[env-trinity] Alaska salmon may bear scars of global warming

[Tom Stokely]

  Alaska salmon may bear scars of global warming

  The Los Angeles Times- 6/15/08

  By Kenneth R. Weiss, Staff Writer



  TANANA, ALASKA -- With a sickening thud, another hefty and handsome
  salmon lands in the waste barrel, headed for the dogs.

  "See, it's all of the biggest, best-looking fish," said Pat Moore,
  waving a stogie at the pile of discards. "It breaks my heart. My dogs
  cannot eat all that. The maggots will get them first."



   More Alaskan salmon caught here end up in the dog pot these days,  
  their
  orange-pink flesh fouled by disease that scientists have correlated with
  warmer water in the Yukon River.

  The sorting of winners and losers at Moore's riverbank fish camp
  illustrates what scientists have been predicting will accompany global
  warming: Cold-temperature barriers are giving way, allowing parasites,
  bacteria and other disease-spreading organisms to move toward higher
  latitudes.

  "Climate change isn't going to increase infectious diseases but change
  the disease landscape," said marine ecologist Kevin D. Lafferty, who
  studies parasites for the U.S. Geological Survey. "And some of these
  surprises are not going to be pretty."

  The emergence of disease in Alaska's most prized salmon has come as a
  shock to fishermen and fisheries managers. Alaskan wild salmon has been
  an uncommon success story among over-exploited fisheries, with healthy
  runs and robust catches that fetch ever higher prices at fish markets
  and high-end restaurants in Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo and London.

  Fishermen and regulators who have cooperated to save species from
  overfishing and local environmental hazards have been caught unprepared
  to deal with forces beyond their control: how to manage a fishery for
  climate change.

  The return of the king -- or chinook -- salmon is eagerly anticipated
  along the Yukon. The biggest of the salmon species, these kings arrive
  with a muscular flash of the tail, sun glinting off a speckled palette
  of blues and greens fading to silver and red.

  Savvy buyers from Japan converge on the docks near the river's mouth to
  purchase these fish that have bulked up with extra fat to swim more than
  2,000 miles, across Alaska, to spawn in the stream of their birth.

  As a fierce defender of the fish's reputation, Gene Sandone, a regional
  supervisor for Alaska's Fish and Game Department, was less than
  receptive to complaints from Tanana fishermen such as Moore that
  something was wrong.

  The chinook salmon they pulled from the Yukon River about 700 miles
  inland didn't smell right. It wasn't an instant, gag-inducing stench. It
  was more subtle but grew into an unpleasant odor of fruit rotting in the
  hot sun.

  More important, the flesh turned mealy. The salmon didn't dry right in
  smokehouses either. Instead of turning into rich red strips of salmon
  jerky, they turned black and oily like strips of greasy rotten mango.

  "If you don't weed out the bad ones, it'll stink up the whole
  smokehouse," Moore said, wielding a knife on his cutting table. "I only
  want the good stuff. I don't want second-rate fish."

  Salmon jerky strips are a staple among the Native Americans and
  subsistence fishermen in rural outposts such as Tanana, a village of 270
  people. "It'll keep you warm in the winter," said Lorene Moore, Pat's
  wife and a native of the village. In Alaska's bigger cities, these
  strips are a prized delicacy, fetching $20 or more a pound.

  When Bill Fliris, another Tanana fisherman, first noticed the problem in
  the late 1980s, he bundled up some salmon jerky strips and shipped them
  to a state Fish and Game biologist. A few weeks later, the biologist
  said it was "the damnedest thing -- they disappeared out of the freezer.
  You know: free strips."

  The next year, Fliris shipped more samples, and this time they were
  tested. But the state Fish and Game lab found nothing amiss.

  A friendly federal biologist advised the local fishermen to send
  samples, including hearts and organs that were covered with tiny
  pimples, to the Center for Fish Disease Research at Oregon State
  University.

  The Oregon lab quickly identified it as "white spot disease," caused by
  a microscopic parasite called Ichthyophonus hoferi. Ich (pronounced
  "ick") is a well-known disease, harmless to humans, that was blamed for
  devastating losses in the herring fishery in Scandinavia. A similar
  parasite can infect aquarium fish.

  The portion of Yukon salmon with Ich grew each year. Fishermen were
  throwing away as much as 30% of their catch, forcing them to catch more
  fish to fill their cache for the winter.

  "The Alaskan Department of Fish and Game wasn't interested," Fliris
  said. "They said, 'There's no money to study this. It's a natural
  disease. There's nothing we can do about it.' "



  So Fliris contacted an outsider: Richard M. Kocan, a fish disease expert
  at the University of Washington. Lining up a federal grant, Kocan began
  to test the fish in 2000, the same year the king salmon run suffered an
  unexpected temporary collapse that forced the closure of the river's
  commercial fishery.

  At the mouth of the Yukon, where the commercial gill netters operate,
  25% to 30% of the chinook salmon were infected, Kocan found. But the
  fish usually did not show signs of the disease.

   The same proportion were infected at midriver near Tanana, about
  halfway to the Canadian border. But here, nearly a third of the fish
  showed the salt-like flecks on their hearts and other organs, and their
  mealy flesh released the telltale smell of putrid fruit.

  Kocan went upstream to the spawning grounds near Whitehorse, Canada, and
  found that the proportion of infected fish dropped dramatically. But
  why? It didn't seem logical that the fish were recovering during the
  last part of their stressful 2,200-mile swim, accomplished over many
  weeks without eating.

