By July 7, the Nushagak district on the west side of Bristol Bay had a harvest of 6.6 million reds, and had exceeded the forecast for both harvest and run of the wild salmon. Meanwhile, the Naknek-Kvichak district remained closed to commercial harvest, and the Egegik district was failing to perform up to preseason expectations.

No prices were posted yet for Bristol Bay's salmon, while in Upper Cook Inlet, where the harvest was at a mediocre pace, fishermen were garnering 85 cents to $1.55 a pound for sockeyes. State biologists said the big surprise so far this season has been strong harvests in the Kasilof River special harvest area, a terminal fishery, where more than 30,000 sockeyes were harvested in one 30-hour opening.

Nushagak district area biologist Tim Sands said sockeyes were going up the river in unprecedented numbers, and that escapement on the Wood River was estimated at 2.8 million reds, compared to the 1.1 million biologists had hoped would escape.

Sands and area biologist Slim Morstad in King Salmon both noted the reds are smaller compared to last year.

"The fish are smaller than average, 30 millimeters, one of the smallest we have seen in 30 years, " Morstad said. "It could be a large volume of fish out in the ocean and limited resources for them to feed on, so they are not growing this big. It takes a lot of resources for fish to grow."

Last year's sockeyes, by comparison, were extremely large. "The food availability was good for them," he said. "It's no doubt food-related."

The fish would be bigger if they had more food to eat, but it's also a question of whether there is less plankton or more fish, or a combination of both, Sands said.

"Right now we are looking at the best run ever in the Nushagak district in over 120 years," he said. "The fishermen are tired. They have been fishing 20-plus hours a day for 10 days, and there is no end in sight. We are still having 200,000 sockeye a day escaping up the Wood River."

On the east side of Bristol Bay, fishermen are pragmatic regarding the lack of harvest, Morstad said. "They are fishermen," he said. "They understand you can't have record runs every year. There is optimism still. We are starting to see some better numbers, but it's still nowhere near what Egegik is capable of doing."

Morstad said the Egegik district has been very sporadic this year. "People have expectations, and the run is not living up to it at the moment," he said. Still he said he has heard good comments on the quality of the clean-looking fish that are being harvested.

In Upper Cook Inlet, meanwhile, the run was living up to its forecast of being a poor one, said area management biologist Jeff Fox.

On the heels of 2004 and 2005 runs that brought in harvests in excess of 5 million sockeyes, the estimated harvest through July 6 was 306,000 fish, according to state reports.

"We've had smaller sockeyes than normal, but just by a little, and a lot of chums and cohos, which is very abnormal," Fox said. "They (chums and cohos) usually come later."

"We've had warm ocean conditions for several years, but right now we have cold water conditions, and cold water is less productive than warm water. But we have super nice-sized chums and cohos being caught right now," Fox said.

All this talk about the size of sockeyes came as no surprise to Rick Steiner, a conservation specialist with the Marine Advisory Program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks School of Fisheries and Ocean Science.

Steiner cited a 1996 Bering Sea ecosystem report of the Nation Academy of Sciences' National Research Council, which said it was extremely unlikely that the productivity of the Bering Sea ecosystem could sustain current rates of human exploitation as well as large population of marine mammals and bird species that existed before known exploitation - especially recent exploitation - began.

"Obviously with the number of problems in the Bering Sea and all those fisheries, and ecosystem problems, there is a big problem," Steiner said. "The Bering Sea has not been sustainability managed."

Steiner said acidification of ocean waters is becoming a concern for a number of people, since plankton - a major source of food for salmon and others in the ecosystem - need a stable water chemistry where the pH, a measure of acidity, is neutral.

Scientists think this is a result of enormous quantities of carbon dioxide being admitted into the atmosphere, and that about half of that carbon dioxide, about 120 billion to 150 billion tons of it, has been absorbed in the oceans, he said

The carbon dioxide - produced by combustion of fossil fuels in motor vehicles, power plants and other sources - forms carbonic acid, which makes the oceans more acidic. If the carbon dioxide levels reach those that they are expected to reach by 2050, certain plankton and coral will have a difficult time functioning, he said.

It is primarily zooplankton, an animal plankton rather than a plant plankton, that sockeye salmon depend on as a food source. "If you start messing with the productivity of the oceans, at a very fundamental level you are going to affect productivity in ways we are very worried about at this time," Steiner said.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., on July 5 released its own study on the affects of global warming.

The report said that worldwide emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning are dramatically altering ocean chemistry and threatening marine organisms, including corals, that secrete skeletal structures and support oceanic biodiversity. A report summarizes the known effects of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide on these organisms, known as marine calcifiers, and recommends future research for determining the extent of the impact.

Joan Kleypas, a scientist at the center and the report's lead author, said it is clear that seawater chemistry will change in coming decades and centuries in ways that will dramatically alter marine life.

"But we are only beginning to understand the complex interactions between large-scale chemistry changes and marine ecology," Kleypas said. "It is vital to develop research strategies to better understand the long-term vulnerabilities of sensitive marine organisms to these changes."

The report, called Impacts of Ocean Acidification on Coral Reefs and Other Marine Calcifiers, warns that oceans worldwide absorbed approximately 118 billion metric tons of carbon between 1800 and 1994. Oceans are naturally alkaline, and they are expected to remain so, but the interaction with carbon dioxide is making them less alkaline and more acidic. The increased acidity lowers the concentration of carbonate ion, a building block of the calcium carbonate that many marine organisms use to grow their skeletons and create coral reef structures.