Day: April 28, 2026

Invasive northern pike have wreaked havoc in Southcentral Alaska rivers and lakes. Introduced illegally in the 1950s, they have been devouring juvenile salmon and other native species.

Now a University of Alaska Fairbanks study warns that matters could get even worse.

As temperatures rise in waterways, invasive pike eat more, said the study, published in the journal Biological Invasions. And as temperatures continue to rise, that trend will continue, the study said. Based on expected temperature trends, invasive northern pike will eat 6% to 12% more by the end of the century, the study said.

“We expect there will be significant warming in the future, and the amount of fish that pike consume is going to increase with it,” Benjamin Rich, who led the study while earning a master’s degree at UAF’s College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, said in a statement released by the university.

The UAF study found that over the past decade, northern pike of all age classes ate more as waters warmed. The increase was most dramatic in year-old pike, which upped their intake by about 63% over the period.

The study site was the Deshka River, a Matanuska-Susitna Borough waterway that is an important feeder to Cook Inlet and commercial fisheries there. The 44-mile river, a tributary of the Susitna River, is also a cherished destination for Southcentral Alaska sport anglers.

It is famous for its abundance of salmon — or it has been. Salmon in the Deshka is a lot less abundant now than in the past.

The decline is a decades-long problem that affects king salmon in particular. State and federal biologists have cited numerous reasons for  the decline.

The presence of invasive pike is one of them; pike have eaten a lot of juvenile king salmon, also known as Chinook, and coho salmon, also known as silver salmon.

Heat stress is also among the myriad causes of declines. The Deshka is particularly vulnerable to heat. It is in a flat area and not glacier-fed, and it is known to be one of the warmest river systems in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough.

It is the subject of ongoing temperature monitoring and studies by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the conservation group Cook Inletkeeper and others.

In 2019, a record-hot year in Alaska, waters in the Deshka were particularly warm — exceeding 81 degrees Fahrenheit that July, according to readings by Cook Inletkeeper.

Warmer temperatures, along with speeding pike metabolism and spurring more food consumption, appear to be sharpening the northern pikes’ predation skills, said Erik Schoen, a UAF fisheries biologist and a study co-author.

Fish, which are cold-blooded animals, have varying physiological responses to heat, Schoen said. Compared to salmon, which get sluggish in warm temperatures, northern pike thrive and become speedier swimmers, he said.

“If it keeps getting warmer, they get much better at catching salmon,” he said. “They’re amazing ambush predators.”

Deshka pike are actually eating less salmon than they did in past years, analysis of stomach content shows. But that is not because they are turning away from salmon; rather, it is evidence of salmon declines in the river.

The abundance of adult king salmon in the Deshka dropped by 42% over the past decade. At about the same time, the biomass of juvenile salmon eaten by northern pike decreased by 30% to 74%, depending on age class.

Do not expect the pike to go away if they deplete all the salmon, warned Schoen, who grew up in Anchorage and spent a lot of time fishing in the Deshka.

Rather, they will turn to other fish, as they appear to have done in the Deshka, such as whitefish and rainbow trout. If they can’t eat fish, they eat flies, he said. Northern pike are even known to eat birds, such as eagle chicks and ducklings, small mammals like voles and shrews — and, on occasion, each other.

“Once they wipe out the salmon, the pike don’t die off because they run out of food,” Schoen said.

Northern pike are native to the Interior and northern parts of Alaska, but they are not part of the natural ecosystem south of the Alaska Range. The first introduction was about seven decades ago, prior to statehood, and traced to the Bulchitna Lake, which is part of the Susitna River drainage. Through the following years, flooding and reproduction spread the fish to new places. And they have proved persistent, showing up not just around the Matanuska-Susitna Borough but also in Anchorage and, to biologists’ dismay, on the Kenai Peninsula.

As entrenched as the pike infestation is in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, the salmon picture there is not beyond hope, Schoen said.

Pike prefer areas with slow-moving waters and lots of plants. That means areas with swift-flowing waters and gravelly banks are much less likely to be invaded by pike, and there are several such pike-resistant spots in the borough.

Even though it can’t get rid of all the pike, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has had some success suppressing the invaders in certain important Matanuska-Susitna spots, Schoen said.

One is Alexander Creek, a 40-mile waterway that was one of the most important Northern Cook Inlet freshwater sites for king and silver salmon.

