Sustainable Alaskan Chinook Salmon? That’s a Problem

Let’s say you’re looking at buying a chunk of Chinook salmon caught in Alaska, and you want to do the right thing.  Was this fish caught sustainably?  If you have a fish dinner, does an endangered – and starving – Puget Sound Orca miss out on one?  You could take a look at the Seafood Watch site, which would give you the green light: “Buy Chinook salmon caught in the U.S. or Canada,” it says, “except from the U.S. Puget Sound or British Columbia, Canada’s South Coast.” 

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) site would do the same:  “U.S. wild-caught Chinook salmon is a smart seafood choice because it is sustainably managed and responsibly harvested under U.S. regulations.” That’s all reassuring.  Unfortunately, it’s not true. And NOAA knows it. 

After a 90-day review of a petition filed by Duvall-based Wild Fish Conservancy (WFC) to list all chinook salmon from rivers flowing into the Gulf of Alaska as threatened or endangered, NOAA has found enough evidence for a year-long scientific review to see whether or not a listing is warranted. The Gulf and the petition cover a vast area from the Aleutians to the Canadian border. No one knows which distinct populations withing that area may warrant a listing.

This isn’t the first time WFC has cast an unflattering light on the fate of Chinook in Alaska.   Not all Chinook “sustainably caught” in Alaska have been spawned there.  Most of the Chinook troll-caught in Southeast Alaska come from Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia, where the Puget Sound, Lower Columbia River, Upper Willamette River, and Snake River fall run of chinooks has been listed as threatened.  All are potential food for the endangered Southern Resident Killer Whales or orcas. However, NOAA’s 2019 Biological Opinion (BiOp) on the fishery allowed the loophole of an “incidental take” of both salmon and killer whales.

Two years ago, U.S. District Judge Richard Jones recognized this, and ruled NOAA’s BiOp violated the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.  Last year, he remanded the BiOp to NOAA so that the agency could replace it with something legal. The judge ordered the incidental catch permit vacated, which would have shut down the spring and fall troll fisheries.  The feds, the State of Alaska, and the Alaska Trollers’ Association appealed, and the 9^th Circuit stayed Jones’ order.  The issue is still in the courts, and the Circuit Court heard oral arguments this month.

Now, looking at WFC’s petition on Chinook that have actually been spawned in Alaska, NOAA has found that, among other things, the numbers of Chinook coming back to spawn had not met regulators’ targets, and the returning fish were smaller and younger than in the past. This, NOAA said, “would lead a reasonable person to believe” that a listing might be justified.  

There’s no question the fish are younger and smaller.  The same is true for other long-lived, commercially valuable, and heavily-harvested fish species, as happened to Atlantic cod.  Overfished for years, they’ve gotten much smaller, too. 

The rivers in which Chinook salmon spawn have suffered generations of habitat loss, temperature rises, and competition with hatchery fish.  Beyond the rivers, (where they are still vulnerable to effects of climate change) they’re likely to wind up in nets or on hooks before they’re fully grown.

Chinook live longer than other Pacific salmon species, and the huge fish of legend – the 100-pounders that once swam up the Columbia and the Elwha – take years to grow that big. These days, they don’t get the chance. Relentlessly fished in nursery areas and along migration routes, their odds of surviving to maximum age and size are slim. 

And if Chinook are smaller, WFC executive director Emma Helverson explains, their habitat has in effect shrunk, too: It takes a big fish to swim up a steep gradient and move relatively large rocks in order to create a nest in which it can spawn at the top.  With smaller fish, Helverson notes, some habitat becomes inaccessible.

Puget Sound orcas spend a lot of time in other waters, swimming along the coast from California to Canada. Wherever they go, the prefer to eat Chinook. And wherever they go, the Chinook are in trouble. From the Sacramento River to Puget Sound, nine Chinook populations are listed as threatened or endangered – and others are being considered for listing.  A 2020 Canadian government assessment of Chinook units in southern British Columbia found that out of a dozen populations, only one wasn’t at risk of extinction.  There wasn’t enough data on three; of the rest, four were endangered, three were threatened, and one was of “special concern.” 

And for Alaska?  There’s a sense of Alaskan exceptionalism. “Despite their historical abundance and the public perception that Alaskan salmon populations are abundant,” NOAA said in its press release on the 90-day finding, “data from the State of Alaska shows the majority of Chinook populations throughout the state have experienced significant decline in abundance, size, diversity, and spatial structure, and many have chronically failed to maintain minimum population goals…Recent declines have been so severe that both tribal and non-tribal subsistence Chinook fisheries have been closed in many parts of Alaska.”  

But this isn’t a uniquely Alaskan problem. “The crisis facing Alaskan Chinook is not unique and mirrors the alarming decline of Chinook in rivers from California through British Columbia.”

WFC noted that the 90-day result was “the first ever positive finding for Alaskan-born salmon under the Endangered Species Act.”  But not really. The WFC petition noted that the State of Alaska had already created action plans for seven Chinook stocks that the state had designated “of management concern.” The Federal Subsistence Board has closed the Yukon River until the end of September to fishing by anyone who doesn’t have a federal subsistence user permit.  Sport fishermen have realized that the fish are fewer and smaller.

NOAA has called its 90-day finding a “milestone.”  It certainly is a milestone – marking not the realization that there’s a problem but in acknowledging it. Some people don’t want to hear it acknowledged. Catering to those people, Alaska’s Sen. Lisa Murkowski noted that listings of Gulf of Alaska Chinook might kill the commercial and sport fisheries for them, and that even now, NOAA’s 90-day finding may reduce investment in Alaskan fisheries.  That’s pretty obvious.  

How much weight should it have?  In her report and recommendations on the Southeast Alaska troll fishery, an expert noted that the Endangered Species Act does not require or allow a listing decision to balance species survival and economics.  But, of course, that’s not how the politics work.  

Where will NOAA go from here?  As federal magistrate judge Jeremy Peterson noted in report and recommendations for the Southeast Alaska troll fishery, the Endangered Species Act doesn’t call for a balancing of environmental and economic interests; it requires an agency to put the species first.  But in the real world, things don’t necessarily work that way. At higher levels of decision-making, it’s not always about the science.  Federal courts have, for example, rejected at least five BiOps on operation of the federal Columbia River system dams.  

How will November’s presidential election influence the fate of Alaskan Chinook?  What about the Supreme Court’s recent decision scrapping the Chevron Doctrine that for 40 years gave deference to an agency’s interpretation of laws that Congress hadn’t made crystal-clear?  

It’s hard to be too cynical about the politics of salmon.  Whoever wins the White House, there will still be a lineup of entrenched special interests, a spaghetti of overlapping jurisdictions, an institutional bias toward the status quo, a regulatory tendency to, as WFC’S Helverson puts it, “manage up to the line” of overfishing. 

Even so, Helverson talks optimistically about the future of wild salmon and endangered orcas.  But, well aware of the complicated environment through which they swim, she says that if we want government to save them, “we’ll have to get creative.”