Public Appeal to Save Alaska’s Ocean Pastures and Restore America’s Seafood Future
Fellow Alaskans and Americans,
Our nation faces a silent crisis on its last frontier—one that threatens not only the health of our oceans but also the livelihoods of tens of thousands of Americans and the future of our seafood industry. The oceans of Alaska, which produce more than 60% of the nation’s seafood, are in dire straits. The collapse of its ocean pastures—the foundation of the marine food web—has led to a devastating decline in marine life and fisheries catch.
Last fall NOAA reported another, repeating, annual $1.8 billion loss in the Alaska catch, which NOAA conservatively translates into a staggering $4.3 billion blow to the U.S. seafood economy. They add that the crisis has also cost the nation 38,000 jobs. Together these are a clear warning sign of deeper industry, economic, and ecological collapse.
The root cause? It’s not a subject of debate!
It is the collapse of primary ocean productivity. Plankton, the microscopic plants that form the base of the marine food chain, are vanishing. These ocean pastures are the lifeblood of Alaska’s fisheries, and America’s fisheries, supporting everything from salmon to crab to the iconic Alaskan pollock. Without healthy ocean plankton pastures, there can be no healthy fish and marine life populations—and without fish and marine life, there can be no seafood industry.
This collapse of the ocean plankton pastures has been the subject of 50 years of ocean science research and the result of that research is that we have proven we have the means to immediately replenish and restore those pastures and their fish to historic levels of health and abundance.
This Crisis Extends Beyond Alaska
While Alaska’s ocean emergency is the most urgent, it is not an isolated problem. Across the United States, our oceans have been and are suffering from similar collapses in productivity, with devastating consequences for fisheries, coastal communities, and our national economy.
Atlantic Coast: Twenty-five years ago, the collapse of ocean pastures led to the decline of Atlantic Salmon, pushing this iconic species onto the endangered species list. Once a thriving commercial fishery, the Atlantic Salmon diminised, starving at sea on degraded ocean pastures, leaving New England’s fishing communities struggling and its ecosystems in chaos.
Pacific Coast: Los Angeles, whose flag proudly features a tuna fish, lost its massive tuna fishing industry in the 1950s due to the collapse of ocean pastures. The disappearance of this vital ocean ecosystems not only ended an era of prosperity, this also served as an early warning sign of the broader crisis we face today.
These examples underscore a troubling truth: the collapse of ocean pastures is a nationwide emergency. What is happening in Alaska today will soon become the reality for other regions if we continue to fail to act. The time to restore America’s oceans is now.
Despite the alarming evidence of economic and ecological collapse, no government agency has deigned to take decisive action to restore these vital ocean pastures. The time for academic fisheries, “fiddling while Rome burns”, merely observing, silence, and inaction, is over. We are out of time and need bold leadership and immediate emergency intervention to reverse this crisis.
What Must Be Done:
Declare a National Emergency: The collapse of Alaska’s ocean pastures is not just an Alaskan problem—it is an American crisis. We call on the President and federal leaders to declare a national ocean and fisheries emergency and to immediately mobilize resources and proven methods to mitigate this catastrophe. We call on the people of Alaska to demand this action now!
Revise Federal Priorities to Address the Crisis: In other emergencies, such as oil spills, hurricanes, or massive forest fires, the federal government immediately revises priorities across multiple agencies to muster teams and resources to mitigate the damage. This is standard practice—and it’s exactly what’s needed now. NOAA’s Alaska vessel fleet and laboratories must be redirected to begin ocean restoration efforts immediately. These resources, already in place, can be deployed to restore the natural mineral dust that plankton need to thrive, jumpstarting the recovery of Alaska’s ocean pastures.
Support Proven Solutions: OPR Alaska, a company dedicated to ocean restoration, has spent years developing and advocating for methods to restore ocean productivity. Our work has shown that replenishing vital minerals can revive plankton pastures and, in turn, restore fish populations. This is not theoretical—it is proven science. Federal action to deploy this work now is critical.
