Federal Fisheries Board Takes Up Chum Salmon Bycatch Issues

The North Pacific Fishery Management Council held a special meeting in Anchorage this week focused on two issues: a second review of the chum salmon bycatch analysis and appendices last reviewed in April 2024; and 2025 harvest specifications for Cook Inlet salmon.

The meeting is being held in the Egan Center in downtown Anchorage. Several dozen people have already testified at this special meeting, which was scheduled to run through Tuesday, Feb. 11.

The five options being considered by the council range from Alternative 1, keeping the status quo, to Alternative 5, which calls for an in-season prohibited species cap on total chum salmon.

In advance of the meeting, the council received some 238 comments from commercial and subsistence fishermen, communities and fisheries organizations.

Linda Behnken, executive director of the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association, noted in her written testimony that the people of western Alaska participate minimally in the society that is driving climate change, yet they are bearing a disproportionate burden.

“The environmental injustice and the threats faced by western Alaska tribes of food insecurity and cultural extinction demand council action,” she said.

Traditionally, Yukon River commercial fishermen harvested over 800,000 chum every year and the subsistence harvest in 2016 and 2017 exceeded 170,000 fish, she said. The collapse of chum returns in 2020 and 2021 closed these fisheries and others throughout western Alaska.

Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission Chair Jonathan Samuelson testified that the council, NOAA Fisheries and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game must act now to implement holistic, ecosystem-based, restoration-focused measures that protect, conserve and sustain salmon throughout their gravel-to-gravel, rivers-to-sea habitat.

Samuelson said they should not weigh what’s practicable for a billion-dollar industry more heavily than what is critical for the survival of a species and the people and ecosystems dependent on it.

The council also heard from a number of commercial fishermen like Skot Lang, who began his fishing career as a processor on a catcher-processor in 1999, just prior to when the American Fisheries Act rationalized the fishery and transformed the industry.

Lang testified that he felt there are many reasons for the decline of Western Alaska chum salmon, including climate change and hatchery fish released into the North Pacific Ocean.

“Even if you could reduce bycatch to zero, it would not guarantee recovery of Western Alaska chum salmon,” he said.

Recommendations from the council on how to move forward were anticipated by Feb. 11.

Source: https://fishermensnews.com/federal-fisheries-board-takes-up-chum-salmon-bycatch-issues/