[Wasillaguy]

Commercial fishing is another problem- somewhere around 70% of the returning salmon are caught in nets at the mouths of the rivers by purse seiners that motor up from Seattle every year. In 2014, commercial fishermen harvested 28.8 million sockeye, 557K chum, 266K coho, 1.3 million pink, and 13K kings. This is in Bristol Bay alone.

Now imagine the days before commercial fishing, when all of those fish would have run into the interior, some hundreds and hundreds of miles inland, where they die and are then eaten by birds, wolverine, fox, coyote, bear, etc. Any that was not consumed by animals served to fertilize the river banks, promoting growth of a dozen types of berries as well as willow (which the moose eat).
How much less wildlife lives in these areas today than when it was annually blessed with all this meat? The rivers and creeks are literally the veins that carry the life blood of the interior. Taking the fish at the mouth is like applying a tourniquet.