A new report by the Department of Fish and Game and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has looked at the genetic makeup of chinook salmon getting to the northern Gulf of Alaska.
Commercial Management Biologist Pat Shields detailed part of the Genetic Stock Composition Analysis of Chinook Salmon Bycatch Samples from the 2012 in Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska Trawl Fisheries report.
Shields: “When you take a sample of a king salmon and run it through a genetics program it’s not like you see on tv with some of these crime scene programs, you can’t take one fish’s genetic material and then say this fish belonged to this river. What they tend to do is run a group of samples and they say this group has a probability that 50% of this sample was headed to this river, 20% was headed to this river, 8% was headed to this river, and they assign some probabilities to it.”
He said the reporting group the Kenai Peninsula is most interested in is the northwest Gulf of Alaska and detailed those results.
Shields: “When they ran the 2012 samples and did their genetic analysis on those, there were approximately 18,800 king salmon caught in the Gulf of Alaska polluck trawl fishery in 2012, when they samples that fishery, approximately 385 were considered to be northwest Gulf of Alaska. Not a lot of those king salmon caught in the trawl fishery out in the Gulf of Alaska were destined here for southcentral Alaska. The biggest reporting group, the three largest ones were coastal southeast Alaska, about 3,500 of the 18,800 kings were headed there, 9,500 were headed to British Columbia, and 5,200 were west coast United States stocks, Oregon, Washington, California.”
