The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 112: Salmon

Episode Date: April 16, 2018

Anchorage, Alaska- Steven Rinella talks with fisheries biologist Danny Rinella (his big brother), along with Dirt Myth and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew. Subjects Discussed: Salmon on the brain; artificial insemination of salmon; black mouth season; why dams are bad for fish; the slow and painful shrinkage of King salmon; Alaska's conservation mode; strengthening the relationship between Alaskans and salmon; eating dogs (salmon, that is); getting duped by Whole Foods; fish introductions in the Great Lakes; and more.  Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. The Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Yanni, before we start, can you retell me what you were saying earlier as a version of saying something's real big?

Oh, Tron. Yeah. I had a fella tell me he called, he wished us good luck. We're turkey hunting. But we're going to be turkey hunting with him.

Yes. He's excited about it. But he was in an earlier email. Not that he's excited about with us, but he's excited about turkey. No, he definitely wasn't excited about going with us because he's serious about it and he didn't want to be fiddle farting with us when he's out there trying to kill his missouri bird

so we're not gonna hunt with him we may or may not but he might already have one you know down by the time we get there because we're coming in for day three of the season so these guys are gonna have two days to start the season. Anyways, he was wishing us good luck and he was saying in an email, hey, if I can't, you know, if this doesn't work out, good luck killing a Missouri Gobletron.

Yeah, but I hadn't heard that and I don't like it. Not to disparage, not to besmirch or disparage the guy, but like, I don't like that because i just think of robots a tron to add tron on the end yeah and maybe it's like ai turkey so it's smarter than the regular turkey maybe that's what he's getting at right like like robotic like artificial

intelligence maybe he's even smarter than the average turkey. Because where I stopped, especially stopped liking it, is when you said it's similar to saying something's mondo. Or a toad. Yeah. We could go around the room. If someone said to you, Dan, if they're like, hey, man, Gobletron, good luck killing Gobletron,

would you be like, what does that mean? Or do you have an idea? I you be like, what does that mean? Or do you have an idea? I would be like, what? Yeah. Do you mean something that's Mondo? Or something that's real shy? Mondo isn't even a word. We were hanging out with a guy who's a houndsman.

And he had been doing a lot of work down in Mexico on research projects. So I thought that we would see a track, and he'd be like, that's a Mondo track. And I thought it was a Spanish word. So I right away liked that, and I started picking up, and then in my head, everything that's big is Mondo. But isn't that a system for shoe sizes too, though? Mondo?

Isn't it? Oh, that's not what he meant. Well, Webster's says definition of Mondo, adverb, slang, extremely. That's what I thought. So I thought that he was, well, not that. I thought he was speaking in Spanish. And I'm like, if there's a Spanish word that means a giant freaking track, I'm on that word. So I adopted before I even really cleared what he's saying.

Then later I'm like, hey, hey man what does uh mondo translate to and he looks at me like what do you mean he goes it's not mondo it's mongo you know humongous so that's what a mondo track is oh you're right so the whole time he was just saying mongo yeah but we like ran with it and we're like mondo is the way to go because i use toad pig biggin big huge giant great biggin great biggin bruiser pig hog stomper tron no yes i wanted to touch on that no one other quick order but it's Dirt

Myth is joining us here and Dirt you you know more people have been writing about your chewing tobacco problem do you care to have me give you

a sum up of what their suggestions are yeah just for other listeners struggling with addiction okay one guy said there is one for the betterment of everyone another guy came and said to us a guy wrote in to say that in fact you're wrong and there is a chew that has no oh i saw that yes it's just nicotine right is that what you're talking about but it doesn't have the is nicotine the part that makes your jaw fall off and you die yeah so that's the part of it yeah and i have a buddy who did that and those things they're speaking of like ai or like technology a thing that is just nicotine that you put in your mouth

just seem you know what i mean i forget what they're called yeah but i tried them that didn't help no i mean you catch your buzz but you know old habits you still catch a nice little buzz yeah yeah but i did see that i think you shared that with me or someone instagrammed it to me or something you know bryce and joe who we were just ice fishing with they're double downers well they chew grizzly and so you put me in an uncomfortable situation because one day i was asking you what kind of chew do you say and you said i have a good job i don't chew grizzly i chew copenhagen so i saw that they had grizz and so knowing that you had told me this and i put a lot of faith in what you tell me i said, it's too bad you boys don't have good jobs.

And it didn't go over real well. Well, no one wants to hear the truth, you know, sometimes. And then Steve pointed out to them that although you have a good job, you're going to live out of your truck for a little bit. Yeah. Well, that's what someone else pointed out. He can't have that kind of a job he lives in his truck well you know he lives if he lives at trailheads if he's like a weird like when you go to a trail and there's a weird guy living there don't make eye contact with him it's probably dirt if he's got a tin of cope then you know it's him saving the saving the

rent for chew and adventures all right before we move on to what we're here to talk about i want to just get i want to find out how much dirt's gonna get out of this conversation so name for me if you can the five species of pacific salmon okay that we that that come to the inhabit u.s waters the layman's name or the uh layman okay common name yeah silver yep chum yep sockeye yep pink yep oh biggins biggins oh king yep yeah yeah nice nice job yeah now name the one in the atlantic i gave you the answer when a biggin salmon no no i gave you the answer after that it was buried within the question it was like the other day when my daughter said to me what's's 1,002? Meaning what happens when you add 1,002?

