The North Pacific Fishery Management Council (NPFMC) has advanced a set of five alternatives for reducing chum salmon bycatch in the U.S. state of Alaska’s pollock fishery, setting up a vote on implementing new protections as soon as December 2025.
Chum salmon populations in Alaska have plummeted in recent years; in the Yukon River, for instance, the fall chum salmon run is 97 percent below its historical average. The low abundance levels have led to fishery closures and bans on subsistence fishing in parts of the state.
“Available science indicates recent declines in chum salmon populations across many regions of the North Pacific, including Canada, Japan, Russia, Korea, and the U.S., appear to be driven by warmer water temperatures in both the marine and freshwater environments which impact juvenile surivival, prey availability and quality, metabolism and growth rates, and reproductive rates,” NPFMC noted in a press release. “However, Western Alaska chum salmon are also taken as bycatch in the Bering Sea pollock trawl fishery, reducing the amount of salmon that return to western and interior Alaska rivers, and the council is considering action to address these impacts.”
Conservation groups, salmon fishing advocates, and regional Tribal government point to incidental takes of the species by trawlers fishing for pollock as a primary factor.
However, the pollock sector has bristled at being blamed for declining chum salmon populations, pointing to environmental factors and the high percentage of foreign-origin chum salmon in their bycatch as evidence that their impact on Alaska salmon isn’t as big as opponents state.
The fleet has also adopted salmon avoidance plans to help reduce bycatch; NPFMC noted that the pollock sector has “reduced its chum bycatch by nearly 95 percent over the past four years.”
According to conservation NGO Oceana, nearly 3 million chum salmon were taken as bycatch by vessels fishing for pollock from 2015 to 2024, with nearly half a million being Western Alaska chum salmon. Most of the chum bycatch, however, is hatchery-origin Russia and Asia chum salmon, according to genetic sampling.
Salmon fishers – both commercial and subsistence – have called on regulators to place caps on chum salmon bycatch and enact other protections to reduce the pollock fishery’s impact on the population.
“We are asking that you take transformative action to help our communities. Our rivers and ecosystem are changing. Why isn’t our management regarding chum salmon bycatch also changing? Every salmon counts, and we need to work toward making sure our salmon get to their spawning grounds,” Association of Village Council Presidents (AVCP) Chief Executive Officer Vivian Korthuis said in a statement.
“We need to get an alternative which sets hard limits and protects the fish corridors. Anything other than that tells me no real effort is being made,” AVCP Executive Board Chair Thaddeus Tikiun added.
The council’s February meeting was almost exclusively devoted to tackling the issue of chum salmon bycatch, with more than 150 people coming out to Anchorage, Alaska, to testify.
While the council declined to support an overall cap on chum salmon bycatch, it did make changes to the Proposed Amendment to the Fishery Management Plan for Groundfish of the Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands Management Area (PDEIS), which includes five alternative options for reducing chum salmon bycatch in the pollock fishery.
Among the changes was modifying one alternative to “provide an inseason corridor closure to focus on minimizing bycatch on western Alaska chum salmon stocks,” with the modified proposal covering a larger area with more discrete closures. The council also supported additional analysis on how Community Development Quota (CDQ) groups would be impacted if they fished on catcher vessels instead of catcher-processor vessels in the future.
“While I wish the council had been able to institute a meaningful cap on chum bycatch today, I believe this is the best solution the broken system afforded them, and I am leaving this meeting feeling hopeful,” SalmonState Ocean Justice Program Coordinator Jackie Arnaciar Boyer said in a press release. “Council members were more responsive to and welcoming towards Indigenous peoples and elders who flew in to testify. I am hopeful that this attitude will carry forward at the December council meeting, and meaningful action will be the result.”
Council staff will evaluate the proposed alternatives over the next several months, and the council could take a vote on implementing one or more of the alternatives at their December 2025 meeting, with possible implementation in 2027.