A multiyear program launched by the department resulted in removal of more than 25,000 Northern pike from Alexander Creek by 2021, according to a department report. Salmon numbers have improved. But pike remain a persistent problem, and suppression should continue, the report concluded.

Through its activities as part of the Alaska Invasive Species Partnership, a multiagency organization, the department is pursuing a long-term plan to control northern pike.

The post Higher temperatures spur Alaska’s invasive pike to eat more, a bad sign for salmon appeared first on Chilkat Valley News.

SEARHC cut the ceremonial ribbon on its new $300 million Mt. Edgecumbe Medical Center in Sitka on April 23.

The event for the five-story, 234,528-square-foot facility featured a traditional blessing, a welcome and addresses by leaders of SEARHC and the Sitka community.

Charles Clement, SEARHC president and CEO of 14 years, said in his remarks, “This has been a real challenging project to pull together, beginning to end.”

“It has come to represent much more than a building for me,” said Clement, of Metlakatla. “It represents our commitment to our patients, our commitment to our communities, our commitment to our employees.”

SEARHC designed and constructed the medical services building. In 2020 SEARHC was selected by the U.S. Indian Health Service for the Indian Health Service Joint Venture Construction Program, which provides long-term funding for staffing and operation of the new hospital.

The hospital is about twice the size of the building it replaces but will have the same number of patient beds. That’s due to funding and license requirements, Clement told the Sitka Sentinel.

“To qualify as a critical-access hospital, it has to be 25 beds or less,” he said.

Services at the new building will start May 4, with departments making the transfer in May and June.

The new hospital comes 10 years after the city of Sitka entered talks with SEARHC about consolidating the services provided by SEARHC and city-owned Sitka Community Hospital. After long negotiations and voter approval in a city election, the Sitka Community Hospital’s buildings, grounds and business were sold to SEARHC in 2019, and SEARHC pledged to continue, and expand, the health and medical services available to the public.

Health care has become the largest sector of the Sitka economy, with total earnings at $67.3 million (782 jobs) in 2024, according to a Rain Coast Data presentation last year.

Growth in health care continues in Sitka. At the ribbon-cutting, the deputy director of the Indian Health Service, Benjamin Smith, announced that IHS will work with SEARHC in a joint venture to develop a new long-term care facility on the Sitka campus.

Clement told the Sentinel the project would “replace the long-term care facility over (at the Sitka Community Hospital building) with a newer, larger facility here on SEARHC campus.” Initial plans are for the facility to have 35 beds in the long-term care unit, up from the 19 beds SEARHC currently offers in a building at the former Sitka Community Hospital site.

In the interview, Clement also addressed SEARHC plans in other Southeast communities.

The tribal nonprofit plans to build “a small critical-access hospital” in Haines, he said, “based on the model that we developed in Wrangell.”

SEARHC opened its $30 million Wrangell hospital in 2021. It’s about one-fifth the size of the new Mt. Edgecumbe facility.

“We’re building a new medical office building (in Wrangell) to consolidate onto a single campus,” Clement said. “We have multiple facilities all over town, and we have enough land there to bring it all into a medical campus.”

The health care provider also plans to build eight rental units in Wrangell to house its traveler staff.

In Klawock, “we’re doing a lot of site work down there to get ready to do another clinic replacement, with a goal eventually developing, if we can make it work, long-term care and a critical-access hospital there,” Clement said.

Sitka will remain a hub for medical services in Southeast, and continues to be the only SEARHC location offering labor and delivery services, Chief Operating Officer Martin Benning told the Daily Sitka Sentinel.

“Everything that’s over at the current hospital is moving in here by the end of June,” Benning said.

As for the future of the old SEARHC hospital building and the Sitka Community Hospital building, Benning said, “We haven’t nailed anything down definitively, we’ve just been focused, ‘Let’s get this done,’ and then we’ll figure out, ‘What do we do?’”

Back at the old SEARHC hospital building on April 23, long-time employees and patients gathered around cafeteria lunch tables to reflect on the history of the building that began as a naval hospital in World War II.

The post SEARHC opens new $300 million Mt. Edgecumbe hospital appeared first on Chilkat Valley News.

Alaska utilities have warned of sharp price hikes when they start importing liquefied natural gas in the coming years to replace dwindling supplies of locally produced gas that’s traditionally been used for home heating and generating electricity.

The first LNG tankers aren’t expected to arrive for a few years.

But increases in the prices paid by consumers are starting to land now.

