Alaska salmon farmers who annually turn almost 2 billion hatchery fish loose to feed on the pastures of the North Pacific Ocean finally appear to have caught the attention of Canadians who’ve for years have watched their wild salmon return generally smaller and fewer in number.
Some of those in attendance at the Pacific Salmon Foundation’s BC Salmon Recovery & Resilience Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, at the start of the month said Seattle-based scientist Greg Ruggerone generated some buzz when he popped the above slide onto the big screen during a talk about a warm North Pacific crowded with salmon.
The graphic was an in-your-face portrait of how heavily Alaska has invested in hatcheries to free-range farmed salmon for profit. As a result, Alaska now annually sends to sea 4.2 times as many salmon as the hatcheries of British Columbia, Washington state, Oregon and California combined.
Most of the Alaska salmon are smallish pinks or what Alaskans often call humpies, and their numbers have gone steadily up over the decades as the numbers of wild Chinook (king), coho, sockeye and chum salmon have gone down, except in Alaska’s Bristol where the sockeye, the predominate species there, get a break from competition with pinks in nearshore waters.
Ruggerone and Canadian colleague James Irvine in 2018 authored a study reporting that in part thanks to hatcheries in Alaska, Russia, Japan and Korea, there are now more salmon in the Pacific than at any time in human history, but with those humpies, the smallest and least valuable of salmon, dominant.
The study was accepted by other scientists as the most accurate assessment of Pacific salmon numbers to date.
Ruggerone and Irvine later detailed a troubling relationship between those humpies and the bigger and more valuable salmon species, reporting that as the numbers of pinks went up -the numbers of Chinook, sockeye, chum and coho went down in both size and number with wild salmon from Canada and the Pacific Northwest taking the biggest hit.
“It is important to recognize that in the present era,” they wrote in ICES Journal of Marine Science, “hatchery releases represent a classic ‘zero-sum’ game, where an incremental increase in hatchery releases results in some loss of growth and productivity of wild salmon through increased competition at sea.”
Zero-sum fishery
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