Protect Jobs and Communities: The collapse of Alaska’s fisheries is not just an environmental issue—it is an economic and social crisis. By restoring ocean pastures, we can restore and save jobs, protect coastal communities, and ensure that America’s seafood industry remains a global leader. The expected results of this emergency action are clear: the immediate return of more than 38,000 seafood industry jobs and the restoration of more than $4 billion in economic prosperity to America.
Why This Matters:
– For Our Economy: The seafood industry is a cornerstone of America’s economy, providing jobs, feeding families, and supporting countless businesses. Alaska’s fisheries alone contribute billions of dollars annually. Without action, the real time catastrophic losses will only grow.
– For Our Food Security: Seafood is a vital source of protein for millions of Americans. The collapse of Alaska’s fisheries threatens our nation’s food security and could lead to higher prices and shortages.
– For Our Environment: Healthy oceans are essential to the health of our planet. Restoring ocean pastures will not only revive fish populations but also help combat climate change by increasing the ocean’s ability to repurpose carbon dioxide into fish!
We Cannot Wait:
The collapse of Alaska’s ocean pastures is a crisis that demands immediate action. Just as the federal government responds swiftly to oil spills and forest fires, hurricanes it must now act with urgency to address this ocean and fisheries emergency. We call on every American to join us in urging our leaders to take decisive steps to restore these vital ecosystems.
Contact your representatives, share this message, and demand that the federal government prioritize ocean restoration. Together, we can save Alaska’s oceans, protect our seafood industry, and secure a sustainable future for generations to come.
The time to act is now. Our oceans, our jobs, and our future depend on it.
If you are inclned to action
You may reserved seats on our ships voyage of recovery. Sign aboard, lend a hand and bend your back and it’ll be as if you have dipped yourself in magic waters.
The one constant through all the years, has been the ocean.
Throughout the ages the land has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again.
But the ocean has marked the time.
It’s a part of our past and our future and reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again. It’s time to for us to take action and make it that way.
Alaska scientists report just 15% of Chum survived their 5 years at sea to return home to spawn
Chum salmon have been experiencing a steady collapse for many years
But a few years ago, in 2017, there was a miraculous recovery of these iconic Alaska salmon.
What’s going on with salmon? Are they doomed, or might they be saved?
Read on for an incredible story of hope.
The end of the 2020 season count of Chum Salmon in the upper Yukon River is just now completed, and the results are giving scientists a terrible sinking feeling. But it wasn’t just the chum heading to Canada that were in such a desperate situation.
Less than 3% of the usual catch of Chum Salmon were caught in the lower Yukon River this year, the worst in history.
Commercial fishermen in the lower Yukon harvested just 13,968 chums in the summer fishery, which was 97% less than the five-year average, which saw 449,000 fish caught every year.
Managers had predicted a rather average return of about 1.9 million summer chum. That would have allowed a harvestable surplus of about 1.1 million fish, according to ADFG. So the total river catch is more like 1% of what was expected.
The latest estimates aren’t just bad, they’re “absolutely dismal,” says Stephanie Quinn-Davidson, director of the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission in Alaska.
Dozens of baby Chum Salmon are in this little girl’s plastic bag and on their way downriver to the sea.
Every year, scientists count fish as they swim up the Yukon River past Eagle, Alaska, near the Canadian border, as they are nearing their end-of-life spawning journey. Five years ago, they had been swept out to sea in the spring floods as tiny minnows.
Those minnows/smolts, numbering in the hundreds of millions, made their way south to the vast ocean pastures of the Gulf of Alaska where they should have spent the last five years being nourished, thriving, and surviving on pastures filled with plankton, their principal food.
Yukon Chum Salmon run is the lowest in history. The 2017 peak is a result of those baby salmon being treated to a feast when they arrived on their ocean pasture in 2012.
This year, the upper Yukon River total chum count is a mere 23,828 fish, so none were allowed to be caught. This is far below, less than 25%, of the minimum number of fish that scientists and management groups want to see. The ‘spawning escapement goal,’ the minimum number of returning fish needed to sustain the salmon requires at least healthy 100,000 adults.
This year, both the commercial and native fisheries in both Alaska and Canada have been closed. Many families along the Yukon River will go hungry this winter.