And I was like, you just said it. What salmon lives in the Atlantic? Is this the question you posed to me in the start? Because I was thinking of two when you started the question. No. Okay. I'm giving you the answer. Okay.

What salmon lives in the Atlantic? Oh, Atlantic salmon. Yeah. So we got it? Yeah. Yeah got yeah yeah no no we're good so dan so that that's dirt myth and then um janice poodle this is here and we're also speaking to my brother danny who i mentioned all the time whenever fish comes up because uh fish biologists fisheries what do you like to say fish Fish biologists, fisheries biologists. But that involves a lot more than fish. Yeah, I know, I know.

Yeah, the current job title I'm working under is a fisheries biologist, but my background is pretty well-rounded in aquatic ecology, and I've done a lot of work with habitat and aquatic insects and food webs and that sort of stuff so didn't it come out that you first like your first kind of work was around aquatic invertebrates yeah that was kind of my path into fish but yeah i got really interested in them as an undergrad working on a fishery fisheries

degree and um yeah the first part of my career was spent entirely on aquatic insects. I'm still fascinated with them, but now it's mostly just through the avenue of them being fish food. Yeah. If you were gonna like, what percentage of your time

do you spend thinking about and talking about issues having to do with salmon? It's most of my time, most of my professional time. And why is that? I mean, one, you like them, but is it because there's an industry around it and so there's money to support it? I mean, that's certainly part of it, but you have to do work that people care about.

When you're when you're working in alaska and i'm a freshwater biologist i don't really you know operate on the marine end of things um you know in terms of alaskan fresh waters it's just you can't overstate the importance of salmon you know, economically, ecologically. They're just incredible. They define Alaska. Yeah. And you like to fish them too. Oh, I love to fish them.

Yes. Yeah. It's one of my favorite things in the world. Yeah. And the, as Dirk pointed out so eloquently, there are five species of salmon

on the Pacific coast of the u.s and all five occur in alaska yes yep run through real quick what the five pacific salmon are with like a kind of a basic sense of like what their groove is okay yeah just in terms of how they and then what's up with the atlantic salmon why is there only one over there um so the the five pacific salmon um we have the pink or the humpy salmon yeah that's good too because every salmon has two names as which is totally it's like weird that it's that way is there one that one that has more? Because there are different names down in the Northwest. I mean, like Chinook salmon. They have different names in British Columbia, Washington.

They have a million names. So, pinks and humpies. Within Alaska, each has two that are sort of in common usage. Yeah. So, pinks and humpies. And they are the smallest and most common of the salmon and uh they they have a sort of a that's the most common salmon numerically yeah most numerically abundant of the salmon um they're just everywhere when the pink salmon run you've been seeing them in the you know when you're

around the smallest coastal streams like down around the fish shack or even up in here but yeah when the when the humpies are in they're in thick you know and there's just thousands of them everywhere you go and the whole place stinks like dead salmon and yeah they're just incredibly abundant um so they have a short life history every pink salmon that that that is uh spawning in the creek is two years old it was laid as an egg two years prior to that um and that's just that's set in stone pretty much yeah it's yeah so so when you have a a river that has a pink salmon run that returns in odd years and a pink salmon run that returns in even years those are two completely separate populations of pink salmon both with their own separate population dynamics and so one of those

could plummet for whatever reason oh yeah it's incredibly lopsided in some places like the and i can't remember if it's odd or even but like the fraser river down and down in british columbia in in one year it gets you know millions and millions of pink salmon and then the next year it gets essentially none and it just alternates every year like so odd year even year you know it's gonna be good or not good yeah yeah and that shifts depending on geography and and over long time spans it probably shifts you know within an area an area might turn from a pink to it or from an odd to an even or whatever you know yeah but some areas are pretty even and some areas are more lopsided but they're really two separate populations okay so that's pinks and

humpies what's their latin name on on crankus they're all on crankus that's how you pronounce it on crankus yeah that's how i pronounce it at least yeah and uh and hump and the hump is is a gorbushka i think it's how it's pronounced it's russian yes oh yeah i believe so i believe so so. But pinks are, life history-wise, they, as with all of the Pacific salmon, they are spawned in the sort of late summer or fall, and the eggs incubate sort of into the winter and hatch kind of maybe late winter, early spring. And pink salmon, upon hatch hatching and they absorb the yolk

and emerge from the gravel and they leave the river they just migrate to fresh water right after they hatch they don't linger they don't linger no and why do pinks like pinks don't run long distances no they're they're a lot of a lot of them spawn sort of in intertidal areas and uh low in river systems. They're just adapted using that part of the watershed. Yeah. They might run a couple hundred yards. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. You see them spawning in intertidal areas on that freshwater lens. They'll migrate into the estuary and then drop back out as the tide ebbs and flows. Yeah. And when they come out of their egg, they're straight out in the ocean. Yeah. Well, they come out of the egg and they still have a little yolk attached right and they once that yolk is absorbed and then at that point their jaws are fully developed and they start feeding

sort of on their own and by that point yeah those pinks are just following the current and they i think you know it's sort of our time they're hatching to other emergence to coincide with um sort of the spring runoff and they just kind of follow that down to the ocean. When a salmon's eggs are laying there, like the salmon, their eggs, like take a pink, for instance, his eggs don't stick to the rock. They're just laying in sheltered areas out of the current between rocks. No, they're actually buried. I mean, the female between rocks they're the the the they're actually buried i mean the the the female excavates the nest or the red and the and she lays the eggs there and they're

fertilized and and then she'll actually bury them under gravel okay yeah you see them digging out but i don't know that so they really cover them up yeah the ones that aren't covered aren't gonna she'll dig a pocket and then you know scoot upstream a little bit and dig another one, and that kind of falls back on the previous pocket. She sort of digs a series of these pockets and lays eggs in them and then buries them as she goes along. Got you. So March lawn to the next.

