Counting on Zero: Why Chinook Data from Southeast Alaska Can’t Be Trusted
July 21, 2025
By: David Mills
Some of Alaska’s most voracious salmon fisheries are located in Southeast Alaska. District 101 is a key interception fishery that operates very close to the Canadian maritime boundary. Its catches have a direct impact on salmon stocks originating in our rivers. It’s open now, intercepting Nass sockeye, and they’re still not reporting their chinook and steelhead bycatch.
Aside from a few weeks in the year, fishers in Southeast Alaska are prohibited from retaining chinook salmon 28 inches or larger. Seiners are encouraged to quickly release chinook salmon in a manner that minimizes mortality. If chinook salmon greater than 28 inches (large) are retained, the fisherman is in violation and may be issued a citation.
During the first week’s opening in District 101 (AKA District 1), Alaska’s Department of Fish and Game estimates that 24 purse seiners caught 73,250 salmon. But ‘zero’ chinook. The reason for that is simple: they are not required to report the chinook caught. Their seiners lift the full net out of the water, crushing many of the fish in the process, then dump the salmon straight into the hold. The sorting is done when the processing vessel arrives. You can see what that looks like here. Let us know whether you think any ‘released’ salmon survived.
In subsequent Alaska Department of Fish and Game advisory announcements, released on July 11 and 15, 81,100 and 183,500 salmon were caught in District 101, respectively. How many chinook were caught? Zero.
Meanwhile, just across the border in Canada, Canadian seiners and gillnetters are being offered limited openings targeting the same fish, except that on our side, fishers are required to release all coho, chinook and steelhead to the water with the least possible harm. To make this possible, brailing (a method of removing fish from a purse seine net using a scoop or dip net, to allow for gentler handling) and sorting of catch are mandatory. Additionally, all salmon seine fisheries have requirements for recording and reporting, and DFO publicly reports the number of coho, chinook, and steelhead encountered and released.
Across the Pacific Northwest, wild chinook salmon remain in big trouble. We shouldn’t be buying salmon from large-scale fisheries that aren’t selective, transparent and well-monitored, and it’s time to tell B.C. grocers it’s not right to label salmon from Southeast Alaska ‘sustainable.’
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Counting on Zero: Why Chinook Data from Southeast Alaska Can’t Be Trusted
July 21, 2025
By: David Mills
Some of Alaska’s most voracious salmon fisheries are located in Southeast Alaska. District 101 is a key interception fishery that operates very close to the Canadian maritime boundary. Its catches have a direct impact on salmon stocks originating in our rivers. It’s open now, intercepting Nass sockeye, and they’re still not reporting their chinook and steelhead bycatch.
Aside from a few weeks in the year, fishers in Southeast Alaska are prohibited from retaining chinook salmon 28 inches or larger. Seiners are encouraged to quickly release chinook salmon in a manner that minimizes mortality. If chinook salmon greater than 28 inches (large) are retained, the fisherman is in violation and may be issued a citation.
During the first week’s opening in District 101 (AKA District 1), Alaska’s Department of Fish and Game estimates that 24 purse seiners caught 73,250 salmon. But ‘zero’ chinook. The reason for that is simple: they are not required to report the chinook caught. Their seiners lift the full net out of the water, crushing many of the fish in the process, then dump the salmon straight into the hold. The sorting is done when the processing vessel arrives. You can see what that looks like here. Let us know whether you think any ‘released’ salmon survived.
In subsequent Alaska Department of Fish and Game advisory announcements, released on July 11 and 15, 81,100 and 183,500 salmon were caught in District 101, respectively. How many chinook were caught? Zero.
Meanwhile, just across the border in Canada, Canadian seiners and gillnetters are being offered limited openings targeting the same fish, except that on our side, fishers are required to release all coho, chinook and steelhead to the water with the least possible harm. To make this possible, brailing (a method of removing fish from a purse seine net using a scoop or dip net, to allow for gentler handling) and sorting of catch are mandatory. Additionally, all salmon seine fisheries have requirements for recording and reporting, and DFO publicly reports the number of coho, chinook, and steelhead encountered and released.
Across the Pacific Northwest, wild chinook salmon remain in big trouble. We shouldn’t be buying salmon from large-scale fisheries that aren’t selective, transparent and well-monitored, and it’s time to tell B.C. grocers it’s not right to label salmon from Southeast Alaska ‘sustainable.’
The kettle calling the pot black. How about acknowledging the lack of adherence to catch reporting on our side (steelhead for example)? Those Alaska seiners have been doing precisely the same thing for years. Youtube is replete with clips. I certainly don’t condone the Alaskan cover-up but it’s been a fact of life for steelhead for more than 30 years. But now, all of a sudden catch reporting is vaulted into the forefront as if it’s aground breaking discovery???? Good politics and fund raising initiative. The same investigative work on our own fisheries is nowhere near a comparable fund raiser, largely because First Nations are major players in our domestic fisheries and none of the NGOs who rely on government and private funding are prepared to jeopardize that.