Here’s how the story begins:

Katie Kangas’ salmon memories live in her body. They are the ache of the knife in her hand after hours of cutting fish in summertime. The heft of a wooden pole loaded with scored fillets. The smell of cottonwood smoldering in her corrugated metal smokehouse. 

Kangas is a grandmother now. Her ancestors, Koyukon Athabascans, harvested fish for thousands of years on this stretch of the Yukon River, 200 miles west of Fairbanks, Alaska, by small plane.

Here, in the village of Ruby, children have always learned how to handle fish by watching and repeating. Teaching them kept elders vital. To her children and grandchildren, Kangas passed on bits of language and details about the natural world, like the way the cottonwood trees tell you the chinook salmon are coming by letting their downy seeds float on the wind. Knowing how to catch, cut, dry, smoke and can salmon is how a person knows they are from here. The chew of a half-dry salmon morsel, oil and phenols lingering, tastes like this place. Or at least this is how it was. 

Chinook are better known in Alaska as king salmon. The massive, fat-rich fish that people in this predominantly Indigenous village always relied on to fill their freezers and caches for winter have dwindled alarmingly over the past two decades. Scientists link the decline to water temperature increases related to human-caused climate change, and there are also concerns about salmon incidentally caught in the ocean by large operations trawling for bottom fish. In the late 1990s, chinook numbers became so paltry that managers began restricting fishing, including subsistence — fishing by locals for their food supplies. A major crash in 2008 nearly curtailed the commercial fishery, and it never recovered. Managers closed the river to almost all fishing in 2021. Still, there has been little improvement. 

People adapted. Ruby, a village of 150 that’s only accessible by boat or plane, kept up the rhythm of summer processing, working with smaller, leaner chum salmon, which they had previously caught and dried mostly to feed their sled dogs. But those chum runs, once relatively reliable pulses in the spring and fall, began failing in 2020, taking scientists and residents by surprise. In response, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game limited and then closed both the Yukon chinook and chum fisheries. For the last few summers, for maybe the first time in more than 10,000 years, there was almost no fishing for either species allowed on the Yukon River at all. Without fishing, the practice of going to fish camp with family, an essential Alaska Native tradition that brings relatives from urban centers to the villages and enables the passage of knowledge about culture and the land from one generation to the next, couldn’t happen. Its absence left a hollowed-out, idle anxiety, Kangas said.  

“What am I going to do?” she asked in July, looking out her kitchen window toward the river. “There’s a big empty river out there.”

Read the rest.

The post For High Country News: On the Yukon a 10,000-year tradition of fish camp, but now, no fish appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

“One year’s poor return doesn’t tend to really send up red flags, but year after year after year, then you start to get concerned as a manager,” said Matt Miller, Alaska Department of Fish and Game fisheries management coordinator for Cook Inlet.

This has not been a great fishing year overall. Commercial harvests for all five species of Alaska salmon statewide were down, according to the McKinley Research Group, which called the across-the-board poor harvest “atypical.” The Cook Inlet region saw the largest coho decline, at 84% below the harvest the year before, which was also poor. The inlet also saw a similarly significant decline in pink salmon harvest, the research group reported.

Last year, according to Fish and Game salmon landings data, the commercial harvest of coho in Cook Inlet was the smallest — just over 80,000 fish — since the department started keeping track in 1985, a highly abundant year when fishermen brought in 670,000 fish.

Read the rest.

The post For ADN: Concern grows among fishermen and scientists about low silver salmon returns in Cook Inlet appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

Thoerner is one of just a handful of commercial fishermen still setting nets in the northernmost part of Cook Inlet. His grandparents David and Jean Ring started fishing there more than 70 years ago. He’s 42 and was raised by his grandparents. Hearing their stories and fishing his whole life made him a witness to major changes in the fishery and the city’s relationship to salmon. He hopes Melina, who is 17, will take over from him, the fourth generation of his family to fish commercially in the shadow of the city.

“That’s if there’s still fish,” he said as he trained his eyes on the line of white corks in the water, waiting for a splash.

“This is the worst year I’ve ever had.”

Read on.

