Salmon Archives - Saving Seafood

Promising signs for 2026 after California closes commercial salmon season for the year

April 29, 2025 — For the third consecutive year, commercial salmon fishing off the California coast will be prohibited, although there will be a limited opportunity for recreational anglers for the first time since 2022. However, officials say data indicates the industry could see a return in 2026.

Angela Forristall, salmon staff officer with the Pacific Fishery Management Council, said the decision to recommend closing the state’s commercial salmon fisheries for the year followed a challenging debate among the council and stakeholders from both the recreational and commercial fishing industries.

Forristall shared that there were several versions of the recommendation that did open commercial fishing briefly, but the data they’re seeing from populations in the Klamath and Sacramento rivers says it’s potentially too soon for major operations.

Read the full story at KRCR

Federal subsistence king salmon fishery closes this season on Stikine River

April 28, 2025 — The Wrangell Ranger District will close the federal subsistence Chinook or king salmon fishery in the Stikine River between May 15 and June 30. It’s the ninth year in a row that the fishery has been closed.

According to a press release from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the preseason forecast for king salmon in the Stikine is low, at 10,000 large kings – salmon greater than 28 inches in length.

Read the full story at KSTK

Alaska’s pollock industry looks to get to the bottom of a rising criticism

April 23, 2025 — Alaska pollock is one of the world’s most valuable fisheries, due to the enormous annual harvest volume and the versatility of the white, mild-flavored fish, federal economists say.

Fairly or unfairly, the pollock fishery’s prodigious size makes it an easy target on controversial issues such as salmon bycatch.

Lately, another criticism has taken on a higher profile – the charge that the pollock industry’s pelagic nets aren’t really “midwater” gear, but rather touch bottom much of the time, damaging seafloor habitat and mangling king and Tanner crab. These crab fisheries have seen total closures in recent years due to stock declines primarily attributed to changes in the marine environment.

To address the bottom contact issue, the pollock industry is embarking on an ambitious project to gain a better understanding of how its trawl gear works in the water and, possibly, to develop improved designs.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

CALIFORNIA: ‘Hope dies hard’: Fishing industry reacts to CA salmon season closure

April 21, 2025 — This week, the Pacific Fishery Management Council adopted recommendations for ocean salmon fishing along the West Coast; for an unprecedented third year in a row, the council has recommended closing commercial fishing off the California coast and allowing only limited commercial fishing in Oregon and Washington.

Commercial fishermen and fishing organizations largely affirmed the need to suspend salmon fishing, but noted that three years without a season has been devastating to fishermen and coastal communities that rely on salmon fishing.

Commercial salmon fisherman and Humboldt Bay Harbor, Recreation and Conservation District Commissioner Aaron Newman said that he had been optimistic after seeing indications that “a lot of healthy jacks” were coming out of the Sacramento region as the Pacific Fishery Management Council planned its recommendation to the National Marine Fisheries Service. But said that analysis of recent trendlines, which take into account the very grim indicator of the past two years, might have scuttled the opportunity for a season.

“Nobody wants to fish on a failing fishery,” Newman said, “but it really looked like it was rebounding.”

Impact on fishermen

“Coastal towns, river communities and thousands of salmon fishery employees depend on the salmon season to generate income and stay afloat — and now, for the third year in a row, they’ve been dealt another devastating impact with an unprecedented closure of the 2025 salmon season,” read a statement issued by U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman (D-San Raphael). “The last two years of closures have devastated California’s coastal economies — and facing a third consecutive closure marks an unprecedented low point.”

Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations Executive Director Lisa Damrosch lamented a lack of a safety net.

“We don’t have access to the same resources that other food producers have,” she said, noting that commercial fishermen don’t have access to programs like those provided by the USDA. “We have had disasters declared in the past; 2023 and 2024 were both declared disasters, but that’s a very long and onerous process. There still have been no pay-outs to the fishermen from 2023 … There are other programs for agriculture such as subsidies if there is a bad season or subsidies for low prices or low-interest loans or grants; we don’t have any of that to help our fishermen, food producers, when there’s a disaster or an issue.”

