2/1/2024 0 Comments Fishing planet alaska chinook"They're going to go for the biggest, oiliest fish there are," Matkin continues. "We go along with the animals and scoop up fish scales and bits of flesh from where they kill something," Matkin says. Matkin, who was not involved in Ohlberger's paper, studies Alaskan orcas' diets. "As far as we can see, the killer whales are taking the older and bigger fish," said Craig Matkin, a whale researcher with the North Gulf Oceanic Society in Homer, Alaska. "There is a large number of resident killer whales out there that really target chinook, and they target the large chinook," Ohlberger says.Ī study from federal researchers in November found that orcas' consumption of chinook salmon in the northeast Pacific Ocean has doubled since 1975, surpassing humans' catches, which have fallen by a third over that time. The 2,300 or more resident killer whales in the Northeast Pacific Ocean eat about 20 million pounds of chinook salmon per year - roughly equal to the annual commercial catch of chinook in recent years, according to the new study. Two species eat more chinook salmon than any others: orcas and humans. "The older fish, which normally come back after five years in the ocean, they come back earlier and earlier," Ohlberger said. Older and bigger fish are mostly gone.įew fish are making it to old age, which for a chinook salmon means spending five or six years in the ocean after a year or two in fresh water. A century's worth of dam-building, overfishing, habitat loss and replacement by hatchery fish cut the size of the average chinook in half, studies in the 1980s and 1990s found.ĭam-building and fishing have tailed off, but chinooks have been shrinking even faster in the past 15 years, according to a new paper by Ohlberger and colleagues in the journal Fish and Fisheries. Ohlberger has been tracking the downsizing of salmon in recent decades, but salmon have been shrinking in numbers and in size for a long time. Now, more than a century later, "it's not impossible that we see individuals of that size today, but it's much, much rarer," University of Washington research scientist Jan Ohlberger says.
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