Picture: Alaska Area U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service/Flickr
My buddies who dwell in Alaska have a nearly-unanimous opinion of pink salmon—they’re annoying. When it’s their yr to run, they present up in big numbers, making it harder to sift via to catch the large rainbow trout and dolly varden that so many fly anglers love.
I’ve by no means met a salmon I didn’t like, although, and pinks are not any exception. Positive, I used to be upset this yr after I hooked a pink from a pod of huge rainbow trout (the most important I’d ever seen), however the salmon put up an important combat. My solely “saltwater” fly fishing expertise got here from casting to pinks and dollies within the surf off Kodiak Island a number of years in the past.
After studying this story from Eric Barker in The Lewiston Tribune, nonetheless, I believe I’m becoming a member of my buddies of their perspective in direction of pinks. It seems that the current abundance (over-abundance might be extra correct) of pink salmon is resulting in smaller wild steelhead.
Barker appears at a examine from Ryan Vosbigian on the College of Idaho, the place he spherical that the habitat of steelhead and pink salmon overlap fairly a bit, particularly with the meals the 2 fish eat.
“What we’re discovering is that there’s an impact of pink salmon being so plentiful that the widespread useful resource is a bit more sparse, and so steelhead are coming again barely shorter,” Vosbigian is quoted as saying in Barker’s article.
The over-abundance of pink salmon is bolstered by hatchery applications all all through the Pacific, and barely hotter ocean temperatures which are extra favorable to pink salmon. Pinks are used primarily in canned salmon, however are additionally filleted and flash-frozen to be offered at supermarkets. In accordance with the Alaska Division of Fish & Sport, they’re “one of the crucial essential Pacific salmon for business fisherman in Alaska…Annual statewide harvests have been round 100 million pink salmon since about 1990.”
Pinks are most plentiful in rivers throughout odd years, and Vosbigian hypothesized that throughout the years when grownup pinks had been at their highest, he’d be capable of see that mirrored in smaller common steelhead dimension. That’s precisely what occurred. Steelhead that returned throughout odd years had been 1.5 inches shorter than fish that returned throughout even years, in response to Barker’s story.
“Whereas the examine didn’t look to see if plentiful pink salmon throughout odd years had an impact on steelhead survival, that’s one thing fish managers have suspected for a while,” Barker wrote. “They’ve famous a steelhead abundance cycle that seems to observe the identical even and odd yr cycle however, up to now, haven’t been in a position to definitively say it’s attributable to pink salmon.”
It shouldn’t shock anybody that there’s such an interconnected relationship between anadromous fish, but it surely’s stunning to see it quantified in such a manner. It’s additionally fascinating that we’re seeing the outcomes of too many hatchery pink salmon dumped into the ocean. Whether or not this makes any distinction in fishery administration should be decided at a later date.
