Author: alaskaadmin

For decades, dogs have been verboten on the Pribilof Islands under a rule imposed by the federal government to protect the world’s largest concentration of northern fur seals.

Now, dogs are welcome — with important caveats.

Under a new interim rule enacted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, dogs may be brought to the islands, but only for the specific purpose of hunting for rats. Dogs allowed on St. Paul Island or any other part of the five-island archipelago must be trained and certified as rat-detectors and catchers, and their stays are limited to 180 days. The general ban on dogs, in place since the 1980s, remains intact, but the new rule creates an exception for dogs enlisted in the anti-rat work.

The Pribilofs have managed to stay rat-free even as other Alaska islands and coastal areas have become infested with the non-native rodents.

Rat-sniffing dogs would help keep things that way, according to the residents of St. Paul Island, site of the main community in the archipelago.

“We work very, very hard to keep this a rat-free island. And we also recognize that shipping lanes are opening up right in the Arctic and there’s just potentially, if not already, going to be more vessel traffic in this part of the world,” said Chelsea Campbell, marine mammal programs manager for the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island, the local tribal government.

Allowing dogs to help is a bit of “forward thinking,” she said. The idea is that “maybe we should have some ability to get a rat sniffing dog out here, just in case,” she said.

Rats are not native to any part of Alaska. But, introduced by ships, they have infested several coastal regions and become one of the most destructive invasive species in the state.

Once established, they can devastate natural ecosystems, especially on islands where bird populations have evolved without exposure to or defenses against any land-based predators. It is a longstanding problem for islands around the world. Invasive rats are even believed to be partly to blame for the extinction of the Dodo.

On St. Paul, there have been a few isolated cases of rats escaping ships, but almost all of those were caught immediately in traps set up at the harbor. One rat escaped that gauntlet in 2018; it was found dead 10 months later.

A reported but unconfirmed rat sighting in 2024 was the main impetus for the new rule, said Mike Williams, NOAA’s Pribilof Islands program manager. No rat was ever found, so if there had been one that escaped from a ship, it apparently died, he said.

Another impetus, Campbell said, was a visit in recent years by a cruise ship that underreported its rat-infestation problem.

Compared to other vulnerable Alaska islands, the Pribilofs have some advantages in their fight against rats.

Community members have been vigilant in the anti-rat program, in coordination with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and other entities and organizations.

Additionally, ship traffic through the Pribilofs is not quite as heavy as that through the Aleutians, Wiliams said. And a “saving grace” for the archipelago, he said, is the native population of Arctic foxes.

The Pribilof foxes make up a genetically distinct population known for the blue tint that shows up in the animals’ fur. Williams said they do not bother the fur seals.

They have a varied diet that includes birds, eggs, marine resources and berries. And they are on hand to hunt and eat rats, Williams said.

One of the first rats ever seen on St. Paul, an event in the 1990s, was actually in the mouth of a passing fox, he said.

The new rule went into effect on Aug. 6. For now, Williams and Campbell said, there is no particular dog or dog trainer yet identified as a candidate for Pribilof work.  

Williams said that if a rat-catching dog is sent to St. Paul, it might make the most sense to have it there in the winter, when any rats on the island would be concentrated in town rather than across a wider area where they may not be able to find food.

“You want a small, focused area to search rather than the whole entire island,” he said.

On the other hand, having a rat-sniffing dog on duty during the summer might be useful to ensure that ships that come to the island are safe, Campbell said.

Rat eradication

Although it is difficult to eject rats once they are established, it is not impossible.

Rat eradication has been successful at some islands, and possibly most famously at an Alaska site formerly called Rat Island. It got the name because it was the first place in Alaska to be invaded by rats; it is believed that the rodents swam ashore from a wrecked Japanese sailing ship in the late 1700s.

A cooperative effort between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and two nonprofits, Island Conservation and the Nature Conservancy.

By 2012, the bird populations there had recovered, and the island was officially bestowed with its Unangan name: Hawadax.

The Fish and Wildlife Service is now planning for similar rat eradications on four other Aleutian islands: Kiska, Attu, Amchitka and Great Sitkin. Like Hawadax, all four islands are part of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge. Different types of rat poison are being considered, along with genetic biocontrol technology, which is a process that uses genetic engineering to limit reproduction.

