Cook Inlet beluga whales (CIBW) are an endangered population of toothed whales in southcentral Alaska that have not shown signs of recovery over the past two decades. Since the 1999 harvest moratorium, the number of whales in the population has remained relatively stable, with the 2022 estimate at 381 whales. Despite extensive research efforts since its Endangered Species Act listing in 2008, the mechanisms limiting population...

Hatcheries release >4.5 billion juvenile Pacific salmon ( Oncorhynchus spp.) into the North Pacific Ocean annually, raising concerns about competition with wild salmon populations. We used retrospective scale analysis to investigate how the growth of chum salmon ( O . keta ) from western Alaska is affected by the abundance of chum salmon from Japanese hatcheries and wild pink salmon ( O . gorbuscha ) from the Russian Far East....

Local adaptation has been demonstrated in spatially or temporally distant animal populations but seldom in proximate populations. To address the scale of local adaptation in Pacific salmon ( Oncorhynchus spp.), two generations of hybrids between temporally separated spawning segments were made in a population of pink salmon ( O. gorbuscha ) and compared with controls to evaluate the genetic architecture underlying adult migrat...

Understanding how species might respond to climate change involves disentangling the influence of co‐occurring environmental factors on population dynamics, and is especially problematic for migratory species like Pacific salmon that move between ecosystems. To date, debate surrounding the causes of recent declines in Yukon River Chinook salmon ( Oncorhynchus tshawytscha ) abundance has centered on whether factors in freshwate...

Regional coastal conditions have a strong influence on juvenile salmon survival during their critical first months in the marine environment. Salmon (genus Oncorhynchus) survival has been thought to be favored within the high latitude downwelling domain if water column stabilities increase, whereas stability may have the opposite effect in upwelling‐dominated lower latitudes. In this study, the relationships between water colu...

A bstract We used simulation to investigate robust designs and analyses for detecting trends from population surveys of Alaska harbor seals. We employed an operating model approach, creating simulated harbor seal population dynamics and haul‐out behavior that incorporated factors thought to potentially affect the performance of aerial surveys. The factors included the number of years, the number of haul‐out sites in an area, t...