A prominent University of Washington professor of marine biologist and fisheries scientist says respect for every form of knowledge is needed to find solutions to the decline of Pacific salmon.
"The impact of the decline of Chinook salmon and chum salmon to western Alaska communities is a concern to all, and every form of knowledge needs to be brought to bear to understand what has caused it and help to find solutions," wrote Ray Hilborn, a professor of aquatic and fishery scientist at the University of Washington, in an article published in May by the Oxford University Press.
Hilborn noted that research published previously by Antoinette Lavoie, of the Department of Human Dimensions of Natural Resources at Colorado State University and others made a good case that Native people have been largely excluded from decision making in management of federal fisheries, especially as those fisheries may impact subsistence users.
Yet Hilborn disagreed with comments about "NMFS fantasies," a reference to research by the National Marine Fisheries Service on the extent of bycatch from its observer program and the region of origin of fish determined by state-of-the-art genetics. Those "NMFS fantasies" were derived from large scale research programs on the extent of bycatch from the observer programs, he said.
Members of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council (NPFMC) meeting in Anchorage in February heard several days of testimony from dozens of people, mostly Alaska Natives residents Yukon River communities. Their testimony spoke to decades of traditional knowledge, of salmon that until recent years returned to the Yukon in such abundance that they provided for a wealth of commercial and subsistence harvests.
The most important issue in evaluating the impact on western Alaska salmon is that the majority of chum salmon and half of the Chinook salmon caught as bycatch are not destined for western Alaska, said Hilborn. Genetic analysis shows that roughly half of the trawl bycatch is western Alaska Chinook salmon and 19% of the chum salmon bycatch is from western Alaska, he said. The number of western Alaska salmon caught has averaged 8,777 Chinook and 46,982 chums.
Total returns to the river in western Alaska Chinooks from 2011-2023 were 400,000-500,000 and for chum salmon 2-4 million until 2020, when there was a dramatic decline in both the number of chum salmon returning to western Alaska and in the trawl bycatch of western Alaska chum salmon, Hilborn said.
While the several thousand Chinook salmon and tens of thousands of chum salmon would have been very valuable to local subsistence users a 1or 2 percent difference in returns is so small that even if trawl bycatch was totally eliminated, conservation closers implemented would not have changed, he said.