Kiska and Attu were occupied by the Japanese during World War II, and a brutal battle occurred on Attu in 1943. The rats there are war legacies. The threat is particularly ominous in Kiska because that rugged volcanic island is home to what is considered a “superflock” of seabirds, particularly auklets, but also an ever-expanding population of rats using the same rocky crevices to kill and stash their prey. Since Kiska is much bigger than the island now called Hawadax, rat eradication there would be more challenging, the Fish and Wildlife Service notes.

The rat eradication proposals for the four Aleutian sites are moving forward, though gradually.

Scoping, the initial phase that leads to an environmental impact statement, was conducted in 2024. A draft environmental impact statement is expected to be released later this year. A draft environmental impact statement is expected this fall, to be followed by a final EIS and a decision on action next year, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service.

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Earlier this summer, I was jogging on a local trail with my 7-year-old black lab mutt, Camas, when she suddenly froze. The fur along her spine bristled. Then she let out a single, sharp bark — a timbre I’d never before heard.

I caught the unmistakable musk of an animal and my hand shot to the bear spray on my chest. Halfway up a tree less than 20 yards away, a beautiful, small cinnamon black bear stared back at us.

The bear scampered off as Camas growled, standing her ground in front of me on the trail. “Good girl,” I told her, my heart rate slowing to a normal pace. My dog, I assumed, warned me early of a potential threat. I was proud.

In bear country, common wisdom holds that dogs serve as early bear alarms, or even deterrents. That belief, however, has long rested mostly on anecdote. Until recently, almost no one had tested whether it was actually true.

A new study in the Journal of Wildlife Management analyzed bear-dog conflicts involving black, polar and brown bears from Alaska to Florida. The results challenge the idea that dogs make people safer in bear country and they have me rethinking my relationship with Camas in the woods.

“If you think a house pet is likely going to be your bear, not only detector but deterrent, you might want to think twice about that,” lead author of the paper Tom Smith told me over Zoom, one of his dogs begging for attention in the background while mine snoozed next to me.

Smith, a research wildlife biologist at Brigham Young University in Utah, analyzed 326 bear-dog encounters spanning more than a century, drawing from newspaper articles, federal and state government reports, books, records compiled by other bear specialists, and internet searches.

Smith began working with bears more than 30 years ago in Alaska’s Katmai National Park. He’s published influential research on bear spray and guns as bear deterrents, and has become one of the world’s leading experts on human-bear interaction. “As soon as you become the bear guy, then everybody comes running to you for advice on how to be safe,” he said. “So I thought, ‘I’m going to have to get to the heart of this.”

Smith has long been interested in the way dogs impact humans’ odds of an encounter in bear country. But the issue became urgent and tangible to him following a 2023 attack that left two people and their dog dead in a tent in Canada’s Banff National Park. The issue hasn’t gone away. This summer alone, a jogger and his dog were mauled near Island Park, Idaho, while recordings of separate encounters involving dogs in Banff and Alberta went viral online.

The findings

The data show people are largely unprepared for bear encounters and naive to their possible consequences. Dogs ran away, fought with bears, provoked confrontations, drew owners in to fight off bears barehanded, and even boomeranged bears back to people.

The first surprise in the data was how few people carried any deterrent at all. That might be because people thought, erroneously, Smith says, that dogs would be sufficient to keep bears away. Recreators wielded bear spray in only about a tenth of cases and a firearm in roughly a third. All told, five people and 56 dogs died in the encounters Smith analyzed.

Contrary to some common wisdom, dogs also weren’t effective warning systems for bears. In fact, they alerted their owners early of a bear in only 1 in 11 of the encounters the study analyzed. Dogs provoked the bear, instigating the encounter, in more than half the cases. After the bear conflict began, things didn’t look much better: Dogs tangled with bears about 40 percent of the time, ran away in 20 percent of encounters, and didn’t engage at all in about 17 percent of cases. So much for dogs being excellent protectors.

Other findings were less surprising. Leashes were a major decider in the severity of the interaction. Unleashed dogs were involved in six times as many incidents as leashed pets. Smith said dogs without a leash can dart ahead of owners or crash through brush and spook a bear. Canines can also act as bear boomerangs. In 27 of the encounters, dogs brought a bear back to their owners. In 70 percent of these instances, the dog owner was injured. Worse yet, many owners in the data came to rescue their pet when it got in a scuffle with a bear, often with no deterrent. The result: 85 percent of the time, those owners were injured.

