Evidence is mounting that pink salmon, pumped by the billions into the North Pacific from fish hatcheries, are upending marine ecosystems. Climate change is making this worse.
The Tutka Bay Lagoon Hatchery is located at the edge of an isolated estuary off southcentral Alaska’s Kachemak Bay. Accessible only by boat from the closest hub community of Homer, the hatchery is one of 30 constructed by the state to boost commercial salmon fisheries that were struggling in the 1970s. On the last day of April, I board a water taxi in the Homer harbor to visit the facility.
Sawlsville and I put on rain gear and he hands me a red-bulbed headlamp to enter the dark incubation room, a cold, damp warehouse with what sounds like 100 faucets going full blast. Here, we meander among the incubators, shallow tanks stacked in rows like shelves lining grocery aisles. Water piped in from a nearby stream gushes through the incubators, filled with salmon fry that hatched in late fall and are now about the length of a matchstick.
This short life cycle is one reason why wild pink salmon are thriving in today’s changing ocean conditions. As waters warm, their ability to reproduce at breakneck speed enables pinks to quickly colonize new areas and recover from population drops, prospering like rats where other species might fail. Warming conditions are also altering the food chain in ways that appear to favor wild and hatchery pinks alike.
Now Hillstrand orders 46-centimeter bags, and she believes hatcheries are partly to blame. For nearly a decade, Hillstrand has pressed for reform in an industry she knows well. She spent 21 years working at salmon hatcheries across the state and estimates that she single-handedly released more than one billion young salmon into the ocean. At the time, she loved the work and those years of living in some of Alaska’s most remote and beautiful places.
In 2000, Ruggerone was studying scales of sockeye salmon from Bristol Bay. Like tree rings, fish scales hold marks that reveal the fish’s growth rate and age. While analyzing the data, Ruggerone noticed a pattern in sockeye growth that seesawed with the rise and fall of pinks he’d first learned about two decades before. “Sure enough, it just stood out,” he says. The growth in Bristol Bay sockeye dropped when pinks were abundant, just as populations of Puget Sound chum fell in Gallagher’s study.
These are disturbing trends, but when Ruggerone and biological oceanographer Sonia Batten from the North Pacific Marine Science Organization compared 15 years of plankton data with pink salmon abundances, a more alarming pattern emerged. For more than two decades, Batten and her team have been gathering data about the North Pacific’s smallest creatures using a meter-long torpedo-shaped sampling device called a continuous plankton recorder that is towed behind tankers and cargo ships.
But what, specifically, is the ecological fallout of the billions of pink salmon released into the North Pacific by hatcheries? Brendan Connors, a fisheries scientist at Fisheries and Oceans Canada, wanted to tease out the effects of industrially produced pinks from wild ones. Connors put himself through university as a fishing guide on Haida Gwaii, taking clients out with single-action reels for coho and chinook.
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