This month, Hilcorp, urban Alaska’s leading local gas producer, is hiking by 14% the price it charges the electric utility in the Matanuska-Susitna region north of Anchorage — to $9.00 per thousand cubic feet, from $7.89.

More increases scheduled over the next two years will bring the price to $11.75 by 2028 — a 49% jump from the rate in early 2026, before the effective date of a revised contract approved by the Mat-Su utility’s board in recent months.

The utility members’ electric bills will rise by more like 5% each year, since gas prices are only one part of the utility’s operating costs. But by 2028, that still will translate into a monthly hike  of more than $20 for typical consumers, according to utility correspondence with regulators.

Utility officials said the amended contract with Hilcorp gets them an extra year of guaranteed gas, when the alternative is a shortfall in supply that could force the utility to generate power with even more expensive diesel fuel.

But the officials also acknowledged that prices for consumers are likely only headed in one direction: up.

“We’re really seeing this as a gradual approach to the unfortunate increase in what Alaskans may see in fuel costs,” Kim Henkel, chief fiscal officer at Matanuska Electric Association, known as MEA, said in an interview earlier this year.

Officials with Hilcorp, urban Alaska’s dominant local gas supplier, said in a prepared statement that its amended contract with MEA reflects a “collaborative approach.”

The deal represents a “deliberate investment approach with our utility partners to bring forward existing production and provide a bridge while longer-term solutions are pursued,” the statement quoted Luke Saugier, Hilcorp’s top Alaska executive, as saying.

MEA isn’t the only utility whose ratepayers are facing imminent price hikes as a result of urban Alaska’s dwindling gas supplies.

In Fairbanks, the local electric utility has no natural gas plants of its own. Historically, as much as 30% of its power has been generated by other utilities’ gas plants farther south and shipped north along a transmission line.

Now, with no excess gas, those lower-priced power sources have dried up, and Fairbanks’ utility has been forced to boost its dependence on its own expensive diesel generation.

Residential prices there have risen nearly 50% since a low in 2020, to roughly double the national average.

Meanwhile, customers of urban Alaska’s main heating utility, Enstar, could also pay $12 a month more if the company moves forward with a proposed acquisition of a new storage reservoir. Enstar says it could fill the reservoir with both locally produced gas in the short-term, as well as imported LNG when cargoes start arriving.

With its own supplies tightening, Enstar says, the $240 million storage project would also add to its capacity to pipe gas out to home and commercial heating customers — as flows become increasingly difficult to sustain with less fuel produced by local companies at any one time.

Additional price increases are almost certain in the coming years when Enstar, and Anchorage and the Mat-Su’s electric utilities, begin replacing their locally supplied fuel with imported liquefied natural gas — expected to cost at least 50% more than what Enstar currently pays Hilcorp for local gas.

“I hate to be the one crying wolf,” John Sims, Enstar’s president, said in an interview. But such steep increases in the cost of energy, he added, are “the start of an economy that just doesn’t work any more.”

One problem, Sims said, is that local gas producers like Hilcorp have seen the prices that the utilities expect to pay for imported LNG, which have been revealed publicly in utility consultants’ reports. “Now I’ve got no leverage,” said Sims, whose company is investor-owned. “They know what the alternative cost is going to be.”

For now, it will be hard for the urban utilities to stem further price increases because of their deep dependence on fossil fuels — and decades of foregone decisions that could have been made to diversify and boost efficiencies, according to Phil Wight, an energy historian and utility expert at University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Urban Alaska’s four major electric utilities could have done more to cooperate on power plant construction and ongoing generation, so that only the most efficient plants were used, Wight said.

They also, added Wight, could have started construction on large-scale renewable projects when substantial federal tax credits were available. But no major projects are set to be built in the state before the credits phase out — and urban Alaska still runs on some 80% fossil power.

“We have these systemic structures that make it hard for us to really get out of this paradigm,” Wight said, adding: “We’re going to be in this pit for a while.”

Nathaniel Herz welcomes tips at natherz@gmail.com or (907) 793-0312. This article was originally published in Northern Journal, a newsletter from Herz. Subscribe at this link.

The post Alaska’s energy cliff isn’t coming. It’s already here appeared first on Chilkat Valley News.

Invasive northern pike have wreaked havoc in Southcentral Alaska rivers and lakes. Introduced illegally in the 1950s, they have been devouring juvenile salmon and other native species.

Now a University of Alaska Fairbanks study warns that matters could get even worse.

