From the Archipelago: The Salmon Forest

December 2002 - January 2003

This is an article from WaveLength Magazine, available in print in North America and globally on the web.
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by Alexandra Morton

Alex’s daughter Clio drawn to a wild salmon caught in the waters of the Broughton Archipelago.

The summer was a blissful series of clear, calm days with lots of whales. Little Springer seemed to enjoy this summer too. With extraordinary resilience, this little whale has moved among her closest female relatives to make a place for herself. Sometimes she's seen with her Granny, sometimes with her Great Aunt's youngest daughter. At the time of writing she has returned to the young female, A51, who was orphaned herself years before and who has been teaching young Springer to stay away from boats. The winter will test these new-forged bonds and spring will be when we learn how this story ends.

But whales are not the only creature I track. I also seek escaped farmed salmon.

When I pulled up to the crisp little gillnet boat, Rick and Lynn smiled and waved. "No, we didn't catch any Atlantic salmon last night. Actually we didn't catch much of anything!"

They helped me tie alongside and offered a steaming cup of coffee. Little Claire was professionally feeding her younger brother at the galley table as I watched the crew pull in the last set of this fishing opening. I love the squeak of the gill net corks as they wind onto the drum and the smell of the net. They remind me of my peaceful days fishing with Billy Proctor and my little boy.

But these were different times: my son is a man now and this net came aboard empty. No longer wondering about how many escaped farm salmon had been caught, I turned to Lynn. "Where are all the five million pinks that are supposed to be here?"

Lynn shrugged. "What about those lice you studied last year around the fish farms? Could they have anything to do with this?" When the fishery closed they had twelve pink salmon. They should have had 1,000.

This wasn't the first time I had looked at this run of fish. These were the adults returning from the sea lice infestation I had studied on the juveniles last year. While my data had clearly suggested 78% of these fish would die before coming back to spawn, I had thought nature might work a miracle here and make up the difference with the extraordinary ocean survival rates wild Pacific salmon are now enjoying.

The Pacific Ocean oscillates between regimes which favour and tax salmon, and the last few years have benefited salmon. Salmon of all species are coming back in greater abundance. This year's Fraser River sockeye were not only abundant beyond expectations, they were a pound and half heavier on average.

A few weeks after the failed gillnet opening, tour operators who take people into watersheds to watch grizzly bears began asking, "Where are all the pink salmon?" Young cubs were being eaten by starving adults. Tour guests burst into tears watching panicked bears searching the river for the calories they required to survive winter. The usual 300 eagles never gathered and the few that live in the valleys of Knight Inlet ate seagulls, a poor substitute for the rich, vitamin endowed flesh of a salmon.

"The pinks have crashed" was the phrase of wonder this fall in languages as diverse as a bear's growl and an eagle's screech. It reverberated through homes, canyons and across open water, right up to the doors of the the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. And there it was silenced. "There were no lice, the pinks are fine... they're just late. We expected a crash."

A dysfunctional agency, spinning falsehoods that made me angry as the pink salmon elsewhere on the coast came home in glorious abundance.

It's time to clean that house out, time to examine priorities and protect one of the last great wild food resources our planet has bestowed on us.

What is a pink salmon anyway? Why all the fuss? They're just a runt of a salmon, no trophies among them. They fill those tiny cans on the market shelf. Tuna probably taste better anyway, and who cares if those little cans disappear - life would go on without a ripple, wouldn't it?

To answer that, let's take a journey back to the beginning. This tiny bit of life, curled into the shape of a comma, struggles against the rose tinted membrane that entraps it. Finally free, the delicate spinal cord straightens for the first time and begins the gentle sashay that makes this a salmon. As the yolk sac forming a pregnant-curve in the tiny fish's belly draws up, the little fish becomes restless. Lying in the gravel is no longer enough, she wants to move, craving the taste of something she has never known - salt.

In a flood of life she and her cohorts emerge under cover of night and pour down river. Birthing into a cool April sea, the river pushes this tender life out beyond the delta. "Swim and bring home riches from the sea so that I may bear again," is the river's last message as she embeds her scent to guide the fish home. These babies need salt now, but in a little over a year, the river will be the only thing on these fishes' minds.

The kingfisher blinks in pleased surprise. As if suicidal, the blue and white-flecked bird leaps off her perch and falls headlong into the sea. Gone for an instant, she flutters back to her perch and deftly whacks the silver fish twice, then closes her eyes as the fish slips down her throat and trips an inner clock: time to make eggs and continue this kingfisher line.

