If we were even partially serious about saving the SRKWs we can look back at the adult salmon data we have from the 60s on for both WA and much of BC and compare the total numbers and biomass to the whale numbers. It would not surprise me to see the decline in whales follow the decline in adult salmon. But, we know the numbers needed and we know it is all 5 species . We just don't want to do it.

Up in AK it's even worse. You can be, as a sportie, significantly fined for wasting meat of fish or game. But if you are a trawler you can simply dump tons of the same species scot free.

04/04/2024




Everyone points to Alaska as many of our problems......trawlers off OUR coast are doing the very same, probably not the numbers of trawlers but still a problem.

That's true, problem is everywhere. But the Alaskan's are also trawling up Killer Whales. Where's Paul Watson when you need him.

was wondering when someone was going to bring that up...

everyone is too worried about the one thats landlocked tho...

https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-s...ear-alaska-2023

It would disrupt too big of fishery/political donation cow to mess with the trawlers.

I think it was my first yeasr of guiding in S.E Alaska when I learned that the Yukon River was closed to the native's subsistence fishing due to a lack of returning chinook. Incidently, one of the other guides at Whalers Cove, was Ed Jones, a recently retired fish bio from Alaska. Ed said that the huge trawl fishery for cod and pollock had a very high rate of chinook bi catch, and that was the biggest factor in reducing the Yukon run. What really got me, is that many of the Alaska natives (and Alaska is a big place) actually lived off the land, more or less. In the small village of Angoon, near our lodge, the residents went fishing and berry picking and hunting on their time off rather that playing softball. The young men in the village all wanted to be fishermen, and the young women seemed to want to get out of town. Doubly interesting that the frozen bait herring that we used, dozens of cases of them, were from Puget Sound Herring Sales!

The Yukon is closed still to subsistence. Bycatch is still allowed and supported while the natives and other subsistence folks do without.

The expediency that habitats and floodplains were destroyed during early colonization is quite staggering. The Army Corps spent decades channelizing, diking, dredging, and removing large wood from all of our rivers and streams. Timber companies logged every last old growth off the landscape, and used barrier culverts to access them. This all happened with little to no permitting scrutiny or oversight. Agriculturalists filled and plowed fertile floodplains and estuaries, and installed irrigation ditches robbing watersheds of valuable water. Now we are expected to rebuild salmon runs within the confines of the damaged landscape we have been given.

Fast forward to today: Restoration activities receive more government scrutiny than any development project ever would. Developers damage waterways and ask for forgiveness, receiving a slap on the wrist if anyone even notices. And we continue to lose habitats at a pace substantially more quickly than we are able to complete even the smallest of restoration projects. Restoration practitioners operate in a world where every single funder is so risk averse and afraid of being sued they can barely put projects in the ground. Basin management plans, comprehensive plans, and legislative rulemaking has every inch of habitat restoration under a magnifying glass before it is ever even close to shovel ready. The permitting and planning minefield restoration practitioners navigate results in bloated restoration projects costing millions of dollars and taking decades to implement at a scale so small they barely even make a dent in the thousands of river miles destroyed Puget Sound Wide.

Until a day that we see large scale, decades long RESTORATION work that can be compared in scale to the decades long campaign perpetrated by the federal government to destroy our rivers in favor of development and agriculture, we will never see habitat restoration. We need unbridled, fast, meaningful restoration occurring at a large scale, and we just simply are not doing that.

whats interesting, is me and one of my best friends (younger than me), have been talking about this for the last couple years, he has a place up there on the Kenai, and has his entire life, and has a few friends up there, including one on the AK board of fisheries or whatever its called...

we have been talking about bycatch for the last year or so, as well as the coastal situation and the Columbia where we fish a lot...

people look at him crazy when he states these exact things, like he is some consipiracy theorist, then here comes someone that verifies it, or one of you guys do...

pretty amazing, and aggrivating as well...

