For more than 20 years, fisheries managers set Chinook salmon recovery goals, closed fishing seasons, and rationed some tribal catches down to a handful of ceremonial fish. The whole time, ocean fleets off British Columbia and Alaska were killing thousands more of those same salmon each year than the official records showed.
Newly revised data released by Canada through the Pacific Salmon Commission show that ocean fisheries, especially British Columbia’s recreational fishery, intercepted far more Endangered Species Act-listed Puget Sound Chinook than was believed. The under-reporting goes back two decades. The is a wake-up call about Chinook populations, which are still “in crisis,” according to the Washington State Recreation and Conservation Office. Because Southern Resident orcas depend on salmon, which sit near their lowest numbers on record, the treaty governing those fisheries is being renegotiated right now.
“We already knew Puget Sound Chinook and Southern Resident killer whales were in crisis,” said Dr. Nick Gayeski, a Senior Ecologist at Wild Fish Conservancy. “Canada’s underestimate of recreational Chinook harvest show that ocean interceptions were substantially higher than previously understood during a critical period for Chinook and killer whale recovery.
A 60% Toll Before the Fish Reached Home
In several Central and North Puget Sound watersheds, including the Nooksack, Skagit, and Stillaguamish rivers among them, revised estimates show Alaska and British Columbia fisheries intercepted more than 60% of returning adult Chinook before the fish ever reached Puget Sound. Distant ocean fleets were taking four to six times more Chinook from those rivers than every Puget Sound tribal, commercial, and recreational fishery combined.
The local cost is stark. In 2025, the Stillaguamish Tribe in Arlington, Washington, reported its ceremonial harvest of just 26 Chinook from a river its people have fished for generations.
The revised data traces to a single change. British Columbia updated the accounting method it had used for roughly 20 years to estimate catch in “mixed-stock” ocean fisheries, where weak and recovering runs from rivers up and down the coast are caught indiscriminately alongside healthy ones. The old method had understated that loss of salmon the entire time, with little public explanation, which is part of why Wild Fish Conservancy frames the episode as a transparency problem, not just a technical footnote.
What the Orcas Lost
The Southern Resident killer whales eat Chinook nearly to the exclusion of everything else, and the shortfall shows in long-term loss of these unique creatures. The most recent annual census, in July 2025, counted just 74 whales; Wild Fish Conservancy put the figure at 76 in mid-2026. Either way, the population has lost roughly a sixth of its members in two decades, and NOAA scientists point to the scarcity of large Chinook as the leading driver of the decline.
Recent modeling in Communications Earth & Environment found that cutting ocean interceptions before the fish reach orca feeding areas could raise Chinook abundance in the whales’ critical habitat by as much as 25%, restoring prey that was being removed at sea while everyone in the fishing community counted on it surviving to spawn.
What the Models Say Comes Next
Long-range projections are sobering under the status quo. A 2025 population model estimated the orcas could decline another 10.6% by 2150 if conditions simply hold at 2010–2020 levels. The same model found the population could grow 17.6% if Chinook productivity doubled, and more than double if specific runs, such as four-year-old Fraser River summer Chinook, rebounded sharply. The future of the whales, in other words, is largely a function of how many adult salmon survive to return.
Another study in Scientific Reports points to a compounding problem. Because ocean fisheries catch Chinook before they finish growing—immature fish can be up to 60% of the ocean catch—this selection contributes to shrinking the body size and reproductive output of future runs. Larger, older females carry more and bigger eggs and reach spawning habitat smaller fish can’t. The researchers found that when fisheries closer to the rivers let those large adults through, they can land greater total weight from fewer fish.
Puget Sound once saw as many as 690,000 Chinook return in a single year. Rebuilding anything close to that won’t come from one fix to a spreadsheet. But the timing matters: the United States and Canada are renegotiating the Pacific Salmon Treaty that governs these ocean fisheries; it’s negotiating window that opens roughly once a decade, and preservation is lever most likely to move the numbers that the models say determine whether salmon and orcas can recover together.
What You Can Do
The highest-leverage actions people can take are collective rather than individual:
- Track the Pacific Salmon Treaty Public comment periods and stakeholder meetings shape where, when, and how ocean harvest happens. Reform that shifts catch toward rivers and estuaries is the change researchers say matters most.
- Support in-river fisheries and tribal co-managers. Catching fewer, fully grown fish closer to home protects both salmon size and the treaty-reserved rights of Puget Sound tribes.
- Ask where and how your salmon was caught. When shopping or dining, look for river- or terminal-caught Pacific salmon over mixed-stock ocean-troll product when you can identify it. It’s a small move, but it nudges demand toward more selective fishing.
- Back habitat restoration in Puget Sound watersheds. Even perfectly counted harvest won’t recover Chinook without cold, clean, connected rivers for them to return to.