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<BLOCKQUOTE class=cite cite="" type="cite"><FONT size=4><B>Alaska salmon may
bear scars of global warming</B></FONT><BR><BR>The Los Angeles Times-
6/15/08<BR><BR>By Kenneth R. Weiss, Staff Writer<BR><BR><BR><BR>TANANA, ALASKA
-- With a sickening thud, another hefty and handsome<BR>salmon lands in the
waste barrel, headed for the dogs.<BR><BR>"See, it's all of the biggest,
best-looking fish," said Pat Moore,<BR>waving a stogie at the pile of
discards. "It breaks my heart. My dogs<BR>cannot eat all that. The maggots
will get them first."<BR><BR><BR><BR> More Alaskan salmon caught here end
up in the dog pot these days, <BR>their<BR>orange-pink flesh fouled by
disease that scientists have correlated with<BR>warmer water in the Yukon
River.<BR><BR>The sorting of winners and losers at Moore's riverbank fish
camp<BR>illustrates what scientists have been predicting will accompany
global<BR>warming: Cold-temperature barriers are giving way, allowing
parasites,<BR>bacteria and other disease-spreading organisms to move toward
higher<BR>latitudes.<BR><BR>"Climate change isn't going to increase infectious
diseases but change<BR>the disease landscape," said marine ecologist Kevin D.
Lafferty, who<BR>studies parasites for the U.S. Geological Survey. "And some
of these<BR>surprises are not going to be pretty."<BR><BR>The emergence of
disease in Alaska's most prized salmon has come as a<BR>shock to fishermen and
fisheries managers. Alaskan wild salmon has been<BR>an uncommon success story
among over-exploited fisheries, with healthy<BR>runs and robust catches that
fetch ever higher prices at fish markets<BR>and high-end restaurants in Los
Angeles, New York, Tokyo and London.<BR><BR>Fishermen and regulators who have
cooperated to save species from<BR>overfishing and local environmental hazards
have been caught unprepared<BR>to deal with forces beyond their control: how
to manage a fishery for<BR>climate change.<BR><BR>The return of the king -- or
chinook -- salmon is eagerly anticipated<BR>along the Yukon. The biggest of
the salmon species, these kings arrive<BR>with a muscular flash of the tail,
sun glinting off a speckled palette<BR>of blues and greens fading to silver
and red.<BR><BR>Savvy buyers from Japan converge on the docks near the river's
mouth to<BR>purchase these fish that have bulked up with extra fat to swim
more than<BR>2,000 miles, across Alaska, to spawn in the stream of their
birth.<BR><BR>As a fierce defender of the fish's reputation, Gene Sandone, a
regional<BR>supervisor for Alaska's Fish and Game Department, was less
than<BR>receptive to complaints from Tanana fishermen such as Moore
that<BR>something was wrong.<BR><BR>The chinook salmon they pulled from the
Yukon River about 700 miles<BR>inland didn't smell right. It wasn't an
instant, gag-inducing stench. It<BR>was more subtle but grew into an
unpleasant odor of fruit rotting in the<BR>hot sun.<BR><BR>More important, the
flesh turned mealy. The salmon didn't dry right in<BR>smokehouses either.
Instead of turning into rich red strips of salmon<BR>jerky, they turned black
and oily like strips of greasy rotten mango.<BR><BR>"If you don't weed out the
bad ones, it'll stink up the whole<BR>smokehouse," Moore said, wielding a
knife on his cutting table. "I only<BR>want the good stuff. I don't want
second-rate fish."<BR><BR>Salmon jerky strips are a staple among the Native
Americans and<BR>subsistence fishermen in rural outposts such as Tanana, a
village of 270<BR>people. "It'll keep you warm in the winter," said Lorene
Moore, Pat's<BR>wife and a native of the village. In Alaska's bigger cities,
these<BR>strips are a prized delicacy, fetching $20 or more a
pound.<BR><BR>When Bill Fliris, another Tanana fisherman, first noticed the
problem in<BR>the late 1980s, he bundled up some salmon jerky strips and
shipped them<BR>to a state Fish and Game biologist. A few weeks later, the
biologist<BR>said it was "the damnedest thing -- they disappeared out of the
freezer.<BR>You know: free strips."<BR><BR>The next year, Fliris shipped more
samples, and this time they were<BR>tested. But the state Fish and Game lab
found nothing amiss.<BR><BR>A friendly federal biologist advised the local
fishermen to send<BR>samples, including hearts and organs that were covered
with tiny<BR>pimples, to the Center for Fish Disease Research at Oregon
State<BR>University.<BR><BR>The Oregon lab quickly identified it as "white
spot disease," caused by<BR>a microscopic parasite called Ichthyophonus
hoferi. Ich (pronounced<BR>"ick") is a well-known disease, harmless to humans,
that was blamed for<BR>devastating losses in the herring fishery in
Scandinavia. A similar<BR>parasite can infect aquarium fish.<BR><BR>The
portion of Yukon salmon with Ich grew each year. Fishermen were<BR>throwing
away as much as 30% of their catch, forcing them to catch more<BR>fish to fill
their cache for the winter.<BR><BR>"The Alaskan Department of Fish and Game
wasn't interested," Fliris<BR>said. "They said, 'There's no money to study
this. It's a natural<BR>disease. There's nothing we can do about it.'