i cant find the article off hand, but have a couple others on it, but the Yukon, in one it showed that zero Chum were harvested by sportsman/tribe, yet 1.2 million were harvested by prosessors...

they also report a certain amount of bycatch, but not many seem to grasp that 70-80 percent of "bycatch" of salmon, actually get smooshed through the nets because they are so small and the pressure pushing on them, making it effectively like a cheese grater...

also, if a crab is missing a leg, its not counted in bycatch, as its not a "whole" crab...

the elephant in the room, is none other than Trident Seafoods, whome should be disbaned immediately, but we know that wont happen...

pay attention to the Columbia, its about to close in 5 days, because there isnt really any fish around for the most part, but the netters are coming in a week or so later...

A growing problem I have seen relates to the folks who are supposed to be studying, monitoring, and managing our resources. Mention the Chinook situation in AK and NOAA will tell you that it is all climate change; the bycatch has nothing to do with it.

Decades ago, the late Jeff Cederholm wrote and article "Who speaks for the fish?". His conclusion was that while he tried, it seemed the F&W agencies didn't. Should add that Jeff worked for DNR and my F&W coworkers felt that he should shut up and make DNR less rapacious with their tree harvest. As time has gone on and I have corresponded with colleagues I find that the political masters in an agency (and probably NGO or University) control what is said. Many of my coworkers still have the scars from the muzzles.

As a truly serious question, how can we solve (any) problems when we are prevented from examining and considering all the information?

If you could view all the information, you could come up with a solution, and if you come up with a solution, then the problem no longer exists, and if there isn't a problem, there's no money to be handed out...

The problem no longer exists once the solution is implemented. It took us the better part of 200 years to beat our resources down to where they are now; it will take more than a couple weeks to fix it.

Just a note from an old timer: Me

When I started with WDF in 1971 there was a division titled "Stream Improvement". They channelized streams and smaller rivers, taking the natural bends out of them, closing off river oxbows, and armoring banks. Downed trees were pulled out of streams using heavy equipment. I remember a lot of these things because I was urged to ticket loggers who left parts of trees in the streams. I studied the law and hardly ever took enforcement action on those few occasions. There's a lot more habitat stories that I still have in my memory, but...Two of the most reckless were conducted by WDF -channeling a stream in September? I'll shut up now (for awhile anyway). These are interesting discussions.

As I worked for a timber company and I am old also when I started they had just ended the practice. The yarder crews were required to pick up any natural woody debris out of streams. DOE tried to get salmon carcasses out of the streams even wanted WDF staff doing stream counts to throw them on the bank. Sometimes you cannot fix stupid.

DOE also does things called wasteland allocation. Essentially, how much of pollutant (and this includes nutrients) can be "safely" put in a stream. This number would divided up amongst all the wastewater discharge permit holders to ensure that the water quality number would not be exceeded. To do that, they did a study. In this instance, the river in question was managed for hatchery coho and chinook and had damn few pink and chum. So, the nutrient input (N and P) was low. I pointed out that the then emerging knowledge of salmon nutrient delivery might cause WDF to increase escapement goals. Note: I knew they wouldn't, but they "might". DOE said that the old goals and practices, which were background levels, needed to remain the same so that business and government could make the treatment investments and not have a moving target to hit. Even then, agencies worked in hardened silos.

Hey Tug remember Harry Senn? One of his first jobs was going around blowing beaver dams to insure adult salmon passage. Thing was Harry noticed a lot of stranded juveniles so he went to his boss with the info along with others and that was stopped. His favorite story was blowing a small hole in a large beaver dam and boom the entire center fell over resulting wall of water closing a county road to a state park. His thoughts were "not my finest moment".

Interesting how program minutes change. As you note, at one time the Habitat Arm would clean out streams of excess gravel, logs, etc. A few years later they would go apoplectic if Hatcheries wanted to remove gravel from intakes, traps, and racks.