  "The working hypothesis," Kocan said, "is that they died before they
  made it to the spawning grounds."

  Tracking what happens to these fish is difficult. The Yukon turns
  mocha-brown in the summer, when its swift waters carry a load of rock
  flour released by rock-pulverizing glaciers and other sediment. Salmon
  that perish sink out of sight.

  To test his theory, Kocan set up a laboratory experiment that compared
  the swimming stamina of infected rainbow trout with that of healthy
  trout. He used a chamber with water swift enough to exhaust a healthy
  fish in about 10 minutes. The infected fish lasted about two minutes.
  "It's like asking someone with heart disease to run a 10K race," Kocan
  said. "He's not going to do very well."

  That left a question: Why did the previously undetected disease show up
  in the late 1980s and resurface every year since?

  Kocan and his students scrutinized all the potential variables and found
  only one significant change: Average river water temperatures had been
  rising over the last three decades. The warming began earlier each
  spring, following an earlier breakup of the river's ice. The June
  temperatures showed the greatest increase, about 6 to 8 degrees warmer,
  and June is when king salmon return from the ocean and begin their long
  upriver migration to spawn.

  Unlike warm-blooded animals, the body temperature of salmon fluctuates
  with the temperature of surrounding waters. Laboratory studies of Ich
  infections in trout, a close cousin, have revealed that the incidence of
  disease and death rises as water warms, especially above 59 degrees.

  Kocan spent five summers on the Yukon River studying the parasite,
  creating an uproar among fishermen by sharing his findings directly with
  them, rather than allowing state Fish and Game officials to review the
  data first.

  He suddenly found his funding drying up after objections from Alaskan
  representatives on the committee that doles out research dollars.

  "I've essentially been blackballed from working on the Yukon," said
  Kocan, whose work has since been accepted and published in peer-reviewed
  journals. "There's one fellow specifically who does not like our
  results: Gene Sandone. He doesn't want to hear the story and change his
  management practices."

  Sandone denied playing any part in this: "I didn't blackball Richard
  Kocan. Dr. Kocan is free to put in a proposal and argue his point. He
  just has to get it through the technical committee."

  The clash comes over the implications of Kocan's thesis. He believes
  that as much as 20% of king salmon are dying en route to the spawning
  grounds. If so, fisheries managers would have to cut back the commercial
  catch by at least that amount to keep the run healthy.

  Sandone has an alternative theory, which has not been tested. He
  believes that the sick fish, weakened by the parasite, swim along the
  slower-moving edge of the river, where a disproportionate number get
  caught by fishing nets and fish wheels that line the banks.

  In other words, subsistence fishermen like Pat Moore are simply catching
  most of the sick fish. The healthy ones swim just out of reach, deeper
  in the river, headed straight for Canada.

  "That's my theory -- that they are not dying on the way," Sandone said.
  "Even if they are dying on the way, so what?" His department limits the
  catch based on how many fish escape all the nets and make it to the
  spawning grounds to reproduce.

  That's been going well, he said, except for last year, when the number
  of fish that made it to Canada fell 50% below the minimum spelled out in
  a U.S.-Canadian agreement.

  Sandone is retiring later this year, after 26 years as a state official.
  The fishermen in Tanana, who scoff at his theory, say they are delighted
  to see him go. They hope the state will be less hostile to studying the
  disease and trying to figure out what to do about it.

  Besides supporting fishermen, salmon are a keystone species in Alaska
  and the Pacific Northwest, supporting wildlife from birds to bears and
  orcas.

  A crash could cripple dependent creatures.

   Mary Ruckelshaus, a federal biologist with the Northwest Fisheries
  Science Center in Seattle, has been running climate models to peer into
  the future for Pacific Northwest salmon. Those models predict that
  salmon will become extinct without aggressive efforts to preserve the
  clear, cool streams needed for spawning, such as planting trees to shade
  streams and curtailing the amount of water siphoned off by farmers.

  "It's sort of a time bomb," Ruckelshaus said.

  "If people don't have a plan for it, it can be disastrous when it hits."

  Her models didn't factor in the potential for emerging diseases, such as
  the one that Kocan, her former professor, has been studying.

  Kocan views Ichthyophonus as a classic emerging disease. He pointed out
  that salmon, a lucrative catch, had been scrutinized by scientists and
  fishermen for decades, and the disease had never before been reported.
  In the last decade, it has shown up in salmon on the Yukon, Kuskokwim
  and Taku rivers in Alaska and on various rivers in British Columbia and
  Russia.

  It has also been detected in recent years in rockfish and smaller
  noncommercial fish in Puget Sound and elsewhere off the coasts of Oregon
  and Washington, and in freshwater trout on Idaho farms.

  It's the kind of redistribution of disease that can be expected with
  climate change, Kocan said: "Everything is getting warmer, and that's
  how climate change is going to redistribute all kinds of disease.
  Parasites have their optimum conditions -- upper and lower limits. We'll
  notice where they show up but not necessarily where they disappear."

  Ichthyophonus is among a class of ancient parasitic microbes that can
  move fast, taking advantage of new niches using age-old tricks that have
  kept them around for billions of years.

  None of this comforts Pat Moore, a musher with dozens of dogs, and
  others who rely on the bounty of the Yukon River to make their living.
  It's a culture that lives on the edge and cannot stomach waste.

  "I don't want to kill fish for the sake of killing them," said Moore, as
  he expertly sliced a king into narrow strips.

  "I want to use the damned things."#

  http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-ichfish15-2008jun15
  ,0,2020280.story?page=1

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