Read the full story at the Times-Standard

California’s commercial salmon fishery to remain closed for a third consecutive year

April 17, 2025 — The U.S. state of California’s commercial salmon fishery will remain closed for a third year in a row due mostly to low abundance fall Chinook runs in both the Klamath River and Sacramento River.

“A third year without fishing is a serious blow to California’s commercial salmon fleet,” Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Association President George Bradshaw said in a statement. “We were optimistic about a return to salmon fishing for California’s fleet, but the reality is the low abundance and return estimates will not provide the economic impact we need. The risk of fishing this depleted population is simply not worth the reward.”

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

California salmon season shuts down for third year in a row

April 17, 2025 — California’s salmon fishery will be closed to commercial fishermen for an unprecedented third year in a row, under a vote Tuesday by fishery managers.

What happened: After an abysmal forecast for this season’s salmon numbers, the Pacific Fishery Management Council approved a proposal Tuesday that would bar commercial fishermen from harvesting salmon due to even lower populations than in 2023 and 2024.

Though the past two seasons have also seen a closure for recreational fishing, this year’s proposal allows a few dayslong windows for sport and recreational anglers under a statewide harvest quota based on a recommendation from NOAA Fisheries.

Read the full story at E&E News

ALASKA: Alaska Board of Fisheries rejects hatchery production cuts

February 12, 2025 — A proposal to slash hatchery production of pink and chum salmon in Southeast Alaska was rejected by the Alaska Board of Fisheries over the weekend.

The measure, known as Proposal 156, aimed to cut hatchery egg takes by 25 percent but failed to gain majority support from the seven-member board, Intrafish reported.

The proposal sparked a heated debate, with commercial fishermen, sport fishing interests, and aquaculture advocates warning of the economic fallout. The Sitka Sound Science Center, which runs Alaska’s oldest salmon hatchery, was among those opposing the measure, citing its role in training and education.

Proponents of the reduction argued that hatchery-raised salmon creates too much competition in the ocean for food resources, potentially harming wild king salmon populations. With ongoing king salmon closures and growing user conflicts, some groups pushed for lower hatchery production as a precaution.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

US government confirms fishery disasters took place in California salmon runs

January 6, 2025 — The U.S. Department of Commerce has determined that fishery disasters affected multiple California salmon runs, including the 2024 Sacramento River fall Chinook salmon fishery and the 2024 Klamath River fall Chinook salmon fishery.

The official determinations open up those fisheries to federal financial relief, which will be allocated to the state and Tribal governments to distribute to affected fishers and businesses.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Advocacy groups call on Alaska to eliminate pollock trawling in Prince William Sound

December 10, 2024 — Salmon industry advocacy group SalmonState is calling on the Alaska State Board of Fisheries to limit or eliminate the Prince William Sound pollock pelagic trawl fishery – the only such fishery managed by the state.

The state board will consider four separate proposals that would either add further restrictions on the state-managed pollock fishery or eliminate it entirely at its annual meeting in Cordova, Alaska, taking place 10 to 16 December.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Small fish size linked to poorer runs of chinook in Alaska’s biggest rivers

December 9, 2024 — The shrinking size of Alaska salmon, a decades-long trend linked in part to warming conditions in the ocean, is hampering the ability of chinook in Alaska’s two biggest rivers to produce new generations needed to maintain healthy populations, a new study shows.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks-led study shows how the body conditions of chinook salmon, also known as king salmon, combined with extreme heat and cold in the ocean and freshwater environments, have converged in the Yukon and Kuskokwim river systems to depress what is termed “productivity” — the successful reproduction that results in adult spawners returning to the same area.

The study examines 26 different populations of chinook in those two river systems in areas from Western Alaska to the Yukon River uplands in Canada. Chinook runs in those rivers have faltered in recent years, and the situation has been so dire on the Canadian part of the Yukon that U.S. and Canadian officials earlier this year suspended all harvests of Canadian-origin chinook for seven years.

The analysis of multiple factors and conditions revealed that fish size was a major factor that determined productivity, defined as adult salmon returning to spawning grounds successfully producing a next generation of adults to come back to the same spawning area.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News