From California to Southeast Alaska, salmon fisheries are closing in lockstep this week — under the same treaty

Southeast Alaska's commercial troll fleet stopped fishing for kings and coho this month, its Chinook catch bumping up against the ceiling set by the U.S.-Canada Pacific Salmon Treaty. The same week, hundreds of miles south, federal managers are closing and tightening salmon fisheries down the West Coast — a parallel that traces back to the same shared, dwindling fish.

The Alaska closure came fast at first, then slow. When the summer king troll season opened July 1, managers figured the fleet would catch its treaty-set allocation of roughly 82,000 Chinook in about a week. Instead, low fish numbers and light fishing effort stretched it to six weeks before the target was finally reached and the fishery closed in early August.

Down south, NOAA Fisheries issued a round of inseason actions this week. Commercial trollers off the coast from the Canadian border to northern Oregon face sharply lower per-vessel Chinook limits, dropping again a week later. Recreational anglers lose part of the Columbia River to salmon fishing entirely, and coho retention closes along a long stretch of the Oregon coast. The particulars differ, but the direction is the same as Alaska's: less fishing, fewer fish to go around.

What ties the two coasts together is the treaty, and the biology under it. Chinook and coho are migratory, shared stocks that cross the U.S.-Canada boundary and pass through the fisheries of both nations and multiple states, so a single depleted run can constrain fishing from one end of the coast to the other. The Pacific Salmon Treaty is the agreement meant to divide that shared resource, and it sets the very Chinook ceiling that just closed the Southeast Alaska troll fishery.

Alaska has a particular stake in how the southern stocks fare. Under the 2019 renewal of the treaty, Southeast Alaska accepted a substantial cut to its own Chinook harvest — cushioned by $22.4 million in federal mitigation — in part to ease pressure on the depleted, Endangered Species Act-listed Chinook of the Pacific Northwest, and on the endangered Southern Resident killer whales that depend on those fish to eat. This week's closures down south are a reminder that the runs Alaska gave up harvest to protect remain weak enough to keep shutting fisheries down.