Hold on. So when does the male come in? Those eggs are fertilized as she's dropping them. Really? Yeah. I mean, you can see it. Oh, yeah. You'll see them.

They'll sort of sandwich up side by side, and you'll see they'll open their jaws and even kind of quiver a little bit, you know? And that's the action right there. That little face. I didn't know. You can even see the milk drifting down the current sometimes. When you see a male, like when you see a female laying,

you see her like the way she- No, that's digging. That's digging? Yes. Because I'll say this the other day. When we used to fish steelhead, you'd be staring into a place where you know steelhead hang out. Yeah. Couldn't tell if there were any there.

And you'd catch the female flash. That flashing is the digging. She's like laying on her side. And picture like if you put your hand on the bottom and the rocks and you lifted it up, you'd create some suction, right? And that would kind of pull the rocks up. That's what she's doing with her whole body okay yeah so i pictured it i didn't i didn't know this i had in my head my whole life here that they lay the egg down and the male comes and somehow fertilizes the sitting egg but they need to do it in tandem yeah yeah

yeah it's happened all at once can you real talk about, before we get back to the other ones, can you talk about when you, like the act of fertile, when you're fertile, like doing artificial insemination of salmon eggs in a bucket. Uh-huh. I remember you saying one time that you saw where there's like a five-gallon bucket of eggs. Yeah. And someone would put in like a five gallon bucket of eggs yeah and someone would put in like a tablespoon yeah yeah stuff shockingly potent yeah that's tables like a squirt right like yeah like a squirt of semen stir that bucket up with a ladle a spoon and be like that bucket is

fertilized yeah yeah yeah this was in some uh uh some little hatchery experience i had in my in my undergraduate days but yeah they would take a a bucket of salmon eggs and take a they would just squirt i think they would use a few males to make sure that they had you know a good viable one and a little maybe a little diversity um but just a little squirt of sperm from each of those fish into a big bucket of eggs stir it up and they're good to go ready to roll yeah okay march on to the next fish um up in size let's go from smallest to most sorry i gotta interrupt like we can't leave the humpy until we talk a little bit about like why does he get that funny shape when he comes back in yeah

yeah we can do that but i was planning on coming back with some other other issues but yeah why not talk about why they call them humpies why they come home so the humpy the humpy term refers to uh the big kind of humped back that the male sock or male pink salmon gets during spawning and his crazy hook jaw yes yes um and so yeah those are secondary sexual characteristics i guess analogous to the ornamentation on a bird or something like that they're just demonstrating their the the hump makes them look bigger and more opposing and the hook jaw makes them look rougher and tougher and they use that to display and for aggression to compete um for females you know with other males so that's him getting tricked out getting pimped out and ready to

spawn yeah do you know like are you familiar with the late um geneticist steven j gould yes a little he had a point he made one time in one of his books i was reading where he's kind of getting at something i'm sure you deal with and talk about all the time would be that like we don't know why things become the way they become and he was using an example like uh someone might look and be like wow bark right bark is brown what's the genetic what's the selective advantage of brown bark like yeah why is it brown like what is the tree gaining from having brown bark and he would say maybe what the tree is doing is that there's an advantage to having very thick bark something structural in that because it can resist forest fire so the advantage is the thickness of bark um as over the years it's selected for thicker and thicker bark it just so happens for for maybe

perhaps no advantageous region reason at all that it's attains a certain color yeah but we look and ponder over the color thinking like why is it that way when it's just there's no reason it's that way it's like green leaves there's nothing special about that color it's just yeah the tree isn't gaining from having green leaves the color is a byproduct of some other yes but in this case it does seem like so but in this case like who like maybe some other reason like why they get a big hump in a hook jaw or is it so like obvious that it has to be that it has that because it's like a competitive selective it's so many other species have you know sort of well a breeding similar types of secondary sexual traits that come out during breeding.

And, you know, salmon live for multiple years. Those traits don't appear until, you know, right at the time of spawning. Yeah. And it makes sense because it's a competitive environment. Yeah, yeah. You have to be in there like, yeah, jockeying for favor. Yeah, exactly. And it fits with their mating structure. Yeah, I mean, it makes sense.

And it probably takes some amount of energy to do it. Oh, for sure. For sure. It's a trade-off. Yeah. Yeah. Are fish, is it true, can you say generally like fish are like birds where the males do a lot more ornamentation?

They're flashier? Man, I was on the salmon world for a while. But yeah, I think so. I think so. And parental care tends to be males, and ornamentation tends to be males. And females tend to be bigger. In that regard, it's unlike birds, because the parental care among the fishes tends to fall more on the males. But in terms of ornamentation, yeah, I think so.

And then with the salmon, are the males all bigger than the females? No, I don't think so. That's a good question. I think it's the females on average tend to be a little bigger. Tend to be a little bit heavier than the males. I think so. So when you to be a little bigger. Tend to be a little bit heavier than the males. I think so.

So when you catch a big, huge king. It could be either sex. It could be either sex. Yeah. Yeah. Gotcha. Yeah. All right.

You cool on that? I'm cool. Man, I think at the top end, I can picture some big males, but on average, the females might be a little bigger. They tend to be a little older. On what species? Just salmon in general. Oh, okay.