The post For ADN: Setting nets for 70 years in Anchorage’s shadow, a family witnessed major shifts in Cook Inlet salmon appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

“There were so many in this one fish, I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking at,” she said. “I put salt on the fillet and they just started coming out everywhere. This was enough where I actually disposed of it.”

Lately, everybody’s got a gross-out story — wormy restaurant ceviche, live worms in grocery store fillets, backyard barbecues derailed by too many cooked worms coming off the grill. White “sushi worms” — in this case, species of nematodes in the family Anisakidae — are part of life in a place where filling freezers with fish is a cultural, economic and nutritional mainstay. But, in the last few years, fishermen, fish sellers, diners, chefs, scientists and home cooks say they are seeing more worms than they’re used to. It turns out, according to a couple of recent studies done by University of Washington researchers, their observations are right on.

Worms are on the rise. Anisakis worms in all saltwater fish and some cephalopods like squid increased 283-fold from 1978 to 2015, according to a 2020 study analyzing hundreds of papers.

“What we saw was an increase from an average of less than one worm per 100 fish — to more than one worm in every fish,” said Chelsea Wood, the Seattle-based parasite ecologist who oversaw the study.

Read on.

The post For ADN: Studies show there are likely more ‘sushi worms’ in Alaska salmon and other fish than there used to be appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

When you see “wild salmon” on a menu or sign at your local fish counter, it usually means the fish were caught in Alaska. 

Only about a quarter of the salmon Americans eat is wild. Of that portion, at least 80 percent comes from Alaskan waters in any given year, with the rest coming from Canada, the Pacific Northwest and California.

The majority of salmon sold in the U.S. is Atlantic salmon, which means they were raised around the globe in fish farming operations that confine the stock in underwater pens where they’re raised on manufactured feed for uniform flavor, color and nutritional value. You can also sometimes find farmed king and coho salmon as well. 

While salmon used to return to spawn in their natal streams and lakes across America and the world, dams, pollution and overfishing have decimated their populations over the last few centuries. Commercial and recreational fishing of wild Atlantic salmon ceased in 1948 and is still prohibited in the United States. The only wild Atlantic salmon that remain live in a few rivers in Maine and are listed as endangered species. 

Read more

Listen to the Edible Communities podcast on wild salmon.

The post For Edible Communities: Alaska Runs on Salmon appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

This was only for a day trip, to Privat’s cabin in Peterson Bay for a family dinner.Privat and Neaton have been packing up boats since they were old enough to walk, but, lately, everything’s a touch harder.

For one thing, Privat is eight months pregnant. Bending down to schlep boxes isn’t easy, though she schlepped a couple anyway. Neaton breezed down the ramp a little later than she said she’d be, with her 1-year-old daughter Ingrid on her back. Neaton also balanced a basket containing, among other things, a vase full of peonies and a candied orange upside-down cake. Falcon, a pint-sized, fox-faced dog, hopped aboard. Situated, they set off into the bay.

Last month, the sisters — technically Privat and a basket of Dungeness crab — appeared on the cover of Bon Appétit magazine, which featured recipes from their new cookbook, “The Salmon Sisters: Harvest and Heritage.” They’ve been mentioned or profiled in dozens of national publications — including The New York Times and magazines Outside and Vogue. But the Bon Appétit cover is the highest-profile placement for both them and Alaska cuisine, which tends to be ignored by the Outside food world. It’s a sign of their growing influence, though they tend to downplay it.

“Salmon Sisters itself is just a way that people can connect to salmon in our state and Alaska in general, its wild abundance,” Neaton said. “Salmon Sisters can be a tiny part of that, it just sticks in your mind a bit.”

The sisters are accustomed to hard work — they grew up commercial fishing and living on an off-grid homestead in the Aleutians — but as they are moving into motherhood, managing a growing business and carrying the complicated story of Alaska’s environment, commercial fishing industry and food culture to a wider world, work has never been trickier. The two of them, now in their early 30s, are thinking hard about the future of their business and about balancing it with time spent on the ocean, a source of solace and inspiration.

Read the rest.

