Salmon Die-off

Observation by Brian Holter, Jr.:

It was an unusually dry summer this year. There was no rain. This, on top of not much snow fall last year, resulted in very dry conditions. Blackbear Mountain near Kluwock had no snow left by the end of the summer. Usually we always have some snow on the mountain. As result there was not enough water (or apparently enough oxygen) and we think this resulted in a die-off of salmon on the Klawock River. A lot of salmon were piling up below the weir, but the water was really low and conditions resulted in this die-off. It was estimated that upwards of 40,000 coho, chums, and pinks died before they were able to spawn. I think the long-term effect will be that the return salmon run in 4 to 5 years may be significantly lower. It will affect our community in a number of ways, subsistence and economically. The location of the die-off was about a mile and a half up river from the mouth.

Ted Meyers, Fish Pathologist with Alaska Department of Fish and Game, writes:

I made an inquiry to the Klawock Hatchery and the manager there, Jeff Lundberg, replied with the comments below for your information. It appears that a very large escapement of pinks and some coho ran up the Klawock River where there was very little water (possibly due to lack of snow melt but more likely due to less rainfall) that was warm in temperature and low in oxygen to start with. The large number of fish exhausted the existing oxygen supply and they began to die in high numbers. Fish die-offs during periods of low warm water and low oxygen are not unusual in SE during warmer and drier summers. Although in this case, the numbers of fish involved were somewhat larger than most events.

Jeff Lundberg, Manager at Klawock River Hatchery, writes:

The incident occurred on August 30. About 5 am, there was a rush of pinks upriver to the weir and the dissolved oxygen crashed. A number of pinks died--Al Edsall walked the stream and estimated 70,000 pinks and 3,500 coho. We opened pickets to let them through to help alleviate the problem. Of course with no water in the river, I don’t know if it did much good since they did not migrate to the lake. As you know, it was a great summer for humans with little rain, but not so much for fish. After this, we would count pinks through the pickets until we met coho escapement, then we would work them through the raceway system. If we thought there might be another problem, we would open pickets for the pinks and just use the coho number for the next week's escapement goal. We did this on September 6th. We passed 160,000 pinks into Klawock Lake. In my opinion, way too many for the streams to handle. This return was based on 35,000 pinks through in 2011. Extremely good survival and low water this summer created some problems. While I do not agree with the article that the return will be poor because of the fish dying, I do think it might suffer because of the extreme amount of pinks trying to spawn in the Klawock Lake streams.