Yeah. Well, the pinks are always coming back at two. Well, I shouldn't say that. Not pinks. The others, yeah. The other ones. The ones we haven't got to yet. The ones we'll get into.

Yeah. So what's the next one? Let's just moving up the uh so i mean you think of pink salmon as being you know quite marine right right because they they um spend relatively little time in fresh water um and so chum salmon have sort of a similar life history in that they home that's a good observation they don't spend like they have to have the fresh water but they just don't spend any time there only use it for breeding yeah i mean as soon as that um as soon as the uh fry emerges from the gravel like they can handle salt water right away

um which you know the other salmon sort of have a more involved transformation, and they're out of there. So he's dead. They all die when they're two. Mm-hmm. And he could have spent a week in freshwater. As a free-swimming fish, yes. As a free-swimming fish. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, chum salmon have a somewhat similar life history in that they go to sea soon after emerging from the gravel. A lot of chum salmon are also spawned sort of coastally low in the watershed, but there are some chum salmon populations like the Yukon River in Alaska, for example, where chum salmon move a really long way up rivers. You didn't say the two names for chums. Chum salmon and dog salmon would be the two. I'm sure there are others, but those are the two that are in common usage in Alaska.

Where they deviate from pink salmon is that chum salmon can spend multiple years rearing in fresh water. Multiple years? I'm sorry, in salt water. Okay. So they leave fresh water soon after emerging, typically in the spring of the year, and they can spend multiple years at sea. I think two and three years is pretty common for them so with pinks when you i want to go step back to pinks from it because when pinks like if

you catch a big male yeah or big whatever you catch a big specimen who's like obviously bigger than the other ones there's nothing he's not older he's not because he's older he went to a better place in the ocean yeah or he's just you know There's a lot of variation and sort of aggressiveness, tolerance for risk, and those sorts of things over the span of two years can result in fish of different sizes. And a chum can choose to stay another year. Yeah. And that's a good way to put it because it sort of is a decision that they make every year when they're rearing in the ocean. Basically, they decide, well, am I going to spawn this year or am I going to wait another year? What is that like?

I know we're using decision, but what does that look like? You know, it seems to be related to the foraging conditions and how rapidly they're growing. And if they are, when that decision window comes, if they're in good condition and growing rapidly, they're more inclined to spawn at a younger age. So sort of paradoxically, like, you know, for a given species, a bigger salmon tends to be an older salmon and it was one that was sort of growing at a slower rate and it took longer to get big when is that so when does that

like um that trigger or decision happen for a salmon oh oh it's or is that not well understood oh you know it's not really my area uh i i mean i but i can speculate that you know probably late winter springtime you know you know they're out they're out in the pacific somewhere and and and it's it's either time to turn and start heading home or not you know and so they need to have your body start like making the eggs Yeah, exactly. To mature sexually. Yeah, exactly. So they need to allow some time for that. So it's not a last minute sort of game time decision. Yeah, yeah.

Because it takes months to develop them. Yeah, exactly. In general, with chums or whatever, how far out into the ocean do they go? Way out. All the way out all of them yeah i mean they're overlapping in their ocean distribution north american um salmon in general chinook tend to be a little more coastal king salmon but you know the others they're overlapping with asian fish and they're all intermingled out in the middle of the Gulf and out in the middle of the North Pacific. So like a salmon who might otherwise go into North Korea

or is going to Siberia. Is interacting at sea with our fish, yes. Wow, man, I didn't know that. Really? Yeah. But a king might be more of a homebody. Yeah. I mean, there's, yeah, they tend to stick closer.

I mean, they tend to stick closer to the coast. Yeah. Yeah. And you think about the fisheries, right? Like people catch along the coast of Alaska and presumably for themselves, people catch king salmon year round. Winter kings. Oh, yeah. They call it the blackmouth sea.

Yeah. Yeah. But, you know there aren't any coho in shore that time of year yeah there's no winter coho fishery or there's no you know there's no chum salmon in shore or so um but yeah there are king salmon in coastal waters all the time when you say interact with these other salmon out there is it like one school passes by the other school or is it like all of a sudden they're like hey let's all get together and feed together

that's a good question i don't know no one knows that yet i yeah i don't know maybe maybe judging by how some people that sort of engage in that sort of research might see you know in a if they're hooking fish or gill netting or whatever, they may see that they're intermingled with fish of Asian origin or whatever, but I'm not that familiar with that. On that same note, do they ever bump into each other in spawning, the same spawning sources? No, because at that point, they are going to their home stream.

And there won't be two species in the same home stream. Oh, for sure. Yeah, yeah. But different timing. But what he was saying is there was fish coming out of Asia and then coming out of North America that when they're out there growing, they might be swimming around together.

They go so far out into the ocean. They're competing with each other. Yeah. But that doesn't happen with a, oh, I got you, I got you. No. Yeah, because they split up. with a, oh, I got you, I got you. No, dirt. Yeah, because they split up.

Think about dirt. If they came all back to the same place, they would cease to be of different origins. Yeah, I'm saying, though, that each subspecies, there's never a case where. These aren't subspecies. They're not subspecies. Each species wouldn't come from the same you know freshwater source like there wouldn't be

pinks and chum coming from the same like freshwater spawning ground oh yeah for sure they do yeah and will they like run into each other at that phase oh yeah oh are you saying this dirt are you saying that do pinks and chums intermingle out in the high seas? Opposite, in the spawning, like back at their, where they, you know. They'll be in the river at the same time. Yeah. Oh, definitely. They're choosing like different types of habitat and stuff, but they can certainly overlap.