The post For ADN: As their visibility and families grow, Alaska’s Salmon Sisters hold fast to fishing life appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

But in recent weeks, this ancient rhythm of the Pacific Northwest was being negotiated not just at sea but also in a federal courtroom in downtown Seattle, where on May 2 a district court judge issued an order effectively shutting down Alaska’s biggest king salmon fishery, one of the largest remaining in the world.

To the Wild Fish Conservancy, the Washington State-based environmental group that filed the lawsuit, the fates of the two totemic animals are intimately bound. The orcas need the salmon to eat, and if we stop fishing them, the conservancy argues, we save the whales.

But the State of Alaska, the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Alaska Trollers Association — all defendants in the suit — argued that shutting down the fishery would have little impact on either, and won a last-minute reprieve that allowed Alaska fishermen to put their lines in the water when the season began on July 1. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco will decide what happens next.

Regardless of the lawsuit’s outcome, though, there is broad agreement that the king salmon, also known as Chinook, are in crisis. After decades of environmental pressures like dams and pollution, the king populations are at historic lows, and scientists are struggling to understand the escalating effects of climate change. The fish are also smaller than they have ever been. Gone are the taxidermied 70-pounders that ended up on the walls of fisherman’s bars.

Some argue that the only way to save the species is to stop catching and eating them at all — if even that would be enough.

Read on.

The post For NYT (A-1!): Starving Orcas and the Fate of Alaska’s Disappearing King Salmon appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

The story begins like this:

“Coffee Point, Alaska—Anna Hoover and I ease up and down in limestone-colored water on a warm, windless afternoon in early July, our backs to the mouth of the Egegik River. She’s distracted, perched in the captain’s seat of her 32-foot drift boat. She glances at her phone, checking the time. The state manages fishing on a tight schedule here, opening the waters to fishermen and then closing them every few hours to let some salmon travel to their spawning grounds. We’ve got five minutes until we unspool our nets.

We sit 300 miles west of Anchorage in Bristol Bay, home to the largest, healthiest red salmon run on earth, where most wild-grown grocery-store fillets caught in the United States come from. Hoover’s parents and grandparents fished here, and she has been hauling reds from this fertile finger of saltwater for most of her 34 years.

This is her first summer as the captain of her own boat. She never doubted the decision to buy it. She’s always seen herself here, her hair pulled back in a bandanna, rubber coveralls flecked with fish scales, eyes gritty from sleep deprivation, adrenaline rising and falling with the tides that carry salmon into the nets.

“We joke how there are two kinds of people—the ones who can’t stand it out here and the ones who can’t live without it,” she says. “Fishing is in my blood.”

Still, no matter how many years you fish, she says, you always get a crackle of anxiety as you slip your nets into the water. So much can go wrong—weather, gear tangling, mechanical problems, bad timing, the catastrophe of the fish failing to show up. The risk, though, is part of the draw. “Fishermen,” she tells me, “have always been gamblers.”

For her generation of fishermen, investing here is more of a gamble than ever. Twin threats hang over this place where many of America’s salmon dinners come from: a rapidly warming climate, which has already scrambled the pattern of the seasons across vast swaths of Alaska, and Pebble Mine, a proposed open pit mine at the bay’s headwaters, which has been given new life by Donald Trump’s administration. Many who live and fish here, including Hoover, worry that once the mine is built, pollution is inevitable and that together these two forces could destroy this rare, pristine ecosystem, threatening salmon, communities, and whole ways of life.

“I think of generations. So many people in the fishery have learned it from their families and want to pass it on,” Hoover says. “Around the world, people have disrespected salmon populations and their environments to the point where they are extinct or they are farmed. This place doesn’t have that—yet.”

Hoover maneuvers us into position. Two crewmen stand ready on the deck. One is a high school English teacher with a toddler at home, the other a high school student—a good kid who never gets tired. There isn’t room to mess this up. They have to make money this summer.

At 4:45 precisely, Hoover motors forward. Her net sails into the sea.”

Read the rest here.

The post For The Nation: Twin threats hang over Bristol Bay appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

Here’s how it starts:

Read the rest here.

The post For NYT: A postcard from Kenai’s dipnet beach, America’s most democratic fishery appeared first on Julia O'Malley.