While salmon runs struggle throughout a large portion of their range, not the case in the great state of Alaska.
Science is beginning to show that the copious amount of hatchery pink salmon being dumped into the Pacific by Alaska is leading to an overcrowding situation affecting wild salmon and steelhead runs.
Taylor Bacharach Member of Parliament for the Skeena-Bulkley Valley summed it up pretty well in this tweet.
“Climate change has reduced the quality and quantity of the food for fish in the open ocean. So the idea of releasing more hatchery fish is like letting more cattle out into a field with less grass and thinking you’re going to get more and fatter cows.”
Southeast Alaska’s salmon harvest was over four times more than last year’s, according to the preliminary report from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
Commercial fishermen in Southeast harvested 58 million salmon across the five species this year: almost 7 million chum salmon; 48 million pinks; 1.5 million coho; 1.1 million sockeye and 216,000 king salmon.
LINK (via KTOO)
48 million Pinks. Incredible. No wonder that the northern Atlantic salmon rivers are seeing invasions of these highly successful but suddenly “wrong ocean” fish. A friend of mine caught a long way from home Pink whilst sea-trout fishing in next stop Ireland and the long Atlantic crossing to East Coast America, south-west Wales this summer. Unlike the handful of sea-trout he caught that week, it wasn’t returned.