Credit: Andrew Hendry/Reuters |
The fishermen and women knew something was off with their catch. “At first, it was just a general comment by everybody: ‘The fish, yeah, I didn’t get any big ones this year,’” said Richard Burnham, who has commercially harvested salmon for four decades in the interior Alaska village of Kaltag. |
|
|
Now, a new study has borne out those observations on a huge scale, documenting body size declines in fish across the entire state of Alaska in four different species of salmon: chinook, sockeye, silver and chum.
Alaska is “the last largely pristine North American salmon-producing region”, the authors write. Yet the size of the Yukon region chinooks – the largest of the four salmon species – has diminished the most, by 10% compared with those caught before 1990. |
|