This year, there will once again be little-to-no opportunity for communities along the Western Alaska river to harvest any salmon.
As the 2024 Yukon River salmon season kicks off, there will once again be little to no opportunity for communities along the Western Alaska river to harvest any actual salmon.
“Who’s going to spend nine bucks a gallon to go out fishing with a dipnet?” Carroll asked. “It might take them four or five hours to get seven chums. Whereas if they had been given their six-inch gillnet, they put it out for a minute, minute and a half, and they’re done. They’ll have 100. Then they’ll spend the next couple of days cutting and smoking, and they’re done for the season.”
The seven-year agreement calls for rebuilding chinook stocks to the point that at least 71,000 of the fish cross into Canada each year. It is technically not a moratorium, as meeting this number at any point in the next seven years would in theory lift the closure. But in 2024, fewer than 15,000 fish are expected to complete the journey.
Since 2019, Carroll said that chinook numbers recorded on the upper Yukon River at Eagle have fallen drastically below corresponding numbers far downriver at Pilot Station. Biologists believe one thing that may be killing them off somewhere along that nearly 1,100-mile journey is the disease-causing Ichthyophonus parasite.
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