Salmon runs in the Yukon River continued to be in decline this year, federal and state agencies have reported that there were not enough fish entering Canada to achieve the goals stipulated in a treaty signed between Canada as well as the United States.
The current fall chum salmon run has been the fifth-lowest recorded for the river’s nearly 2,000 miles and the coho run is now the second-lowest on record as according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game said on Tuesday.
There is enough salmon in the fall to permit subsistence fisheries in one upriver region The department has reported that in it is the Teedriinjik River, also known as the Chandalar River, a Yukon tributary. The subsistence harvest began in the middle of September.
However, all other regions in the lower Yukon River basin, whether located in Alaska or Canada remains closed to coho and chum salmon fishing, the department stated.
The Yukon River’s autumn Chum run came after an earlier summer run that even though it was low however, was much superior to the previous two years, as per the report released jointly by the Yukon’s state Department of Fish and Game as well as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The summer chum runs, according to sonar data from Pilot Station near the Yukon River’s mouth, was 86,000 fish. This was within the the forecast for the preseason and in line with the goals of “escapement,” the term used to describe the return of salmon to their spawning grounds, according to the report released on September. 30. This was enough for some subsistence fish harvests for Alaska this summer. It was also an improvement over the record-setting number of summer chums recorded at Pilot Station in 2021 and more than twice the number of total of 463,806 summer chums recorded there at the time of 2022.
Chum salmon is one of the five salmon species of Alaska return to rivers where they spawn with two general flows classed as fall and summer runs.
Like chum, the Chinook salmon did not exhibit significant improvement this season in the Yukon River, according to the report of the federal and state governments.
Chinook salmon only 58,500 were recorded by sonars that passed across the water in Pilot Station, just above the record-low number that was 48,439 Chinook according to the joint report of the federal and state governments. This is less than 1/3 of the current decade-long mean in the case of Yukon River chinook.
In the case of the chinook that swam through the river, only around 15,300 of them passed through the sonar station located at Eagle close to the Canadian border The report stated. It’s only 1/3 of the goal for escapement as stated in the report.
Similar to what has happened in previous years Chinook and chum returns did not meet the targets set by the U.S.-Canada Yukon River Salmon Agreement which is an annex of the Pacific Salmon Treaty.
There are many possible reasons to problems with the Yukon River salmon problems, according to biologists.
The return of Chum, both in the fall and summer were normal up until recently, according to Christy Gleason, a Fish and Game biologist from the area of the Yukon River region.
“Then in the year 2020 it was the year 2020, there was an event at the North Pacific and all the stocks of the Yukon River crashed,” Gleason explained.
Alongside ocean issues there are changes to the upriver areas of spawning which are especially harmful to fish that originate from Canada she added. “The past few years, we’ve witnessed a decline in the run strength in Canadian stocks.” Canadian fish stocks” She said.
She cited an incident that took place in 2016 which the rapid retreat of the Yukon Territory glacier abruptly changed the direction of the river. The incident, which researchers call an instance of ” river piracy,” has caused some of the sloughs in which the chum salmon usually are spawning to be dry she explained.
Chinook are a particular concern. fears that the parasite kills fish before they get to their upriver spawning areas. Authorities and other organizations are studying the extent of infection that are caused by parasites Ichthyophonus. Salmon get the parasite through food items consumed in the ocean and the severity of infections during migrations of rivers rises as temperatures rise. as per the Department of Fish and Game.
There are worries that too many Yukon River salmon are being caught at the sea, by fishing boats, which are harvesting Pollock as well as other fish species. This is referred to as
bycatch
. In its meeting in October, which just concluded that the Federal North Pacific Fishery Management Council agreed to an
Analysis
of rule changes that could be that could be aimed at limiting the of chum salmon caught in Bering pollock harvests of the Sea.
The story was originally published in Alaska Beacon and is republished here with permission.
