Friday August 26, 2022
Alaska Public Media —
Both the fall chum salmon and the coho salmon runs on the Yukon River remain too low to open subsistence harvest.
Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologists say they don’t expect either to reach their goals for fish reaching their spawning grounds.
An estimated three quarters of the fall chum salmon run is past the lower river. As of Sunday, the state-run sonar at Pilot Station counted 194,000 fall chum. That’s compared to a historical medium of 486,000 fall chum by that date.
The fall chum that have returned are slightly older than the historical average and with slightly fewer females than the historical average. The fish are also smaller, measuring 26 millimeters less than their historical average length.