S.E. Alaska King Fisheries; Taking Account

The population of king salmon has crashed in Alaska again and still the state fisheries management have decided to have a winter king season albeit with limited activity. Why do the fish have such difficult times reproducing? Are they trying to achieve zero population growth. Surely something could be done to encourage them to breed, perhaps marijuana fish pellets?

King salmon are what many people regard as a kind of spirit of Alaska along with killer whales, bear and eagles. An Alaska with weak king salmon sport fishing is a pathetic condition to many, and that hurts revenue streams generated by travelers seeking to bring in a large fish on small tackle.

Actually fish management seems to be treated as a saving account that will refill if their is enough escapement of fish-capital to reproduce itself. Of course the overall size of the account keeps shrinking since none of the high tech fisherman can resist taking any sizable chunk of money-fish, and the state cannot resist giving it to them except for a tiny quota of escaped fish that are regarded as capable of replenishing supply each year and of course cannot. The king salmon fishery has been beaten down to a sliver of its former natural size for decades.

It is not surprising that fish are regarded in the same way as money. The value of fish to fishermen and the state is money, just as the velocity of money through accounts govern Wall Street investment priorities so it stimulates fish management toward resembling financial rather than natural cycles.

Instead of treating the king salmon fish stocks as a saving account it should be recognized as part of nature that will decline with habitat loss from development and logging, and that over-fishing and poor management may reduce it permanently to something as pitiful as that of Washington State.

The answer is simply to allow no fishing at all except for provable subsistence needs in a third of S.E. Alaska (rotating third) for two years of every six.  it might be reasonable to allow sports-fishing a 3/4s of the the usual size-with a very low absolute fish number threshold, in the third of S.E. closed for commercial fishing. Then fish can have a chance to recover some size and numbers. Since kings are plundered in the North Pacific in their four year cycles the U.S., Canada and Russia should agree to close the ocean fishery and police that closure two of every six years, together.

The main thing for fishermen would be to have a stable fishery. The opportunity cost of an an irregular and paltry fishery is probably fairly high. Given more certainty of fish numbers and seasonal reliability fishermen could probably plan for something else to do than fish during the recovery years.