Yeah. During the, at the timing of their spawning. Yeah. Is there, and what made me ask that is like, do they ever, is there there ever i don't know if crossbreeding is the right hybridizing yeah yeah you know i i think that's pretty rare in the native range of salmon but in the great lakes i know that it's not it's it's not uncommon there i've seen in the great lakes where pacific several species of pacific salmon have been introduced i have seen hybrids of king salmon and pink salmon okay yeah that's really kinks it looks like a great big humpy does it yeah it's because the way that they are you know

like you're saying that so much eggs and so much sperm like it's all mixed in there yeah like big old fish orgy yeah they're all spawning roughly the same time of year yeah but in the you know i in their in the native range it's maybe it happens i but not common yeah not common all right dogs and chums they don't go they tend to not go far into the rivers but but some with some very serious exceptions, yeah. Like the ones that'll go thousands of miles. Yeah, kilometers at least up the Yukon, yeah. And other rivers. Okay.

And pinks are never found up there. No. Pinks will go a little ways in, you know, miles, tens of miles, maybe hundreds of miles, but not thousands. I would invite the listener to go pull up a map of North America a little ways in, you know, miles, tens of miles, maybe hundreds of miles, but not thousands. I would invite the listener to go pull up a map of North America and ponder for a moment. Look at the Yukon. So like you can imagine like how big Alaska is, okay?

Biggest state. If you center Alaska over a map with lower 48, you kind of like wind up centering Alaska, you know, around Iowa or so. And Southeast Alaska goes way down into Texas. I think the Aleutians go out to the California coast. Southeast Alaska is like Georgia and down in there. It's just huge. But look at a map of North America and ponder for a moment that fish entering the Yukon.

So the Yukon kind of like cuts Alaska in half, east to west, and flows out in western Alaska. That salmon that are entering the Yukon at the coast are spawning in Canada. Yeah. And the United States has a treaty with Canada dictating how many salmon we're going to let swim through the border. It's an enormous journey. Yeah. I don't know how many miles it is at that point, but it's a lot. Yeah.

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As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. And that's chums. And real quick, back up, because there's a thing I wanted to touch on.

The sort of like economic value. Or, you know, like the table fare value. Chums are low man on the totem pole of the five salmon the least well regarded from a food from a food perspective oh i guess i guess so and i'm not yeah um i mean i can speak more as an alaskan and someone who you know eats a lot of salmon and and has a lot of conversations about salmon and it's like sort of steeped in salmon culture but yeah and and i don't think there's a great market for them either but i mean i think the reason they have the nickname dog

salmon is because it's you know it's often dog food even even even still today. And yeah, pink salmon are pretty low regard in terms of food value too, at least among Alaskans. A lot of them wind up in cans. Yeah, yeah. But there's an industry around canned pink salmon and a lot of that goes to Europe and England in particular. And the color on a pink salmon, it might be why they call them pink salmon.

I think that's what that refers to, is the flesh is pink, not red. Yeah. And chums are- And like reds have red flesh. Very red. Yeah, very red appetizing flesh. Yeah. And chum salmon don't have great color

and they tend to have low fat content because they're not undergoing a long freshwater migration. And so it kind of keeps the demand down and the price down they have big eggs though and um they're that's um their fish commercially a lot of their commercial value is in the row most of which gets which probably goes to markets in asia yep yep okay what's the next salmon um let's go to sockeye reds reds or sockeyes yep reds reds or sockeyes um yeah so so similar type of life history pattern uh they're anadromous and uh they the adults return from the ocean to their natal river, or in the case of sockeye, lakes.

They are strongly associated with lakes, and spawning occurs often in or near lakes. So they go up a river to get to a lake. Yes, yes, exactly right. And they're, so like we talked about with pinks and chums, after they emerge from the gravel, those two head to sea. Sockeye, for the most part, head to a lake. And so the spawning occurs like along the beaches and lakes, in some cases where it's upwelling or or sort of wind-driven

kind of currents um or they'll spawn in feeder streams or even outlet streams and those fish are sort of genetically programmed to know where that lake is and head for that lake once they hatch be it upstream or downstream from their particular location and they spend a year or two in most or a year or two rearing in that lake in a lake in a lake yep and they get how big in the lake oh what is what's that two and a half inches long 80 100 millimeters i think i'm just roughly yeah a few. What's the advantage there? So then he spends a year or two in a freshwater lake, and then he's like, now I will go to the ocean.

Now, yeah, exactly. Exactly, yeah. And what's the advantage of that? Probably just, it's just a niche they filled. They're in that lake, and they're, instead of, well, we'll talk about how king salmon and coho salmon sort of make a living as juveniles in the river, but they've just sort of adapted this lifestyle where they're living in a lake

and they feed on plankton in the water column. They're sort of a pelagic fish for a couple years. But at some point their needs become too great and they go to sea yeah it's at some point they sort of in an evolutionary sense they've made the decision that they can grow a lot faster by migrating to the ocean there's uh the the the the marine environment is much more productive. There's a lot more food out there. When they reach a size that is big enough that they're not going to get eaten the moment they poke out there, right? So it's a bit of a balance. How long do you stay in freshwater? But when they reach a certain size, they'll head to the ocean. They're big enough to enough to survive i mean the survival rate's very low

regardless of how big these fish are when they're migrating but yeah they get to a certain size ahead of the ocean they take their chances there um because the return is potentially you know huge in terms of uh the potential for uh the forage base is much larger. And how long do they, how long does a red or a sockeye go out to sea for? They're rather variable, but I would two to four years, I think is pretty common. And they come back weighing about what? Like just from a fishing perspective,

like how big are they? Pound wise. Oh, like, you know, maybe three to six or eight pounds is pretty common. Just guessing. And then two quick things. Can you explain what a kokanee is? So yeah, a kokanee is a landlocked sockeye salmon.