By the first of May, dark ribbons of five centimeter-long fish snake for kilometres along steep rock shores and swirl above white shell sea floors in shallow coves. Young coho, fat and sassy after a year in the stream, position themselves below the pinks. Brilliant, predatory flashes remove all who are slow, damaged or inferior, until only the robust and finest fan out from the archipelago waters. Now the internal instructions shift: it is time to leave the shore and sunlight and dive out of sight. The sweep of the growing spotted tails continue to push the unseen masses west. For the next fifteen months, the river feeds the ocean. Everywhere that the pink salmon school, life is assured, new generations begin, and always, the pinks are continuously honed to perfection by their predators.

Feeding low on the food chain, on plankton blooming under an open ocean sun, these fish avoid the insidious toxins we have unwisely loosed into the atmosphere. Higher up the food-chain, fat molecules bind tight to these toxins and carry them home to all of us carnivores. But the pink salmon doesn't seek the accumulated fat in higher trophic layers; she feeds as directly upon the sunlight as animal life can, and she stores this in her rapidly growing body until the river whispers, "Come home to me."

Eagles, salmon, bears, the forest... it all ties together.

Some forms of life were simply designed to feed the masses, and pink salmon are one of these. Returning home, they grow the sea lion pups, nourish the mighty orca, offer a package of protein just the perfect size to be carried into an eagle's nest, and feed communities of humans. If they all made it back into the river, they would not fit, but if none came home at all, this passage of life would become a sweep of death. Leaping in wriggling abandon, as if swimming up into the clouds, the early summer sign of pinks upon the coastal waters have brought a sense of peace to First Nation elders for many thousands of years. Winter survival has been assured. Sweeping her massive head, the mother grizzly can smell their arrival on the wind, and know that the cub inside her and the ones wrestling with her now would live to grow. The mink, the wolf, raccoon, raven, even the mountain goat and cedar tree would benefit from the nitrogen, phosphorous, fat, protein and minerals surging up-river, timidly at first and then with a rush so great that the level of the river itself is raised. As males and females find their perfect match, rosy eggs spill down into the gravel. The water ouzel, a bird that runs along the river bottom, chases these pearls of protein to refuel her motherhood-depleted body.

Bears drag fish beneath the trees of the salmon forest, feeding these giant plants that shade this river nursery and protect its banks so it's capable of making fish. The growth rings inside the trees stretch wide in response to the tons of fish fertilizer rotting into the forest floor. Insects lay eggs on decomposing ocean protein so that, come spring, there will be invertebrates to nourish young coho, Chinook, steelhead, trout and sockeye which - unlike the pinks - must stay and feed in the river.

Without the pinks there can be no bugs, so none of the larger salmon can survive. An eagle takes a bellyful of pink salmon into the alpine and leaves some behind to grow a clump of grass impregnated with nitrogen from the pacific gyre. And then a hush drifts down the watershed. The eggs are washed clean by oxygen-rich water in gravel beneath ice. Snow blankets the forest floor. And it all begins again.

To break this chain of life, to allow wondrous ancient DNA to unravel, to sentence death upon innocent life as diverse as snowflakes in a blizzard, should be a crime that all humanity guards against. Inside that tin beside the tuna is a blueprint for the perpetuity of life - our life, our world, our children's life.

This past year I have witnessed a line crossed, a line between abundance and death. I refuse to witness this any further. Only 1% of the pink salmon of my home waters came back this fall. When their progeny go to sea, we must ensure that there are no corporate farm fish along their route to kill these babies again. The evidence is clear to all that allow themselves to see. Enough is enough.

Listening to Whales Be sure to pick up Alex's beautiful new book, Listening to Whales to learn more about her incredible life and the orcas she studies. Born and raised in Connecticut, she began her career in marine mammal research in 1976 when she moved to California to work for noted dolphin researcher Dr. John C. Lilly. Since 1984 she has lived at isolated Echo Bay in the Broughton Archipelago where she studies the language and habits of the various pods of orcas that visit the area. Chapters: www.chapters.indigo.ca - Amazon: www.amazon.com

© Text and photos by Alexandra Morton (R.P.Bio) is a marine mammal scientist and writer in British Columbia's Broughton Archipelago.Visit her website at www.raincoastresearch.org.

 

 

 

 

© All photos by Laurie MacBride