Agrees that ‘status quo’ not enough

In Tuesday’s edition, Steve Totten wrote a letter to the editor stating that, in his opinion, the Northern District sport fisheries would be much better served if the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADFG) would begin an expanded stocking program rather than spending major dollars researching why salmon runs, kings in particular, have been poor the last several years. I was planning to address related points in this week’s column, so this letter is timely.

Totten is expressing the sentiments of a lot of Valley anglers. Folks are tired of studies and want to see some positive action from ADFG resulting in more fish in our Valley river systems. Actually, the department is in the process of doing both tasks — researching the causes for our poor salmon runs and expanding the king salmon stocking program in the Northern District.

As I mentioned in previous columns, the Legislature this past session allocated $7 million specifically to the Northern District for research and salmon population enhancement. The governor signed off on approving these funds. To address Totten’s comments, $2 million is earmarked specifically to expand the king salmon stocking programs for the Willow Creek and Eklutna Tailrace sports fisheries.

Why only these locations? First, both are easily accessible by road, so the greatest number of anglers can be accommodated by enhancing these runs. Second, the Eklutna location is already a totally hatchery-supported run and the Willow system has an established king salmon enhancement program with an egg-take site currently in place. Adding additional hatchery fish to these two locations will not significantly alter the genetics of existing populations of wild kings.

Third, and probably the biggest reason, is cost. Hatchery fish are expensive to produce. The $2 million available is capital budget funding, available over a five-year period. The cost, in round numbers, to expand king salmon stocking to its full potential at these two sites is about $500,000 per year. If future funding can be secured from the Legislature, the stocking programs could be expanded, but that situation is an unknown.

OK, so why not use some of the other $5 million for stocking? If all the department did was stock fish with no regard to why the wild stocks were faltering, our fisheries would shortly end up being totally hatchery supported, and then only as long as the hatchery fish remained healthy. If the problem is ocean based, it is affecting the wild king stocks and the hatchery fish as well, Without knowing what is causing reduced returns with the various fisheries, all the fish stocks — hatchery or wild — are in jeopardy for their long-term survival.

For those who still think the best and only answer is stocking, here are a couple more points to consider. First, king salmon are the longest-lived of the five Pacific salmon species. One generation can live as long as eight to nine years. Establishing a proven stocking program over several generations with good, measureable returns of hatchery fish can, literally, take decades to happen.

The second point is the one that keeps causing me the most concern. Where do the additional eggs for all these enhanced stocking programs come from if the available returning adults are limited in number now? A prudent person would not take every egg from a returning population of fish and run the risk of a hatchery failure, potentially resulting in the loss of an entire brood year of those fish. So, where do the eggs come from?

A carefully developed program over years of enhancement of a salmon population could eventually result in having all the eggs needed to expand a program to its full potential while also assuring an adequate population of wild-spawning fish as well. At some point, if the genetics of this population were compatible with surrounding area needs, this population might also serve as an enhancement source to expand stocking into neighboring systems as well.

So, the take-home thoughts here should be that stocking is only one tool the managers have to expand fish populations back to a “healthy” condition. As Totten states, “Bringing our fish resources back to ‘status quo’ is not good enough.” I agree completely. However, to do that, we need to know all the factors that caused the decline to begin with. For those identified things, one of which will be sport fishing harvest, restrictions on anglers will continue to be a necessary evil.

Howard Delo is a retired fisheries biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. You can leave him a message by emailing sports@frontiersman.com.