![]() ![]() The model uses harvest, age composition, and relative and absolute measures of in-river run abundance to estimate parameters that describe the production relationship for this stock.” “During this review a state-space model that simultaneously reconstructs runs and fits a spawner-recruit model to estimate total return, escapement, and recruitment of Copper River Chinook salmon from 1980 to 2016 was completed. “The committee evaluated stock-recruit data, the percentile approach, and habitat-based models as means of setting an escapement goal,” Fish and Game’s written report says. Grading on a curveįish and Game, in its report to the Board of Fish, said it put together a committee to study the decline and how many fish the state should allow to “escape” the commercial drift gillnet fishery off the mouth of the river at the southern edge of Prince William Sound. The entire Copper River was at the same time cycling downward. There was a good return of fish here and there – 3,900 made it back in 2013 – but in most of the years from 2008 on, fewer than 3,000 fish made it past the tower. Only once in the next five years did the number of spawners drop below 3,700.Īnd then it started to slide. The state started counting king salmon from a fish spotting tower along the Gulkana in 2002. The state fishery biologists that set the goal for the Copper said they didn’t have enough data to set a goal for the Gulkana. How many spawners the Gulkana needs to maintain the popular sport fishery there is another unknown. How many of the 3,700 they might catch is unknown, but the figure is likely in the hundreds. ![]() That is 5,500 Chinook below the existing goal of 24,000, and not far above the estimate of 14,000 Chinook returning to one Copper River tributary – the Gulkana River – in the 1990s. A later radio-tagging study concluded the Gulkana, the most popular sport-fishing stream in the region, is the spawning ground for about two of every 10 Copper Chinook, the largest of the Pacific salmon most Alaskans know simply as kings.Ī 20 percent share of a return of 18,500 Copper kings would earmark 3,700 fish for the Gulkana, but personal use and subsistence fisheries downstream on the Copper River would catch some before they reached the river. With annual returns of prized Chinook salmon to Alaska’s fabled Copper River creeping steadily downward, the state Board of Fisheries is meeting in Valdez to consider reducing the spawning goal for the river system that drains 24,000-square-miles of Eastern Alaska, an area nearly the size of Maine.įisheries biologists with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game admit they have no idea of how many Chinook the Copper Basin should be able to support, but they say the best science of the day would indicate a spawning goal of 18,500 of the big fish is enough. A radio-tagged Gulkana king salmon/Alaska Department of FIsh and Game photo ![]()
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