"<BR><BR><BR><BR>So Fliris contacted an outsider: Richard M. Kocan, a fish
disease expert<BR>at the University of Washington. Lining up a federal grant,
Kocan began<BR>to test the fish in 2000, the same year the king salmon run
suffered an<BR>unexpected temporary collapse that forced the closure of the
river's<BR>commercial fishery.<BR><BR>At the mouth of the Yukon, where the
commercial gill netters operate,<BR>25% to 30% of the chinook salmon were
infected, Kocan found. But the<BR>fish usually did not show signs of the
disease.<BR><BR> The same proportion were infected at midriver near
Tanana, about<BR>halfway to the Canadian border. But here, nearly a third of
the fish<BR>showed the salt-like flecks on their hearts and other organs, and
their<BR>mealy flesh released the telltale smell of putrid fruit.<BR><BR>Kocan
went upstream to the spawning grounds near Whitehorse, Canada, and<BR>found
that the proportion of infected fish dropped dramatically. But<BR>why? It
didn't seem logical that the fish were recovering during the<BR>last part of
their stressful 2,200-mile swim, accomplished over many<BR>weeks without
eating.<BR><BR>"The working hypothesis," Kocan said, "is that they died before
they<BR>made it to the spawning grounds."<BR><BR>Tracking what happens to
these fish is difficult. The Yukon turns<BR>mocha-brown in the summer, when
its swift waters carry a load of rock<BR>flour released by rock-pulverizing
glaciers and other sediment. Salmon<BR>that perish sink out of
sight.<BR><BR>To test his theory, Kocan set up a laboratory experiment that
compared<BR>the swimming stamina of infected rainbow trout with that of
healthy<BR>trout. He used a chamber with water swift enough to exhaust a
healthy<BR>fish in about 10 minutes. The infected fish lasted about two
minutes.<BR>"It's like asking someone with heart disease to run a 10K race,"
Kocan<BR>said. "He's not going to do very well."<BR><BR>That left a question:
Why did the previously undetected disease show up<BR>in the late 1980s and
resurface every year since?<BR><BR>Kocan and his students scrutinized all the
potential variables and found<BR>only one significant change: Average river
water temperatures had been<BR>rising over the last three decades. The warming
began earlier each<BR>spring, following an earlier breakup of the river's ice.
The June<BR>temperatures showed the greatest increase, about 6 to 8 degrees
warmer,<BR>and June is when king salmon return from the ocean and begin their
long<BR>upriver migration to spawn.<BR><BR>Unlike warm-blooded animals, the
body temperature of salmon fluctuates<BR>with the temperature of surrounding
waters. Laboratory studies of Ich<BR>infections in trout, a close cousin, have
revealed that the incidence of<BR>disease and death rises as water warms,
especially above 59 degrees.<BR><BR>Kocan spent five summers on the Yukon
River studying the parasite,<BR>creating an uproar among fishermen by sharing
his findings directly with<BR>them, rather than allowing state Fish and Game
officials to review the<BR>data first.<BR><BR>He suddenly found his funding
drying up after objections from Alaskan<BR>representatives on the committee
that doles out research dollars.<BR><BR>"I've essentially been blackballed
from working on the Yukon," said<BR>Kocan, whose work has since been accepted
and published in peer-reviewed<BR>journals. "There's one fellow specifically
who does not like our<BR>results: Gene Sandone. He doesn't want to hear the
story and change his<BR>management practices."<BR><BR>Sandone denied playing
any part in this: "I didn't blackball Richard<BR>Kocan. Dr. Kocan is free to
put in a proposal and argue his point. He<BR>just has to get it through the
technical committee."<BR><BR>The clash comes over the implications of Kocan's
thesis. He believes<BR>that as much as 20% of king salmon are dying en route
to the spawning<BR>grounds. If so, fisheries managers would have to cut back
the commercial<BR>catch by at least that amount to keep the run
healthy.<BR><BR>Sandone has an alternative theory, which has not been tested.