Additionally, the data reinforced something bear experts have known for years: the larger the group of people, the less likely the encounter. However, the presence of a dog dramatically shifts that risk. Dogs roughly doubled the odds of a conflict compared to the same-sized groups with no canine companions.

Taken as a whole, the data paint a portrait in which bears and domestic dogs don’t get along. Smith suspects it’s part of the long evolutionary relationship between bears and wolves. For thousands of years, wolves competed with bears for food, killed cubs and even kicked bruins off carcasses. Some of this behavior is on public display in places like Yellowstone National Park, where populations of both species flourish. Modern dogs may still trigger those ancient instincts.

Smith recognizes limitations and nuance in his data, too. For one, it’s important to note that the dogs in the analysis were domestic companions, not highly-trained guardian dogs meant to fend off predators — which data show can reduce bear presence at ranches and farms. Also, data on human-bear conflict inherently shows a bias, depicting only the encounters that went majorly wrong rather than the majority of experiences when people venture into the places bruins live and the species coexist without incident. “For the most part, people and their dogs pass through bear country without incident,” Smith wrote in the paper.

Should your pup join the hike?

“The takeaway isn’t to keep dogs out of bear country,” Smith said. “The takeaway is there are things you can do that greatly improve your odds.”

Best practices, backed by Smith’s data, say to travel in groups, eliminate smells if you’re camping and make noise. Bear bells, he says, don’t work. Above almost all else? “You have no business being in bear country without a deterrent,” Smith said.

Dogs just don’t cut it on that front. According to Smith, bear spray has the highest likelihood of fending off an aggressive bear for the vast majority of recreationists in bear country. But firearms can work too for experienced users. Carry your spray (or gun) where you can reach it in a split second. No matter what deterrent you choose, practice with it. Bear encounters can happen in seconds.

If you do take your dog, consider a leash. “It’s not just dogs and bears,” Smith said. “It’s also dogs and everything else.” Smith’s own dog had been sprayed by a skunk twice in the last month. Mine finds few greater joys in life than chasing ground squirrels, marmots and grouse. So, we’re both faced with navigating how to behave in wild places with these family members that, if they see a deer or elk or bear, may not be able to hold themselves back.

Since talking with Smith, I’ve thought about the role Camas plays in bear country in a more nuanced way. She’s warned me about bears — even since that encounter on my jog. But she’s also ignored bears less than 30 yards away, chased wildlife she shouldn’t and, even in her younger days, treed a black bear.

The lesson isn’t that dogs don’t belong in bear country writ large. It’s that they’re dogs. If recreating in bear country is an odds game, they’re not doing you any favors. As much as we love and trust them, they’re unpredictable. And they can make things worse as often as they make things better.

“It’s a personal thing, it really is,” Smith said. “We work in statistics with a pool of instances. But you are not a pool of instances. You’re you.”

This story was originally published by Mountain Journal at mountainjournal.org.

With the 2026 commercial salmon harvests winding down in Alaska, the seafood industry is already calculating how to navigate at a profit in 2027, given dynamic biological, economic, climate and market conditions.

Their forecast has a far-reaching socio-economic impact across the state — Bristol Bay’s commercial fishery had about $2 billion in economic impact and supported 15,000 jobs in 2019 according to research from the McKinley Research Group. 

Preliminary forecasts from the University of Washington for the celebrated Bristol Bay wild sockeye fishery are looking at a run of 45 million fish next year, up from the 2026 forecast of 41.5 million. But run size is just one of many factors under consideration.

Fish size is one of those factors: 45 million big fish have more meat — and a bigger economic effect — than 45 million smaller fish. The size of the fish also helps determine which products the processors will produce.

“When we get really big returns the fish are smaller for their age, because they are competing for their food,” said salmon researcher Daniel Schindler of the University of Washington School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. “We estimate how many fish of each age class are coming back.” 

For 2027 that preliminary estimate is 20 million fish that have spent three years in the ocean — known as three ocean fish — and 30 million fish that have spent two years in the ocean in 2027. Because there are more fish that have spent less time in the ocean, the overall catch will be smaller.

But the climate can affect how much of that forecast becomes a reality.

“The climate factor is baked into the number of fish we see,” Schindler said.  “The fish tell us how well they survived, so if it was a bad climate year we see it early in the numbers of young fish.”