So it's a population of sockeye salmon that lives in a lake, but for whatever reason, they don't go to the ocean. Either they've sort of made that decision not to go or they're somehow blocked. And there are natural populations, because there's a lot of introduced populations of kokanee, but they come from natural populations that somehow through some cataclysmic event, presumably. No, I don't think kokanee are necessarily blocked from going to the ocean. It's sort of just a life history decision. So there are kokanee populations that could go to the ocean.

Yeah, they stay in lakes. They spin off from that lake's sockeye population and just become kokanee. I mean, you can think of it the same way as some resident rainbow trout populations have spun off the steelhead population. Gotcha. And just stay put.

So the opposite happened there. Yeah. But kokanees are dinky, though. Yeah, they don't get big because they reach sexual maturity at a small size because they're in that lake environment. But compare that to how big

an ocean sockeye is. That just shows you the difference in growth potential between those two environments. That it's worth the gamble. Yeah. And then sockeyes will do some mega migrations or no?

Yeah, they use the whole North Pacific, yeah. No, I mean, when they go up a river, they'll shoot. Yeah, I mean, they're really attached to lakes. So if you have a river system that has a lake way, way, way upstream. Oh, what's Redfish Lake in Idaho? That's an interesting example. I don't know how far inland that is, but it was a sockeye population all the way in Idaho. They're going up to Columbia.

Columbia. Into the clear water or whatever. Yeah, I can't. Yeah. And then that fish, talk about this for a minute because that fish is a fatty fish, right? Yeah. I'm not sure about the stats on the fad content. Why do you see, why do some people think there's a salmon called a Copper River salmon?

Like as its own species, sort of. Well, it's more of a brand than a species, but yeah. But so, in lots of ways, salmon adapt to their, they're really a product of their river and they adapt to their specific river. And so in the case of – well, I mentioned earlier fat content. It's sort of an adaptive trait of salmon and it relates to – once salmon begin their freshwater migration, they stop feeding and they live on their fat reserves. And fish that are destined for a spawning ground that's further up some river tend to put on a little more fat than fish that are spawning lower in the watershed. So the Copper River being a relatively large watershed with some, in terms of sockeye, some somewhat long migrations, they tend to be a little fatter.

And people certainly value that. The fatty content. Yeah, yeah. And the comparison that's often made in south central Alaska is to that of the Kenai salmon. The Kenai River is another really popular local sockeye salmon fishery. And the migration, the freshwater migration there

isn't quite as long. And people regard those those some people at least regard those fish as being less fatty and less flavorable but there's probably some data on it i don't i'm not familiar with it though can you real quick explain the dip net fishery that you engage in yeah so uh alaska residents are allowed to participate in a number of fisheries that are called personal use fisheries where um yeah they let you do some things that would be considered poaching pretty much anywhere else uh that so there are a few in south central alaska the copper river the kenai river the

river and sometimes some others um during us principally, these are mostly focused on sockeye salmon, but the state opens it up for locals to fish with dip nets. And a dip net is defined as basically a landing net with a hoop up to five feet in diameter. So they're potentially very large nets. And people will line up along a beach and waders with these nets in the water, or in some cases fish from a boat and sort of tow these nets down river you gotta hold them in your hand and you're allowed um you know a generous supply of salmon for your family um like it might be 15 sockeyes for the head of household 25 right now so i think the the keen eye and the copper have separate are managed separately with separate limits but you're allowed a 25 for the head of the household and 10 fish.

This is an annual limit. And then 10 fish for each member of the household. So my family would be allowed 55 salmon from each of those rivers. That's far more than we need. But yeah, so often we head out dip netting and get some fish, yeah. Like up to your ankle deep in the boat fish. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, it's nice to be able to go out in one shot, get a whole bunch of salmon and take good care of them, get them in the freezer and be done with it.

Yeah, and then can them. Can them, freeze them. Yeah, different people do different things with them. Do you know yeah and then can them can them freeze them yeah different people do different things with them but do you still mess around with your steel canner no i no i haven't used that in years i want to get it out though yeah you know i'm talking about yanni he bought like a thing to make a like a home job he'd make steel cans instead of glass instead of glass jars yeah it just it it just crimps the lid on the can is what it does. And then you still process it in the canner. That thing's pretty sweet.

It is cool. I remember you made me a teal duck in a can. Yeah, yeah. All right, so that's the sockeye. And the sockeye is the earliest. He runs quicker than anybody, right, in the spring, in the summer. Oh, that run timing all depends on where you're at. Oh, it does.

But around here, yeah, the King Salmon and Sockeye tend to be the earliest. June? Yeah, even May for King Salmon in some places. They're starting, yeah. June and July for sockeye around here and then yeah later in june and into july that um pinks and chums start showing up and then pretty much probably everywhere in alaska the coho or the silvers are the tend to be the latest. Let's move on to the next one. So we've covered pinks, pinks humpies, chums dogs, red sockeyes.

