Sonic Tagging and Aha! Moment For Mixed Fisheries

There were 3 primary results that are directly applicable to some of the fishery management problems we're seeing here. And specifically, he demonstrated that king salmon off the shore of the Kasilof and Kenai River have a tendency to migrate back and forth and be vulnerable for an extended period of time, therefore increasing their, their probability of capture. In that setnet fishery. He also demonstrated that sockeye salmon were offshore of that and vulnerable to capture in the drift fleet. The third thing he demonstrated with crystal clarity was that those sockeye and those king salmon are separated vertically in the water column, and consequently, a mechanism to maintain a directed commercial fishery on sockeye and afford the required and requisite protections for king salmon exists by simply adjusting the depth of the net.

And it's something that people have thought about for a while. It's something that most fishermen would have recognized. But now we have empirical evidence of the highest quality that tells us that this in fact exists. So it opens the door for a maintenance of a viable commercial fishery directed at sockeye and still allows us the opportunity to afford conservation measures for primarily Kenai and Kasiloq King Salmon. And that has benefits to the Matsu Borough because we're able to take the those sockeye in a terminal area continue to fish, allow the king salmon escapements into the other systems, and preserve the corridor outside of those terminal areas, allowing fish to migrate back up into the Mat-Su.

It's all connected.