The University of Washington and Alaska Department of Fish & Game both compile data on the Bristol Bay fishery. ADF&G compiles data on Bristol Bay using counting towers. Researchers at the University of Washington go to the spawning grounds and count the fish there. The two methods help inform a more accurate forecast.

The industry would like to increase the amount of domestically-caught fish that Americans consume. According to NOAA Fisheries, the national average consumption of domestically-caught seafood remains relatively flat at 19 pounds per person, with 80% of that seafood coming from foreign imports.  

An ongoing campaign of the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute focuses on boosting retail consumption of the Alaska catch, including an abundance of salmon, with an eye to how the economy, climate and marketing conditions are evolving. Planning for domestic and overseas markets for the coming year gets underway annually on July 1, with a concentration on harvest information, consumer trends and preferences and numerous other factors, said Greg Smith, communications director for ASMI. 

Smith said the organization’s emphasis is on the wild-caught harvest, the people who catch and process the harvest and the health,nutrition and sustainability of well managed fisheries. ASMI focuses on helping consumers overcome barriers to seafood purchases such as a lack of confidence in preparing seafood, uncertainty on sourcing and sustainability of fisheries, cost of product and convenience, he said. ASMI also focuses on ensuring younger generations become strong seafood consumers.

Harvest forecasts for Alaska’s 2026 salmon fisheries of 125.5 million fish were about 36% lower than a year earlier, resulting in prices per pound in retail shops being higher overall than in 2025. But with fewer fish for sale fewer are likely to be left in inventory for 2027, said fisheries economist Gunner Knapp. Such conditions could keep prices stable in the coming season.  

Long term growth in seafood production is dependent on consumer demand as well as selling fish in product forms that meet consumer demand. Both are important, Knapp said.

As of late July average prices of wild Alaska salmon fillets in the Anchorage area were $13.99 to $26.99 a pound, with sockeye and coho on the lower end and king salmon on the higher end. At Seattle’s Pike Place Fish Market the price of fresh wild Alaska sockeye fillets was holding steady at $29.99 a pound.

The bulk of seafood produced in the U.S. is consumed internationally, so the industry continues to turn its eyes to home — but there is competition from low prices from foreign markets. That fish may not be sustainably sourced with ethical labor practices. “U.S. domestic markets are increasingly important, so in many parts of the U.S. at higher end retail outlets you can find wild Alaska sockeye salmon for sale,” he said.

Knapp characterizes commercial fisheries as a risky business.

“Lots of opportunity and lots of risk, but the resources are so big and so valuable that there will always be a seafood industry in Alaska,” he said. “Only aquaculture has potential to grow.”

Aquaculture is when the fish are not wild caught but cultivated or raised in hatcheries.

“The reason I’ve observed so much more innovation in aquaculture than in wild stocks is that aquaculture is far more able to take advantage of technological innovation than wild fisheries because aquaculture has so much greater control of production,” Knapp said.

“Still because wild fisheries are much older they have stronger cultural traditions, with more dependent communities less receptive to innovation, although they may have more political power,” he said.

Meanwhile, NOAA Fisheries is working to calculate many climate factors affecting the state’s commercial fisheries, from winds and ocean currents to ocean temperatures and precipitation. For salmon, the varying and changing climate impacts winter snowpack, ice cover, growing season lengths and streamflow, said Nate Mantua, a physical scientist at NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, California.

“Right now there is a great deal of media attention on the developing El Nino event in the tropical Pacific,” Mantua said. “This is likely to impact Alaska’s winter and spring climate in 2027.” 

El Nino is a climate pattern defined by unusually warming of surface waters in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, weakening trade winds and global weather disruptions.  

The current forecast for Alaska’s winter includes increased odds for a warmer than average winter, and increased odds for above average precipitation in Southcentral Alaska and below average precipitation around Norton Sound.

“Another large factor in seasonal forecasts relates back to climate change and the fact that most every winter in the past decade has been warmer than winters before the 2000s,” Mantua said.

“Our ability to predict future climate is limited to about one year in advance and NOAA has an operational forecasting effort provided by the Climate Prediction Center.” 

The rise in greenhouse gas concentrations have caused ocean warming and increased acidification, which is bad for salmon.

University of Washington fisheries researchers have started producing a preliminary report to come out  the third week of August on the 2027 salmon fishery. Its formal preseason river by river forecast will come out in November, after ADF&G finishes collating its data on a river by river forecast.

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