Coho silver. That's the next one. Yeah, we'll save the king for last, yeah. So, yeah, coho or silver, um, they're cool salmon. The thing I like about them is that, um, they're an, a sort of an aggressive and a sporty salmon. They like to chase flies and they like to hit lures and they run every little trickle. There's just coho everywhere. Um, and yeah, you can fish them just about anywhere. And they run every little trickle. They're just coho everywhere.

And yeah, you can fish them just about anywhere. They're, they're, they're, and they're, yeah, a great eating salmon. They're kind of like, yeah, just like the everyman salmon, you know, they, they, they run all over the place. In terms of life history, obviously anadromous spawn in, so a little bit later in the year, at least around here, they're more of a fall spawner. September, October, the eggs overwind in the gravel, they emerge in the spring. But unlike all the others we've talked about up to this point, the coho then spends two years typically in alaska two years um rearing in a stream they don't go to a lake like the soccer go to see like the pink so he gets how big about 100 millimeters or so same thing yeah three a three inch fish yeah yeah and so in alaska it takes a couple years to do that sometimes you'll see them

taking a little longer a few of them go out after one year you think you're looking at a dinky little trout but it's a coho yeah i mean yeah to the casual observer it would look like a small rainbow trout or something yeah yeah and then goes out to the ocean and lives out in the ocean for how long one year that's it yeah oh really yeah so when you're catching 12 pound silvers those are a year old yeah no they're three years old yeah one year been out in the ocean one year oh i'm sorry one year at sea yeah so he spends way more of his life in fresh water than he does in salt water yes yeah in alaska i think further south um, they tend to more commonly spend one year in freshwater. And that's a good eating fish,

but not everybody admits how good they are. You say not everybody? I feel like there's some guys that are kind of down on silvers. Some guys will only eat a king. Yeah. There's like sockeye king guys. Sure, yeah. Yeah, I was going to ask ask the sockeyes and the cohos roughly usually for for the average alaskan that fishes are they considered to be equals yeah i think people sometimes do different things with them too like like sockeye hold up

the canning really well you know so a lot of people home can um i think the color on that the sockeye is really appealing to you know it's a really pretty fillet when you take it out of the freezer too but there can't be as many um there can't be nearly as many tons of silvers harvested commercially no as sockeye no no i'm the no sockeye are in areas where you have rivers with lakes on them, these sort of lake systems, then sockeye are incredibly abundant. And those are the big dollar salmon fisheries in Alaska. The big dollar commercial salmon fisheries here are sockeye fisheries. Here's a quick

one to throw us off the the sequence that we're going through but how many uh how many years would you have to go back to find a common ancestor and would you oh yeah yeah um oh it's in the millions, maybe like, I want to say six to maybe 10 or 15 million years. I think like that, the five salmon that we're talking about had all differentiated by about six million years ago. What the hell was that fish's groove man i don't know and then going further back the the atlantic salmon peeled off the pacific salmon line out there's a common ancestor there too oh is it really yeah huh yeah like all the different weather changes and stuff that have happened yeah so well i think you brought this up earlier but

you know there's uh you know a theory out there that you know all that speciation in you know where you have one species of atlantic salmon but five different pacific salmon that has to do with all the topographical diversity around the pacific rim and the you know the uplift of mountain ranges and things segregated habitats and created opportunities for divergent evolution and yeah like those fish can go and experience so many different kinds of yeah yeah but then you know around the sort of the atlanta the atlantic rim you never hear that term but um yeah it just doesn't have the you know the all theount uplift and the potential for habitat fragmentation.

It's a little more homogenous. Yeah, yeah. That's the thinking on that anyway. That's interesting. So the last one, did we give the silver coho its due? I think so, yeah. You kind of finished on just saying how we kind of got all excited when we realized that he's he's only in the ocean for a year he's going out in the ocean at three inches and a year later he comes back as a 12 15 16 yeah they grow fast and it's really interesting like

you know how you know we catch silvers around the cabin in the saltwater and that's like some of my favorite fishing ever you know i absolutely love it um but those fish are packing on like a pound a week when they're sort of in the inshore like on the last bit of their sort of pre pre-spawn migration as they're moving to those channels in southeast alaska and presumably other places you know as they're nearing maturity they're feeding like crazy and just packing on weight hey you know we haven't touched on the different fish um do they tend to target different stuff out in the ocean? Yeah, there's a... I know a little bit about that.

Chinook salmon tend to be a little higher on the food web. They're eating more fish, fewer invertebrates. Sockeye tend to be consuming more invertebrates um sockeye tend to be um consuming more invertebrates less fish um i think i think pink and chum are a little lower you know a little more invertebrate in their diet less fish and like kings will go out and eat squid and stuff yeah yeah yeah i think i think all of them would eat a squid given the opportunity i mean they're all generalists but they you know they they have their own sort of preferences. Yeah.

Okay. So kings, Chinooks. What the hell is the word Chinook? It's got to be a native word. Oh, yeah. From where? I don't know. Is coho a native word, do you think?

I don't know. It's a good question. Silver. Like when you talk about a coho or silver, the silver has to refer to the side of that fish. Yeah. I can't imagine this. I mean, it looks like it's chrome yeah yeah like made out of chrome made out of stainless steel double dip chrome yeah um so a chinook probably a native word king being he is the big bad mofo king of salmon. King of salmon, yeah. He's the bad mofo of the salmon world.

