With marine heat waves helping to wipe out some of Alaska’s storied salmon runs in recent years, officials have resorted to sending emergency food shipments to affected communities while scientists warn that the industry’s days of traditional harvests may be numbered.
Salmon all but disappeared from the 2,000-mile Yukon River run last year, as record-high temperatures led to the fish piling up dead in streams and rivers before they were able to spawn. Ain the journal Fisheries detailed more than 100 salmon die-offs at freshwater sites around Alaska.
Commercially, the river’s salmon fishers altogether earned a mere $51,480 for their 2020 harvest, before the harvest was canceled in 2021. By comparison, they earned $2.5 million in 2019 and $4.67 million in 2018. Scientists mostly have blamed ocean warming, with a series of heat waves in the Bering Sea and North Pacific Ocean from 2014 to 2019 affecting salmon living in the sea before their return to spawning grounds.
“In my opinion, the salmon are starving with climate change,” said Brooke Woods, the chair of the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission from the Athabascan village of Rampart.led by von Biela on the rivers, streams and lakes where salmon spend their early and late life stages, the team found that Chinook salmon show heat stress at temperatures above 18 Celsius , and start dying above 20C.
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