SALMON

Western Alaska chum versus Eastern Aleutian sockeye: that’s how many people are framing an Alaska Senate bill that aims to temporarily close Area M, a fishery off the Alaska Peninsula and eastern Aleutian Islands.

Surveyors with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game are knocking on doors in Unalaska this week and asking questions about salmon.

The Qawalangin Tribe of Unalaska and KUCB are proud to present "Aqalix Qada!" — a traditional foods video series. The program features Unangax̂ elders and community members sharing their knowledge of traditional food preparation. In this episode June McGlashan shows us how to make her famous alaadix and fish spread!

Qawalangin Tribe President Harriet Berikoff said it was a tough year for subsistence fishing in Unalaska. Rough boating weather and low salmon numbers meant most families weren't able to fill their freezers. Last week, September 7th, the Qawalangin Tribe of Unalaska donated $22,000 worth of sockeye salmon to its tribal members.

Salmon stocks from up and down the Pacific coast congregate in the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea to feed. That’s also where trawlers go to harvest millions of pounds of pollock and other groundfish. And those trawlers often accidentally scoop up salmon and other fish in their nets, too — a problem known as bycatch. Scientists with NOAA Fisheries, which oversees federal fisheries in those waters, want to understand where the bycatch is coming from — and where those fish would return to — so that they can understand the impacts of bycatch on specific stocks. That’s especially true for stocks in western Alaska, an area of the state that is seeing dismal salmon returns.

In a historically late push, almost 3,000 sockeye salmon came through the weir at McLees Lake on Sunday. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game says the salmon run in Unalaska is now at a sustainable level and fishing restrictions have been lifted.

The Qawalangin Tribe of Unalaska and KUCB are proud to present "Aqalix Qada!" — a traditional foods video series. In our third episode subsistence hunter and fisher Trever Schliebe demonstrates how to fillet a halibut.

The Qawalangin Tribe of Unalaska and KUCB are proud to present "Aqalix Qada!" — a traditional foods video series. In this episode, traditional foods expert Harriet Berikoff shows us how to salt and pickle fish!

New data from drone surveys flown over Unalaska’s three road-system lakes last summer show low sockeye salmon counts. The counts total less than half of what they were in summer of 2020, according to data released in April by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. But Fish and Game biologist Tyler Lawson said the one-year drop isn’t too concerning. Escapement numbers often fluctuate and there’s more room for error in aerial surveys, he said. “We call them a ‘high error survey,’ which kind of sounds bad, but it's just because in comparison to the weir — which is a very precise tool — there's variability whenever you're up in the air, looking down and trying to count salmon,” he said. While the technology is still relatively new when it comes to counting salmon in Unalaska, Lawson said he’s hopeful that drones will play a key role in helping assess broader trends among salmon stocks in the region.

The Qawalangin Tribe of Unalaska and KUCB are proud to present "Aqalix Qada!" — a traditional foods video series. In this first episode of the series, Vince Tutiakoff Sr. demonstrates how he fillets a silver salmon.