Report: Yukon River Salmon Mysteriously Missing

The Anchorage Daily News completed a three-part series today trying to solve a disturbing trend regarding Yukon River’s salmon. Here’s writer Zachariah Hughes on the mystery (and here are parts one and two of the series (though they’re behind a paywall):

The salmon situation this year on the Yukon is bad. Kings have been in decline for years, here and almost everywhere else in the state. This summer was the fourth lowest count of kings in the Yukon since 1995.

This year, Western Alaska river systems that usually see dependably high volumes of chum salmon — the Kuskokwim, the Yukon and drainages feeding Norton and Kotzebue sounds — have all been near total busts. Most of those regions have enough sockeye or pink salmon that are performing well enough so people can subsistence fish for their household needs. But not the Yukon, where commercial and subsistence harvests are built atop of waning king stocks and the mysteriously absent chum.

For both summer and fall chum, around one-tenth of the normal numbers of fish were tallied.

One of the most unsettling aspects of this year’s chum collapse, according to people in Emmonak, is the absence of a definitive explanation.