In the last 10 years, chum salmon have been faring better than the King, or Chinook, salmon that they share the river with. But not this year. The tiny return of Chum is said to come as a surprise to many scientists who were not expecting this year’s chum salmon numbers to be at such a catastrophic low. The same disaster scenario is true for the Chinook Salmon, again numbers so low no fishing was allowed.
The Eagle sonar counting station at Eagle, Alaska, offers an annual set of data for scientists to review. The station, 1200 miles from the ocean, has been counting salmon for 50 years. This year’s numbers for chum are ‘dismal’ says one researcher (Alaska Department of Fish and Game). Chum populations are known to fluctuate and even have big crashes, but this year’s numbers in the Yukon are the lowest in all of history. With so few spawning adults, future years’ returns will become even more dismal.
But what about that big run of Yukon Chum Salmon shown in the charted data for 2017?
With this year being the lowest number of Chum Salmon in history and just a few years ago, 2017, showing the largest number in history what could be the reason. Many fisheries managers and scientists are eager to put forth wild ideas that transfer blame to some unknowable reason or some knowable villains responsible.
At the top of this churlish list of ‘the usual suspects’ lies the fish hatcheries on both sides of the Pacific. Fish bureaucrats looking to shift the blame suggest the hatcheries are responsible for sending too many hatchery grown fish out to sea where they compete with the ‘pure natural’ stocks. But hatchery releases are nothing new, they have been taking place for decades, and there are no patterns of exceptional numbers to support them as responsible for the salmon decline. It is plain to see something much more fundamental is the blame.
Plankton blooms as seen from space by NASA may appear as art but they also show the way to reduce CO2 and global warming. Click to read more
The second ‘usual suspect’ is an ill-defined but ever-present ‘bogey man’ called climate change. It is true that the oceans are warming, including the North Pacific, but the warming is being seen over the course of many decades not a few years. Even if the decline of Chum might be correlated to such warming, the warming hypothesis does not offer a causative mechanism.
There are many other species of salmon and marine fish that share the Gulf of Alaska’s ocean pastures. All are in decline in both numbers and individual fish size. Big salmon like Chum and Kings have been shrinking by as much as 1% per year, that loss of size can only be attributed to less food.
It is clear that the problem is the carrying capacity of these vital ocean fish pastures. Fisheries management of salmon has never to this day considered the ocean life of salmon as important. They see their only mandate is to manage the ‘catch’ of salmon as they return to the rivers where they spawn. I know this well as for many years I enjoyed the biologist life being able to study returning salmon on government pay with a fishing rod in hand
Chum salmon return in the largest numbers in all of history. Click to read more
Interestingly we can look for part of the answer far to the south, to the lesson of the Chum salmon of the Fraser River that enters the Pacific Ocean near Vancouver, British Columbia.
In 2016 the return of Chum Salmon to the British Columbia coastal rivers was the largest in history. It was declared ‘a salmon miracle’. But at the same time the other side of the Pacific, Japan’s chum salmon failed to survive as their dying ocean pasture produced the smallest catch in history, a ‘salmon tragedy’.
“2016 Chum Salmon return is estimated to be two million, the largest return on record,”said Lara Sloan of Fisheries and Oceans Canada in November of 2016.
“Catches in Johnstone Strait were some of the strongest on record. There have also been very strong returns of chum to the Nanaimo River.” Sloan said the spawning target was met early, with a total catch estimated at 150,000.
Fishermen also reported an astonishing and unexpected bonanza of salmon. Gillnetter Shaun Strobel fishes the west coast of Vancouver Island, and down the Johnstone Strait to Nanaimo “The fall net, or chum catch, is usually good”, he said. “But nothing like this.” The fisheries experts were all totally off on this one.
At first, the Chum salmon return was expected to be so low there was supposed to be a lottery to select a very few fishermen who would be allowed to fish commercially, but returns were so strong fishing was opened up in a free for all for everyone with no limits.
“Everybody was catching fish from the top of the straights up towards Alert Bay all the way down to Campbell River. We were catching fish everywhere,” said Vancouver Island salmon fisherman Shaun Strobel, who described catches of fish weighing down boats and threatening to break or sink nets. “We were all doing the best ever.”
