Amid severely restricted fishing on the Kuskokwim River, one bright spot has been abundant sockeye salmon runs at 30,000 fish daily near Bethel.
Biologists do not expect either to reach their goals for fish reaching their spawning grounds.
The booming Bristol Bay salmon run has broken the record set just last year, while on the Yukon River, Chinook are too scarce to harvest.
A decades-long decline in salmon in the Yukon River has reached a crisis this year, forcing harvest closures and prompting emergency shipments of salmon from other regions of Alaska to river residents who are otherwise facing food shortages.
Chum returns are the lowest on record, leaving communities with empty freezers and uncertainty about getting through the winter.
The Kuskokwim River king salmon run does not look particularly strong this year, but chum numbers look even worse. Historically, around 60% of the salmon in the river at this point in the season would be chum or sockeye, but right now Bethel Test Fishery numbers show that just over 20% of the salmon are.
The size of king salmon returning to Western Alaska rivers to spawn has been decreasing over the past few decades. Researchers at the University of Alaska
Usually Aug. 7 is the midpoint of the coho run, but this year it was not until Aug. 8 that numbers at the Bethel test fishery increased, and then only modestly.
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