![]() The Council, which was founded in 1996, certifies fisheries that meet high environmental standards, enabling them to use a label that recognises their environmental responsibility. In 1999, the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC)*** commissioned a review of the Alaska salmon fishery. It is this management mechanism that has allowed Alaska salmon stocks - and, accordingly, Alaska salmon fisheries - to prosper, even as salmon populations in the rest of the United States are increasingly considered threatened or even endangered. Even sport fishing can be brought to a halt. ![]() The fishermen know the approximate time of year when they will be allowed to fish, but on any given day, one or more field biologists in a particular area can put a halt to fishing. The salmon season in Alaska is not pre-set. The biologists sit in streamside counting towers, study sonar, watch from aeroplanes, and talk to fishermen. There are biologists throughout the state constantly monitoring adult fish as they show up to spawn. ![]() The primary reason for such increases is what is known as ‘In-Season Abundance-Based Management’. Over the next few decades average catches steadily increased as a result of this policy of sustainable management, until, during the 1990s, annual harvests were well in excess of 100 million, and on several occasions over 200 million fish. At that time, statewide harvests totalled around 25 million salmon. With the onset of statehood, however, the State of Alaska took over management of its own fisheries, guided by a state constitution which mandates that Alaska’s natural resources be managed on a sustainable basis. Between 19, overfishing led to crashes in salmon populations so severe that in 1953 Alaska was declared a federal disaster area. During 2000, commercial catches of Pacific salmon in Alaska exceeded 320,000 tonnes, with an ex-vessel value of over $US 260 million.Ĭatches have not always been so healthy. Indeed, if Alaska was an independent nation, it would be die largest producer of wild salmon in the world. ‘Salmon,’ notes writer Susan Ewing in The Great Alaska Nature Factbook, ‘pump through Alaska like blood through a heart, bringing rhythmic, circulating nourishment to land, animals and people.’ The ‘predictable abundance of salmon allowed some native cultures to flourish,’ and ‘dying spawners* feed bears, eagles, other animals, and ultimately the soil itself.’ All five species of Pacific salmon - chinook, or king chum, or dog coho, or silver sockeye, or red and pink, or humpback - spawn** in Alaskan waters, and 90% of all Pacific salmon commercially caught in North America are produced there. ![]() The true cultural heart and soul of Alaska’s fisheries, however, is salmon. Taking advantage of this rich bounty, Alaska’s commercial fisheries have developed into some of the largest in the world.Īccording to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G), Alaska’s commercial fisheries landed hundreds of thousands of tonnes of shellfish and herring, and well over a million tonnes of groundfish (cod, sole, perch and pollock) in 2000. The rivers feed into the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska - cold, nutrient-rich waters which support tens of millions of seabirds, and over 400 species of fish, shellfish, crustaceans, and molluscs. It shares, with Canada, the second longest river system in North America and has over half the coastline of the United States. The forty-ninth state to join the United States of America (in 1959), Alaska is fully one-fifth the size of the mainland 48 states combined. 'The islands’ native inhabitants called this land mass Aleyska, the ‘Great Land’ today, we know it as Alaska. More than two hundred years ago, Russian explorers and fur hunters landed on the Aleutian Islands, a volcanic archipelago in the North Pacific, and learned of a land mass that lay farther to the north. ![]()
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