long-term of the fishery. Are other buyers making similar decisions?
O’Malley: That’s just really hard to tell. That was actually one of the more surprising things for me, because I didn’t really realize that the orca issue had made such deep inroads into the marketplace. The thing about that is, it’s so much more…. like all of these things. We’re at the grocery store and it’s like that, I’m sure you get tired of this, but that Portlandia skit where they’re ordering the chicken, but they want to know how the chicken felt before.
Miller: It’s putting onto the consumer all kinds of questions, because it feels like it’s up to us sometimes to make these ethical decisions, because the market as a whole is not. So we get paper or plastic, or a million versions of them.
O’Malley: Exactly!
Miller: I guess you’re saying that salmon is a version of that?
O’Malley: Absolutely, and so certainly, like right now, red salmon is just bonkers abundant. The price is great. There’s no reason not to buy red salmon, right? King salmon, if you don’t eat and buy it, will it impact this iconic, amazing orca population outside Puget Sound? Most scientists who I’ve talked to have said, boy, it’s a lot more complicated than just the Chinook. This group of orcas face sound pollution and they hunt using sound, so that’s important. They face their genetics; they’re inbred because they’re such a small population, so their genetics are not strong, and they are exposed to a ton of PCBs.
If you look more north, at the northern residents, which is another group of orcas, they’re doing pretty good, and in general orcas are doing pretty well. Better than they have in 40 years, because of the Marine Mammal Protection Act. One scientist pointed me to a study that was like, ‘look, because we have so many more orcas that are more northern than the southern residents, they’re intercepting the chinook salmon at levels they never have before’, and orcas eat a lot of fish, more by many times than the entire troll fleet catches.
There’s also this issue of the way that we manage and protect some wildlife, and the way that we manage and protect other wildlife, and the interdependence of those two things. It’s pretty complicated. The decision about whether or not to eat Chinook salmon, I don’t know how much of an impact that actually has on the orcas. I don’t know that you can definitively say how much of an impact that has. It’s just not a simple choice, I would say.
Miller: Julia O’Malley, thanks very much for your time. I appreciate it.
O’Malley: Okay. Thanks for having me.
Miller: Julie O’Malley is a freelance journalist based in Anchorage. She wrote about the many effects of dwindling Chinook or king salmon numbers in Alaska.
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