Regarding the underweight salmon “phenomenon” article in Friday’s Clarion, what do you expect when you overload the system? You can make all the excuses about what might be causing the weight loss, but as long as Prince William Sound Aquaculture Corporation keeps dumping 600 million pinks in the Sound every year, not to mention Russia and Japan dumping billions of pinks and chums, and the hatchery sockeye programs scattered all over the state dumping millions more sockeye in the ocean, just really what do you expect?
Science is destroying our salmon runs in the name of commercial interests. Science knows little of what happens in the ocean, yet condones this unnatural release of billions of hungry fish into a system unable to provide for them all. There are no meaningful studies of the effect this has on the ocean. Our king salmon have been smaller now for a long time, and of course the sport fishery gets the blame. The halibut are fewer, much fewer, and much smaller per age class than they were 10 years ago. Does anybody else see a pattern here? Don’t you think maybe it’s time to stop this overuse of the ocean and give it a rest? We are starting to see the unintended consequences of our irresponsible actions. We now have more commercially harvestable salmon, but have to fish much longer to catch the same amount of weight as years past. Doesn’t make a lot of sense.