“Although Fraser River sockeye numbers have hit a record low, Chum returning to the Fraser are doing extremely well,” wrote one fishing company’s general manager, Chris Kantowicz.
Kantowicz said the largest catch ever recorded in a Johnstone Strait chum salmon fishery took place Oct. 17 when one fleet pulled in 800,000 fish in a single day.
While fishermen are delighted the Federal Fisheries experts are saying ‘they have no idea’why the unexpected bonanza of Chum Salmon showed up so utterly against all of their usually reliable projections.
Hmmm… What might have happened with regard to the Chum Salmon last year.
click to enlarge
Let’s examine their 4-5 year life cycle and see if there are any clues. Chum salmon, like all salmon, lay their eggs in the gravel in freshwater rivers and streams in the fall of the year. The adults then die and their carcasses provide vital nutrients in the river that will grow river insects to feed their hatchlings. The eggs incubate over the winter and hatch in the early spring. The tiny Chum alevins emerge from their gravel incubators and are flushed/swim immediately to the ocean. In the Yukon that is a journey of nearly 2000 miles.
Chum are big salmon and they lay vast numbers of eggs, the eggs are big, this means there are vast numbers of healthy baby Chum hatching each year. No one knows precisely the numbers of young Chum, smolts, that go to sea each spring but surely the number is in the hundreds of millions.
Once in the ocean, the young Chum salmon spend as little time in the near-shore coastal waters as possible as that is a region full of all manner of hungry sea-life that love nothing more than baby salmon. The young salmon head out into the great North Pacific, the Gulf of Alaska promptly. There they are safer than in coastal waters as there are far fewer predators. But there, they are also at the mercy of the health of their ocean pasture. Chum are primarily plankton feeders, their survival depends on the condition of their ocean pasture. If the pasture blooms in abundance then the survival rate of the baby Chum salmon is very high and they grow big and strong over the next 4-5-6 years.
Across 10,000 miles of North Pacific ocean pasture declarations from Japan and the USA are reporting a cataclysmic collapse of Pacific Salmon. The fish are tragically starving at sea as the plankton pastures have turned into clear blue lifeless deserts. Click to read more
Mostly in recent decades the Chum salmon like so many salmon have provided a story of doom and gloom as they have simply not been returning from their ocean pastures. The ocean pastures of the North Pacific have been in a multi-decade history of worsening collapse. Without a healthy ocean pasture the health and abundance of the ‘livestock’, aka salmon, the pasture can sustain have plummeted.
Our CO2 is Killing Ocean Pastures, but perhaps not in the way you might think.
Ocean pastures are in cataclysmic decline in the North Pacific and indeed in every ocean of the world. The reason is not about the usual suspects, those big bad villains the overfishing folks or climate change. The reason is just a little bit of bad behaviour of each of us, but there are a lot of us – 7.4 billion and counting. Our CO2 emissions are killing ocean pastures in a very easy to understand manner.
CO2 is today high and rising in the global atmosphere and that’s indisputable. Humanity has in all of our yesterday’s of the fossil fuel age already spewed more than a trillion tonnes of Yesterday’s CO2 into the air. We’re busy now working on spewing another trillion tonnes of our CO2 plant food into the air that’s Tomorrow’s CO2. CO2 as we all know feeds plant life which is powered by the sun, and photosynthesis helps plants grow and exhale back oxygen into the air. How great is that you say, we all need to breathe oxygen.
But here’s the problem for the oceans. This is a blue planet as 72% is oceans, of the remaining 28% it’s not all land as about half that or 14% is ice and rock where nothing grows. Of the part where plants grow more than half is actually grass, not trees. So what is happening is that as our CO2 is helping plants on land grow, and let’s focus on the grass how can that harm the oceans.
Rain and Dust in the wind are the Yin and Yang for pastures on land and at sea. Click to read more
Where plants living in mineral soil they live or die depending on whether nature delivers vital rain. We all know that when the rain doesn’t fall the grass dies off, but when the rain does fall the grass grows green and bushier. Well CO2 gives plants the ability to survive with far less rain! Hence our present world’s high CO2 has resulted in a vast amount of extra grass growing, its called ‘global greening.’
OK Plants on land need rain but CO2 lets them grow better with less rain. Stick with me.
