Alaska's salmon collapse and the trawler fight

Returns of Yukon chinook, the salmon Alaskans call kings, eroded for decades, falling nearly 90% from 1980s levels. Then chum, a second salmon species, crashed abruptly in 2020. Subsistence fishing, which means fishing to feed a household, had fed river families for generations, and it was closed. Federal disaster relief has been allocated for the lost seasons, after the fact. On April 1, 2024, Alaska and Canada answered with an agreement suspending directed chinook fishing, meaning fishing that targets chinook, on the mainstem Yukon. The mainstem is the river's main channel. The suspension covers commercial, sport and subsistence fishing, and runs for one full salmon life cycle, seven years, through 2030. Its rebuilding target is 71,000 Canadian-origin chinook crossing the border, a bar it applies to one run at a time. A limited subsistence opening depends on what the agreement calls a 'bilateral inseason estimate' of border passage, projected from the Pilot Station sonar. That sonar is a fish-counting station the run passes on its way to the border. These are treaty fish, spawned in Canada and caught historically in both countries under the Pacific Salmon Treaty's Yukon chapter. The agreement commits Alaska to reducing marine catches and bycatches of Yukon-origin salmon 'to the extent practicable.'