Yukoners blame Alaskan fishing industry for low salmon numbers
Last Updated: Monday, December 10, 2007 | 5:01 PM CT
CBC News
Salmon watchers in the Yukon say Alaskan pollock fishermen are to blame for dwindling chinook salmon stocks, which led to a poor salmon run on the Yukon River this year.
Members of a Canadian delegation that appeared last week before the North Pacific Fishery Management Council in Anchorage, Alaska, said Alaskan commercial trawlers in the North Pacific are not living up to obligations laid out in the international Pacific Salmon Treaty.
As a result of very low salmon numbers — particularly chinook salmon — coming from the ocean to the Yukon River, the territory's commercial and recreational fisheries were cancelled this summer.
"We had no commercial, domestic or recreational fisheries. The aboriginal fishery was allowed to go ahead, but even it only caught about 60 per cent or 70 per cent of what it normally takes," Gerry Couture, a Dawson City-based fisherman and member of the Yukon River Panel, told CBC News on Monday.
"So it was bad, and it was bad because, in part, enough fish didn't enter the river and, in part, our Alaskan colleagues made a mistake in management."
Pollock trawlers often catch thousands of chinook salmon as bycatch in their nets. Fishery biologists estimated that last year, the Alaskans' total bycatch included more than 100,000 chinook — about 26,000 of them bound for the Yukon River.
"Bycatches of salmon, especially chinook salmon, have increased terribly in the last five years in the pollock fishery out in the ocean," Couture said.
"We had a very poor run to start with," he added. "If you take a good chunk of those 26,000 fish and take it off, too, it leaves you with a really poor run, and it leaves managers trying to manage with a good chunk of the run being creamed off the top."
Couture, who led the Canadian delegation to Anchorage, said the Alaskan pollock industry is bound to reduce trawler bycatches under the Pacific Salmon Treaty, which was first signed in 1985 by Canada and the U.S.
The treaty states in part that parties in both countries must "maintain efforts to increase the in-river run of Yukon River origin salmon by reducing marine catches and by-catches of Yukon River salmon."
While the industry has tried dozens of techniques to avoid catching salmon, Couture said trawlers seem to take more every year.
"This is not a fight. This is an insistence that they live up to their obligation," he said.
"They're conscious of the obligation; they obviously seemed sympathetic. Their difficulty is big, big money on one side, and small people on the other, despite a legal obligation."
Alaskan fishery regulators said they are considering imposing stricter rules for pollock trawler fleets. However, pollock fishermen say any more restrictions would shut down their industry.
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Topic: Wonder where the Chinook went?? (Read 1425 times)