Plants in the ocean, you know the 72% of this planet that is blue, actually, it is healthy when it is murky blue-green. Those plants live in water and what they need most is something that blows to them as the rain does for plants on pastures on land. Ocean pastures need dust in the wind. They have all the water they could ever use but they have no minerals.
Here’s the crux of the CO2 problem that grows more grass on land.
MORE GRASS GROWING MEANS LESS DUST BLOWING
Increasing grass, aka ground cover, is starving the ocean pastures to death due to loss of dust.
Back to our story of the twin miracles of Chum Salmon of 2016 and 2017
Did something happen in the North Pacific Chum Salmon pastures that helped the baby Chum salmon that came back last year as adults? No mystery there!
Before and After! Looking astern off the transom of my research ship before we began our dusting to restore the ocean to health the ocean was a blue desert. After dusting the same view revealed a beautiful emerald-green see that had become full of life. (No Photoshop, raw camera) – click to read more
In the summer of 2012 just when the gazillions of baby Chum Salmon went out to sea to begin their 4-5 years of grazing and growing on their ocean pasture they found their pasture had miraculously returned to historic levels of health and productivity. This was no accident it was the result of the greatest ocean pasture restoration project in the history of ocean and fisheries science. Proof of this is that the work of a scant dozen earnest shipmates, my village crew, and our work to replenish vital mineral dust to the salmon pasture returned the largest salmon runs in history in perfect correlation with that work being ‘good shepherds’ for the ocean pasture.
Do the math for the Chum Salmon, just count from 2012-2013, that’s their 1st. year; 2013-2014, that’s 2 years, 2014-2015, that’s 3 years, and 2015-2016, that’s 4 years and the magic number for the southern Chum Salmon who are known for just that life-cycle! Chum Salmon miracle mystery solved, it was an intended miracle and it just worked.
Feeling skeptical? The miracle of the 2016 and 2017 Chum salmon are not the only salmon miracles!
In 2013, the year following my Gulf of Alaska ocean pasture restoration work the Pink Salmon of Alaska made up an even greater salmon miracle. Pink Salmon live for only two years. So let’s do the life cycle math. The Pink salmon that were eggs in the gravel of rivers and streams along the North American Pacific coast and hatched into baby salmon in the spring of 2012, like their cousins the Chum Salmon were swept and swam out to their vast ocean pasture that spring.
There instead of finding their ocean pasture was a desolate blue desert unable to sustain them they found it had been made into a restored Garden of Eden. Instead of mostly dying they grew and grew and before too long they swam back to their home rivers and streams healthy and strong. That swim home took place in the year 2013, remember Pinks live just 2 years so count em up the year 2012 is year one for the pinks, 2013 is their spawning year.
In Alaska, in 2013 the fisheries experts were confident within 5%-10% certainty that the catch of Pink Salmon would be between 50-52 million of the silver beauties. The experts were dumbfounded when the fishers caught not 50 million Pinks but 226 million of the silver beauties more than 4 times the number expected, the largest catch of salmon in all of Alaskan history. All up and down the Pacific coast reports came in of very stream no matter how small in Pink Salmon territory being absolutely jammed with spawning Pink Salmon. Surely many hundreds of millions of additional Pinks.
The arrow points to our ocean pasture restoration work in 2012. Note the repeating historic Pink Salmon returns in Alaska. Nearly a billion additional, unexpected fish caught, delivering hundreds of millions of economic stimulus into the Alaska economy.
Our 2012 ocean pasture restoration project worked so well it brought back record salmon returns To Alaska the very next year and many years thereafter.
What’s next?
Restore ocean fish pastures everywhere and bring back billions of fish, salmon, cod, tuna, mackerel, and more… enough fish to help end world hunger! And save the planet at a cost of mere millions neither billions nor trillions as the sales folk of climate change would have the world spend.
Last fall NOAA reported another, repeating, annual $1.8 billion loss in the Alaska catch, which NOAA conservatively translates into a staggering $4.3 billion blow to the U.S. seafood economy. They add that the crisis has also cost the nation 38,000 jobs. Together these are a clear warning sign of deeper industry, economic, and ecological collapse.
