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ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Even before this fishing season began, Alaska fishery biologists expected they could be in for a funky year.

Cold waters in the Alaska Current sweeping the Gulf of Alaska warned them salmon were likely to return later than normal.

Unexpected, though, was that fewer of the fish would come back at all. Some biologists are wondering now whether a northern ocean chilled by La Nina — El Nino's frigid alter ego — might have done more than just delay returns.

Some places, the result has been a disaster.

Commercial fisheries on the Yukon River are closed. Subsistence fishing there has been cut back significantly. And biologists with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game are still worried that too few salmon will escape nets and fish wheels to ensure future runs.

The spawning goal is 100,000 of the big fish upriver. Projections based on early sonar counts at Pilot Point on the lower river indicate the entire king run might number only 100,000, possibly less. It's normally at least twice as large.

Some Canadians are already calling for a moratorium on fishing for Yukon kings. They are worried Alaska fisheries could snare enough fish bound for Canada, where much of the Yukon run spawns, that there won't be enough to meet a treaty-guaranteed goal of 45,000 spawners — let alone additional fish to support traditional Native fisheries.

"My family has gone without salmon for ... this is going to be the third year we don't get any," First Nations' chief Carl Sidney told Canadian Broadcasting Corp. Sidney lives in Teslin, a small community along the Alaska Highway south of Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, and chairs the Yukon Salmon Committee.

Sidney is not happy with Alaska salmon managers.

"We are at the end of the line, and we're the ones that see this fish is in trouble ... and they will not listen," he said. "They wouldn't listen, and they kept (their) commercial fishing and their subsistence fishery over there. That's totally out of hand."

Alaska officials have defended early management decisions based on indications that salmon runs all over the state are late.

Unfortunately, said Jeff Regnart, Fish and Game's supervisor of commercial fisheries in Southcentral Alaska, "a weak run behaves a lot like a late run."

An Anchorage based fisheries manager, Regnart has first-hand experience with just the sort of problem that happened on the Yukon. Biologists here allowed commercial setnet fisheries at the mouth of the Susitna River to catch Deshka River-bound king salmon despite early indications of a weak run.

Sport fisheries biologists, who regulate the in-river fishing on the Deshka, did the same thing. Everyone thought the fish were late, and would eventually show. They didn't.

Angling on the Deshka was finally stopped June 20 when biologists concluded so few were coming that every last one would be needed for spawning. The Deshka has a minimum goal of 13,000 spawners. As of Wednesday, only 3,687 kings had passed the river's fish counting weir. Though the run historically sees a big bump of fish just before July, nobody is expecting a big enough bump to get anywhere close to the spawning goal.

The Deshka and Yukon aren't the only places were kings are struggling. King runs are weak all over the state from the Karluk River on Kodiak Island to the Anchor River at the tip of the Kenai Peninsula to the Copper River south of Cordova.

"It's kind of across the board," said Regnart.

"It's the proverbial question of are they weak or are they late or are they both?" added regional sport fisheries supervisor Jim Hasbrouck. "It seems like with some sockeye stocks, they are late."

With kings, though, it seems like both.

An emergency order will close the Karluk Sunday night. As of Wednesday, only 394 kings had passed a weir on their way to the spawning grounds. The goal is 3,600 spawners.

The Anchor River on the Kenai Peninsula is doing better. More than 4,000 kings have returned there, but that's only about two-thirds the number for this time in the last couple of years. And the situation looks much the same at the popular, put-and-take Fishing Hole on the Homer Spit.

"Our abundance is down a little bit," said area sport fisheries biologist Nicky Szarzi. "I think they're coming slowly. I think we're going to have kings coming on into August."

Commercial fishermen were expected to catch 43,678 Copper River kings by June 17. They have actually caught only 11,194, far off the 10-year-average of 40,356 by that date. And it comes in a year when Fish and Game forecast a better than average king run.

Nobody really knows, but clearly something went wrong in the ocean given that both wild and hatchery runs have come back weak. Some fishermen — subsistence, sport and commercial — have tried to blame increasing incidental harvest of kings in pollock trawls in the Bering Sea, but biologist Dan Bergstrom of Fish and Game is skeptical.

Certainly the department would like to see incidental catches of kings go down, not up, he said. But he added that the trawlers incidental catch of kings appears to be coming from a big mixing pot of runs from streams not only in Alaska but all along the Pacific Northwest coast down to Washington state.

The state is now doing genetics studies to determine which rivers are losing fish to the trawlers, but even if the take is more than the 130,000 reported, it is doubtful it would have much affect on any individual Alaska river.

For one thing, about half the fish the trawlers caught are thought to be Canadian. That leaves only 65,000 Alaska fish, and the Yukon River alone appears to be short more than 130,000.

Regnart said cold water in the Gulf of Alaska has him worried that the North Pacific could be in for a long-feared "regime change," but that it's way too early to even start thinking about that. Historically, such changes appear to have altered ocean pastures to favor Pacific Northwest salmon at the expense of Alaska salmon and vice-versa.

"Hopefully, this is just one year," Hasbrouck said.

Nobody managing fisheries in state really wants to the think about the alternative.

Alaska salmon have been on the top of the pyramid for about 30 years while Northwest salmon struggled, in large part because of destruction of spawning habitat as well as ocean conditions. Attempts at commercial ranching of salmon in Oregon and Washington failed in the late 1970s and 1980s because no matter how many millions of young salmon hatchery salmon dumped in the ocean not enough fish came back.

Biologists suspect this will change one day, and that Alaska hatchery fish will struggle while Pacific Northwest hatchery fish thrive. And wild runs, which are harder to manage because of environmental conditions that affect spawning success, will mirror those hatchery returns.

But it's always hard to say with salmon.

Even this year in Alaska, with king runs struggling almost everywhere and red salmon returns below expectations as well, salmon numbers look to be strong on the Kenai and Kotzebue rivers.

What might they have in common that sets them apart this year?

"Other than that they both begin with 'K's?" Hasbrouck asked.

Anything more than that would be just a wild guess. Because for all scientists know about salmon now, there is even more they don't know.

Kenai and Kotzebue fish could have all migrated to remote corners of the ocean with better pasture. They could have somehow ended up in feeding areas with few predators. They could have grown fatter in the rivers as young fish, hitting the ocean larger and with a better chance of survival.

Or something altogether different could have happened.

After all, the most prominent characteristic in the nature of nature is its unpredictably.