AK - Red Salmon Numbers Exploding In Russian River, Thanks To Warming

[hatrack]

RUSSIAN RIVER -- The red salmon came again this June in a gray-backed wave of life that at times nearly obscured the rocky, rubble bottom of this stream. No one could have imagined such a bounty nearly 40 years ago when the groundwork was being laid for the revitalization of the popular Kenai Peninsula fishery. The river then supported a healthy salmon fishery, but it was nothing compared to what it is today.

Red salmon used to return each summer by the thousands or tens of thousands. Now, between the early run just finishing and the late run just beginning, they come by the hundreds of thousands.

EDIT

James Anderson at the University of Washington School of Fisheries and others have theorized much of this has to do with global warming or what oceanographers have called a "regime shift" in the North Pacific Ocean. "Two major climate regimes have been identified,'' Anderson has observed. "One associated with cool and wet climate in the Pacific Northwest and another associated with warm and dry Pacific Northwest weather. The warm/dry regime favors stronger ... stocks of many Alaskan fish.''

Warmer, drier weather for the Pacific Northwest, associated with warmer, wetter weather for Southcentral Alaska -- sort of a northward shift of the Seattle climate -- is what some global warming models forecast. And few debate that Alaska's climate has warmed in the past two decades, though there is much debate as to what caused the warming and whether it is long term or short term. Whatever the case, Anderson and others have argued the change significantly altered the environment of the North Pacific in the late 1970s. "The pattern,'' he wrote, "was particularly strong with Bristol Bay sockeye (salmon), which jumped from catches on the order of 1 million fish in the early '70s to a record catch of 44 million sockeye in 1995.''

EDIT

http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/7947557p-7841020c.html

[Blue_In_AK]

1. You won't get too many complaints

from the Kenai Peninsula fishermen, that's for sure. I read this morning that there is an increased chum run in the Yukon-Kuskokwim area, as well.

[Mikimouse]

2. Thank God for the ncreased Chum run...especially after the

fish drought in '98 and 2000.

[Blue_In_AK]

3. I'd link you to the article in the Anchorage Daily News

but I think you need a subscription. According to the paper, it's the best run in 20 years, 3 million EXTRA summer chums may pour into the Yukon by season's end, three times the average run. Subsistence fishermen on the lower river landed a season-full of fish in a matter of minutes - more than 200 in some cases - when the bulk of the rush came in last month at Emmonak. But the surplus is annoying the commercial fishermen who are finding it harder to separate out the kings, which is what they're after.

In any event, this is great news for the Natives of Western Alaska.