Only four months after dams blocking migration were removed, the first Chinook salmon traveled 230 miles to return to the Klamath River Basin. This was the first fish to come home to their ancestral migration routes since 1912.
Over 100 years shut out and it only took them four months to return home once they had the chance.
From the article:
“The return of our relatives the c’iyaal’s is overwhelming for our tribe. This is what our members worked for and believed in for so many decades,” said Roberta Frost, Klamath Tribes Secretary. “I want to honor that work and thank them for their persistence in the face of what felt like an unmovable obstacle. The salmon are just like our tribal people, and they know where home is and returned as soon as they were able[.]"
Help the SOCKEYE SALMON reach their spawning grounds! • Sockeye salmon are born in lakes, rivers, and streams, but spend their adult lives in the Pacific Ocean. When they’re old enough, they make the upstream trek back to their birthplaces to spawn (and they even turn from silver to red+green to mark the occasion!) They must overcome predators, outdated dams, and fishermen along their incredible journey.
The spring-fed water that flows through Hansen Creek in southwestern Alaska is almost always clear. Its rate and temperature stay relatively constant throughout the year. Each summer, sockeye salmon migrate through the shallow, narrow creek bed in distinct pulses, in a migration pattern common to salmon populations around the world.
Why the salmon move in pulses is the subject of a new paper published today in Animal Behavior.
"The folk wisdom is that the salmon are all independently cueing off common environmental cues, and that tends to synchronize their movements," says co-author Andrew Berdahl, an SFI Omidyar Fellow. That trigger could be a change in tide or water temperature or the patterns of the moon.
But in Hansen Creek, where researchers have recorded the movement of salmon for the past 20 years, salmon arrive in pulses despite the very stable environmental conditions. Furthermore, existing models, which invoke environmental cues, don't predict migration pulses very well. In the new paper, Berdahl and colleagues suggest that social cues might be the key to understanding the group migrations.
"Because you see this pulsed movement in places where standard explanations say you shouldn't, it leaves us searching for another mechanism," says Berdahl. "Maybe they're cueing off each other."
Researchers recently found about 100 chum salmon spawning in the Arctic, suggesting the species is shifting to new habitats
Excerpt from this story from Smithsonian:
Chum salmon, the second-largest Pacific salmon species, can be found throughout the northern coastal regions of North America and Asia. But now, as the climate warms, the fish are laying eggs even farther north—in Alaska rivers that feed into the Arctic Ocean, according to a statement from the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF).
“We saw not only fish that were actively spawning, or had finished spawning and were still alive, but also carcasses—fish that had been spawning and already died,” Peter Westley, an evolutionary ecologist at UAF who led the recent research, tells Wired’s Matt Simon. “It’s really consistent with that clear harbinger of climate change: this shift toward the poles.”
The research team found about 100 chum salmon that were spawning or had just finished spawning in the Anaktuvuk and Itkillik rivers of the North Slope, Alaska’s northernmost borough. However, this finding is not entirely unprecedented. Locals have reported sightings of chum salmon before, and in 2017, researchers in northern Alaska found a juvenile of the species, according to the Alaska Beacon’s Yereth Rosen.
“I don’t want to portray our discovery as the first ever. That assumes no one has ever seen this before, and people have been there for thousands of years,” Elizabeth Mik’aq Lindley, a UAF evolutionary ecologist, says in the statement.
However, the recent announcement demonstrates that salmon numbers appear to be increasing in northern Alaska.
“When I first came here, if someone got a salmon, it was the talk of the town,” Robert Thompson, who moved to Kaktovik, Alaska, in the 1970s, tells the Alaska Beacon. Now, he adds, people catch salmon regularly, though still in low numbers.
