Corals, Community, and Celebration: Oceana Goes to Salmonfest!  - Oceana USA
Home / Blog / Corals, Community, and Celebration: Oceana Goes to Salmonfest! 

August 22, 2025

Corals, Community, and Celebration: Oceana Goes to Salmonfest! 

BY: Jamie Karnik

Protect Alaska, Protecting Ocean Habitats

Picture this: you’re sitting at a booth wearing your best Oceana gear, talking with other Alaskans about the importance of healthy seafloor habitats and fish populations, when you hear a Mardi-gras style band heading your way. Wide smiles spread on everyone’s faces as a ragtag group of drums, tubas, trombones and trumpets start walking by, led by dancers, stilt walkers and clowns all dressed in a riotous explosion of color.  

Everyone’s eyes get as wide as their smiles a few seconds later when a 12-foot long sockeye salmon shows up, carried along by four salmon lovers who make it wriggle and swim like it’s heading upstream. 

That’s just one highlight from Salmonfest, a three-day arts and music festival dedicated to healthy fish and oceans held in Ninilchik, Alaska for one long weekend each August. The festival showcases artists and musicians from around the country and draws about 8,000 people every year. That means that for a few short days Salmonfest is technically the 7th largest city in Alaska! And this year Oceana was there! 

A CORAL COMMUNITY GARDEN

Oceana staff with our growing coral garden! Photo: Oceana / Jamie Karnik

Two members from Oceana’s Alaska team—campaign manager Lauren Hynes and communications manager Jamie Karnik—hosted a booth at this extraordinary event. The goal was to build community support for our campaign work in Alaska to protect corals and other critical habitats from being destroyed by bottom trawling and reduce the unintentional catching (known as “bycatch”) of nontargeted species like salmon in trawl nets. 

Oceana’s “coral community garden” was another definite highlight of the weekend, where dozens of kids (and more than a few adults!) used clay to mold beautiful corals, anemones, sea stars, sponges and more than one mer-person. The creativity and talent on display was truly amazing, and it was a joy to see Oceana’s booth table slowly become overtaken by vibrant representations of the ocean floor. 

The brightly colored clay corals on display also helped bring home the dangers faced by fragile living corals on the Alaska seafloor. While the explosion of blue, orange, pink, purple and other brightly colored parts of our seafloor garden drew delighted smiles from each visitor, those faces quickly changed to looks of alarm when they learned how living corals that might have been growing for hundreds of years can be destroyed by a single pass of a bottom trawl net. 

ONE BIG SMALL TOWN

People in Alaska often refer to the state as “one big small town,” because while Alaska is by far the largest state geographically (2½ times the size of Texas!) it is one of the smallest by population. It’s astounding how many people you might know in Alaska who end up connected to so many other people you know, and how small and interwoven the worlds of fishing and conservation are.  

Oceana campaign manager Lauren Hynes talking to other Alaskans about corals and bottom trawling. Photo: Oceana / Jamie Karnik

Just one example from Salmonfest—one of the captains from Oceana’s Gulf of Alaska expedition in 2022 happened to stop by our booth, and even better happened to be wearing a faded Oceana hat he received as a gift at the end of that adventure! 

Throughout the weekend Oceana’s Alaska team spoke with people aged 6 to 86 about corals and habitat, opening minds to the wonders of the Alaska seafloor and of the critical need to protect it. Some had been fishing in Alaska since the mid-1960s and told stories of past abundance. Others had just recently moved to the state and were excited to learn about the ocean waters offshore of their new home and how they could help protect them. 

Many were unaware there were corals in Alaska’s cold oceans waters at all, and even less aware of the dangers facing them.  

CORALS, SEAFLOOR HABITAT, AND BOTTOM TRAWLING

Corals, anemone and a bat star on the seafloor of the Gulf of Alaska. Photo: Oceana

Most people associate corals with warm weather places like Australia or Hawaii, but did you know that Alaska is home to some spectacular corals, sponges and other extraordinary habitats? Some of these living seafloor creatures can take hundreds of years to grow, and they are not only fragile and beautiful but are also incredibly important habitats for fish and other ocean life to feed, breed and hide from predators.  

The greatest threat to corals and other seafloor habitat is bottom trawling, a form of fishing where huge nets as long as a mile and several hundred feet wide are dragged along the seafloor, sometimes for miles, in an attempt to catch groundfish like flounder or sole. Along the way these nets indiscriminately plow over everything in their path, smashing corals and sponges, crushing crabs and other seafloor life, and doing irreparable harm to habitats. 

Bottom trawl graphic by commissioned by Oceana. The top view shows the scale of a bottom trawl net and the long cables that connect the net to a trawl vessel. The bottom “fish-eye” view shows the damage and bycatch from trawl nets. Artist: Lee Post

Thanks to years of campaigning by Oceana and others, most of Alaska’s ocean waters are protected from bottom trawling. Yet there is a large area that is still vulnerable to potential harm—the central and western Gulf of Alaska. Right now only 9% of the central and western Gulf is protected, but Oceana is campaigning to increase that protection to more than 90% using a science-based approach that would largely limit bottom trawling to where it is already occurring and ensure untrawled areas remain unharmed. 

HOW YOU CAN GET INVOLVED

Call on NOAA Fisheries to protect corals and other habitats in the Gulf of Alaska.  

Learn more about Oceana’s campaign to protect corals and other habitat in the Gulf of Alaska.  

P.S. Oceana will be at Salmonfest 2026 – will you be there too?  

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