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More Salmon Being Caught in Waters of North Slope

Posted on: Sunday, 21 May 2006, 12:00 CDT

By Wesley Loy, Anchorage Daily News, Alaska

May 21--Alaskans are heading into another summer of salmon plenty, and by the time commercial fishermen haul in their last gillnet and sportsmen cast their final hook, the catch is expected to top 160 million fish.

Nearly all will be taken along the state's historic salmon belt, the southern coastline from Ketchikan to Cordova to Kenai to Kodiak to Bristol Bay.

In recent years, however, salmon have seemed to turn up more and more in an odd place -- the Arctic Ocean, which laps the top of the state.

Just ask Dora Nukapigak, cultural coordinator for the North Slope village of Nuiqsut. She's sure villagers who have long caught fish such as Arctic cisco, grayling and char as part of a subsistence lifestyle also are bagging more salmon, including king salmon -- the biggest of the five Pacific salmon species -- and small pink salmon.

"In Barrow, my brother puts a net out. He catches a lot of kings," Nukapigak said. "And then over here in our rivers, we get more of these pink and silver salmon. They're coming in more than they've ever been. I'm not sure what kind they are, but we know they're salmon because they're red."

Craig George, a wildlife biologist for the North Slope Borough in Barrow, agrees that salmon seem more abundant.

"Just from having lived here over 20 years, it's been my impression that salmon catches have increased," he said.

So have the salmon temporarily lost their bearings, or have they shifted permanently to the Arctic for some reason?

Scientists are pondering whether salmon and other marine life are responding to climate change marked by warming waters and receding ice in the Bering Sea as well as the Beaufort Sea farther north.

Certainly salmon have expanded their range before.

Southeast Alaska is one of the state's richest salmon provinces, but you wouldn't have found a king or pink there 10,000 years ago. That's because glaciers covered the entire region, said Doug Eggers, a state fisheries scientist. When the ice receded, salmon strayed in, found good spawning habitat and established new runs.

"Salmon are incredibly resilient," he said.

Aside from the anecdotal evidence -- stories of salmon catches by subsistence fishermen working the Colville River near Nuiqsut and other North Slope streams -- the North Slope Borough has some intriguing data based on periodic household surveys.

The numbers are sketchy, but they suggest a salmon boom.

A survey conducted in the mid-1990s tallied six king salmon and 51 pink salmon taken in subsistence fishing in the Barrow area, said Joshua Bacon, a biologist in the borough's Department of Wildlife Management. The most recent survey, in 2003, found 439 kings and 18,048 pinks.

Bacon cautions against drawing conclusions.

"Another way someone could look at this salmon data is, maybe there's more of an effort by people to catch salmon," he said. "That could be contributing to the increase in harvest numbers we're seeing."

But scientists are finding other evidence of a northward shift in marine life that seems to correlate with climate change.

A team of U.S. and Canadian researchers, in a March 10 article in the journal Science, documented shrinking ice and rising air and water temperatures in the northern Bering Sea, and along with it an expansion in pollock -- a bottom fish used to make fish sticks -- and juvenile pink salmon that feed on pollock.

"Local observations indicate that pink salmon are now colonizing rivers that drain into the Arctic Ocean north of Bering Strait," the article said. The authors cite other oddities such as migratory gray whales extending their Arctic stays, with listening devices at Barrow detecting the surprising sound of whale calls during winter.

Last summer in Norton Sound near Nome, state fishery biologists noted explosive pink salmon runs up the region's rivers and streams. On the North River, a record 1.6 million pinks passed a counting station. It was peculiar because the Sound's pink runs usually are weak in odd-numbered years.

While salmon have supported major commercial fishing, canning and freezing operations for more than a century around southern Alaska, the industry has shown only tepid interest in salmon farther north and none along the Slope, which has no commercial salmon fishery.

Some Arctic experts envision that changing within the next 50 years if warming continues. The U.S. Arctic Research Commission, in a 2002 report for the Navy, noted a melting polar ice cap, rising temperatures that could improve winter fish survival in rivers and streams, and salmon near Barrow at the tiptop of Alaska.

"Climate warming is likely to bring extensive fishing activity to the Arctic," the report said.

But if people are counting on a new salmon bonanza on the North Slope a la Bristol Bay or the Copper River, they might be disappointed.

The Slope and the Beaufort Sea remain unfavorably frigid for salmon, and the rivers and sea lack viable salmon habitat and the feed -- lots of tiny plankton -- that baby salmon require, said Eggers, the state fisheries biologist.

What's more, Canadian scientists doubt the Beaufort Sea is really experiencing a climate-induced salmon boom. Rather, they suggest a temporary spike like those seen in years past.

The Canadian researchers, writing in the March issue of the journal Arctic, say records document Pacific salmon catches in the Alaska Arctic as far back as the 1880s.

Chum salmon, the species most commonly found in the Beaufort, are known to spawn in the Colville River and in the Mackenzie River in Canada's Northwest Territories, the article said, but other species including kings, sockeye, silvers and pinks seem less established and are probably just strays.

At least on the Canadian side, "there is little evidence to suggest that Pacific salmon are more common ... today than they have been over the past 90 years," the authors conclude.

Nukapigak knows one thing: Her brother Jimmy Nukapigak enjoys catching salmon, drying them and then sharing the fish with village elders.

"They're very tasty," she said.

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Copyright (c) 2006, Anchorage Daily News, Alaska

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Source: Anchorage Daily News

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