As temperatures rise in waterways, invasive pike eat more, said the study, published in the journal Biological Invasions. And as temperatures continue to rise, that trend will continue, the study said. Based on expected temperature trends, invasive northern pike will eat 6% to 12% more by the end of the century, the study said.

“We expect there will be significant warming in the future, and the amount of fish that pike consume is going to increase with it,” Benjamin Rich, who led the study while earning a master’s degree at UAF’s College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, said in a statement released by the university.

The UAF study found that over the past decade, northern pike of all age classes ate more as waters warmed. The increase was most dramatic in year-old pike, which upped their intake by about 63% over the period.

The study site was the Deshka River, a Matanuska-Susitna Borough waterway that is an important feeder to Cook Inlet and commercial fisheries there. The 44-mile river, a tributary of the Susitna River, is also a cherished destination for Southcentral Alaska sport anglers.

It is famous for its abundance of salmon — or it has been. Salmon in the Deshka is a lot less abundant now than in the past.

The decline is a decades-long problem that affects king salmon in particular. State and federal biologists have cited numerous reasons for  the decline.

The presence of invasive pike is one of them; pike have eaten a lot of juvenile king salmon, also known as Chinook, and coho salmon, also known as silver salmon.

Heat stress is also among the myriad causes of declines. The Deshka is particularly vulnerable to heat. It is in a flat area and not glacier-fed, and it is known to be one of the warmest river systems in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough.

It is the subject of ongoing temperature monitoring and studies by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the conservation group Cook Inletkeeper and others.

In 2019, a record-hot year in Alaska, waters in the Deshka were particularly warm — exceeding 81 degrees Fahrenheit that July, according to readings by Cook Inletkeeper.

Warmer temperatures, along with speeding pike metabolism and spurring more food consumption, appear to be sharpening the northern pikes’ predation skills, said Erik Schoen, a UAF fisheries biologist and a study co-author.

Fish, which are cold-blooded animals, have varying physiological responses to heat, Schoen said. Compared to salmon, which get sluggish in warm temperatures, northern pike thrive and become speedier swimmers, he said.

“If it keeps getting warmer, they get much better at catching salmon,” he said. “They’re amazing ambush predators.”

Deshka pike are actually eating less salmon than they did in past years, analysis of stomach content shows. But that is not because they are turning away from salmon; rather, it is evidence of salmon declines in the river.

The abundance of adult king salmon in the Deshka dropped by 42% over the past decade. At about the same time, the biomass of juvenile salmon eaten by northern pike decreased by 30% to 74%, depending on age class.

Do not expect the pike to go away if they deplete all the salmon, warned Schoen, who grew up in Anchorage and spent a lot of time fishing in the Deshka.

Rather, they will turn to other fish, as they appear to have done in the Deshka, such as whitefish and rainbow trout. If they can’t eat fish, they eat flies, he said. Northern pike are even known to eat birds, such as eagle chicks and ducklings, small mammals like voles and shrews — and, on occasion, each other.

“Once they wipe out the salmon, the pike don’t die off because they run out of food,” Schoen said.

Northern pike are native to the Interior and northern parts of Alaska, but they are not part of the natural ecosystem south of the Alaska Range. The first introduction was about seven decades ago, prior to statehood, and traced to the Bulchitna Lake, which is part of the Susitna River drainage. Through the following years, flooding and reproduction spread the fish to new places. And they have proved persistent, showing up not just around the Matanuska-Susitna Borough but also in Anchorage and, to biologists’ dismay, on the Kenai Peninsula.

As entrenched as the pike infestation is in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, the salmon picture there is not beyond hope, Schoen said.

Pike prefer areas with slow-moving waters and lots of plants. That means areas with swift-flowing waters and gravelly banks are much less likely to be invaded by pike, and there are several such pike-resistant spots in the borough.

Even though it can’t get rid of all the pike, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has had some success suppressing the invaders in certain important Matanuska-Susitna spots, Schoen said.

One is Alexander Creek, a 40-mile waterway that was one of the most important Northern Cook Inlet freshwater sites for king and silver salmon.

A multiyear program launched by the department resulted in removal of more than 25,000 Northern pike from Alexander Creek by 2021, according to a department report. Salmon numbers have improved. But pike remain a persistent problem, and suppression should continue, the report concluded.

Through its activities as part of the Alaska Invasive Species Partnership, a multiagency organization, the department is pursuing a long-term plan to control northern pike.

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