He<BR>believes that the sick fish, weakened by the parasite, swim along
the<BR>slower-moving edge of the river, where a disproportionate number
get<BR>caught by fishing nets and fish wheels that line the banks.<BR><BR>In
other words, subsistence fishermen like Pat Moore are simply catching<BR>most
of the sick fish. The healthy ones swim just out of reach, deeper<BR>in the
river, headed straight for Canada.<BR><BR>"That's my theory -- that they are
not dying on the way," Sandone said.<BR>"Even if they are dying on the way, so
what?" His department limits the<BR>catch based on how many fish escape all
the nets and make it to the<BR>spawning grounds to reproduce.<BR><BR>That's
been going well, he said, except for last year, when the number<BR>of fish
that made it to Canada fell 50% below the minimum spelled out in<BR>a
U.S.-Canadian agreement.<BR><BR>Sandone is retiring later this year, after 26
years as a state official.<BR>The fishermen in Tanana, who scoff at his
theory, say they are delighted<BR>to see him go. They hope the state will be
less hostile to studying the<BR>disease and trying to figure out what to do
about it.<BR><BR>Besides supporting fishermen, salmon are a keystone species
in Alaska<BR>and the Pacific Northwest, supporting wildlife from birds to
bears and<BR>orcas.<BR><BR>A crash could cripple dependent
creatures.<BR><BR> Mary Ruckelshaus, a federal biologist with the
Northwest Fisheries<BR>Science Center in Seattle, has been running climate
models to peer into<BR>the future for Pacific Northwest salmon. Those models
predict that<BR>salmon will become extinct without aggressive efforts to
preserve the<BR>clear, cool streams needed for spawning, such as planting
trees to shade<BR>streams and curtailing the amount of water siphoned off by
farmers.<BR><BR>"It's sort of a time bomb," Ruckelshaus said.<BR><BR>"If
people don't have a plan for it, it can be disastrous when it
hits."<BR><BR>Her models didn't factor in the potential for emerging diseases,
such as<BR>the one that Kocan, her former professor, has been
studying.<BR><BR>Kocan views Ichthyophonus as a classic emerging disease. He
pointed out<BR>that salmon, a lucrative catch, had been scrutinized by
scientists and<BR>fishermen for decades, and the disease had never before been
reported.<BR>In the last decade, it has shown up in salmon on the Yukon,
Kuskokwim<BR>and Taku rivers in Alaska and on various rivers in British
Columbia and<BR>Russia.<BR><BR>It has also been detected in recent years in
rockfish and smaller<BR>noncommercial fish in Puget Sound and elsewhere off
the coasts of Oregon<BR>and Washington, and in freshwater trout on Idaho
farms.<BR><BR>It's the kind of redistribution of disease that can be expected
with<BR>climate change, Kocan said: "Everything is getting warmer, and
that's<BR>how climate change is going to redistribute all kinds of
disease.<BR>Parasites have their optimum conditions -- upper and lower limits.
We'll<BR>notice where they show up but not necessarily where they
disappear."<BR><BR>Ichthyophonus is among a class of ancient parasitic
microbes that can<BR>move fast, taking advantage of new niches using age-old
tricks that have<BR>kept them around for billions of years.<BR><BR>None of
this comforts Pat Moore, a musher with dozens of dogs, and<BR>others who rely
on the bounty of the Yukon River to make their living.<BR>It's a culture that
lives on the edge and cannot stomach waste.<BR><BR>"I don't want to kill fish
for the sake of killing them," said Moore, as<BR>he expertly sliced a king
into narrow strips.<BR><BR>"I want to use the damned things."#<BR><BR><A
href="http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-ichfish15-2008jun15"
eudora="autourl">http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-ichfish15-2008jun15</A><BR>,0,2020280.story?page=1<BR><BR></BLOCKQUOTE></BODY></HTML>