So what's their basic rundown? Quite similar to that of the coho. They'll hang out in the freshwater. Yeah, here most of the king salmon in Alaska spend a year in freshwater and then several years in saltwater is how that goes. That's why they get so big. Yeah.

Yep. They'll go out for several years. Three, four is pretty common. Five certainly happens. So when someone catches a giant, is it likely that that just meant he was out longer or was he just doing the right thing and not make a mistake? It's a little bit of both but yeah i think like a really hog king salmon it's uh has

been out there a while four or five years but then that's what you earlier you kind of mentioned this like sort of paradox so that means that there was a handful of times when his body felt that it wasn't right quite ready yeah it wasn't right it wasn't that it wasn't quite ready. It wasn't right. It wasn't getting what it needs, and so it postpones its spawning run, but then turns into some 50, 60-pound fish. That's exactly right.

Yeah, if he was really kicking ass, he would have came back. He would have went to sea and came back that summer as a jack. If they're really growing fast, sometimes they don't even need the river. So does a jack die when it spawns? Yeah.

Every salmon we've talked about dies when it spawns. Yes, yes. Pacific salmon, well, it gets a little squirrely because of the steelhead here, which is sort of technically a Pacific salmon, but that's the only one that will live to spawn again. And a steelhead is a rainbow trout.

I mean, this is in layman's terms. It's a rainbow trout that goes to the ocean for some of its life. It's an anadromous rainbow trout, yeah. It's the same genus as the Pacific salmon. But a steelhead can spawn multiple times. Yes. Yeah, but Pacific salmon always spawn after they die atlantics can go back to the ocean yes yes it's not a death sentence to spawn no no i mean a lot of them do die what is the advantage of the dying so the advantage of the dying is it's a trade-off they're basically committing all of

their resources to one reproductive event so they can make more eggs bigger eggs they can defend their nest they're just plowing it all into one event at the expense of any future potential spawning going for broke they're just going for broke exactly right in an evolutionary sense yeah and if like that works for them why did it not work it's just like why is it being so weird like why did it not work for steelhead yeah just yeah they're operating in a different yeah a good time machine question would be to go back more toward that like the common ancestor and what was that fish's groove yeah what's the ancestral trait there yeah was the whole dying thing a later like something that came around later or they've been doing that the dying trick

for a long time yeah i don't know that's a good question are the oh go ahead are the lanic salmon do they have traits more similar to that initial, like, before the split of the species? In that they can spawn multiple times and they don't have the, like you said, specific... Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, like, there aren't... I'm not sure that's something you can derive from the fossil record. Like, you know, things about the nuances of behavior you know so there's not a lot of salmon fossils to begin with so um yeah somebody might know the answer to that but not me

why do uh why do dams why are dams so bad for fish uh well quite a they impact the habitat in a lot of ways but the most obvious is that they block migration. That is the most obvious problem. Upstream and downstream. And they convert a big chunk of river to a pond, you know, and you get a whole set of predators that tend to live in those ponds right and then when you when you have juvenile fish on their seaward migration and they're used to sort of riding the spring melt plume out to the ocean and they're making that journey like taking a lickety split trip and also they hit a lake you know it really slows things down yeah yeah exactly full of walleye and pike minnows and all kinds of other fish that that

weren't originally there that want to eat you yeah and then you got turbines to condense contend with and you know the impacts of which like mechanically kill the fish i mean like meaning like smack them in the head well it's you know yeah they're not it's not plenty of fish pass through and live but but and this is more pacific northwest type stuff and it's not really my you know my area but um yeah you guys don't have any major um you don't have any major no we don't have big hydro projects here no there's one that's kicked around once in a while on the susitna river but um no it's not um yeah we're sort of lagging behind you guys uh yeah i'm hoping you don't catch i'm hoping you don't catch up. Yeah, yeah. But like, so why are kings? Okay, is the future bright for pink salmon?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, pink salmon being so short-lived, they're quite adaptable. They're a little bit weedy. I don't think anyone's, numbers are really high right now. But why are kings then like why are kings so screwed like what is their achilles heel so yeah like all you never hear any good news about kings yeah so it's like like river system after river system it's like there's fewer they're

not as big fewer they're not as big yeah yeah. So the king salmon have been trending downward in size for decades. Decades. Decades, yeah. Do you feel that it's human causes? Size selective harvest probably plays a role in that. Yeah, there's a fair bit of speculation about what's driving that. It's probably not any one thing,

but people have been harvesting salmon for a long time and it's non-random. And so, yeah, selectively harvesting larger individuals is you know it's gonna drive down size yeah so that's probably part of it changes in ocean productivity uh food resources at sea that sort of things probably also plays a role so like general general overfishing in the seas could be could it could not not i mean not over overfishing sort of a separate issue you know that's taking so many that they can't replace themselves right or or but this is this is sort of fishing in a non-random way right you're you're you're selectively harvesting the

larger or faster growing individuals and you're sort of left with it but what about the food aspect if so um yeah yeah king salmon you mentioned earlier that they feed a little bit more coastally they're a little bit more of a cold adapted salmon. They're in deeper water. They're in colder water. They're feeding in a sort of a different food web than the other salmon. They tend to be more at the surface, more offshore. And yes, it's possible that changing climate patterns and ocean circulation patterns have affected their food resources

in a way that hasn't impacted the resources of the other species. Am I right in saying that they're just kind of screwed? Is that not, is that true or not true? I don't know. I mean, there's a long history of salmon, you know,

having problems and bouncing back, you know, and, um, what's an example of a salmon that had a problem and bounce back? Oh, there, you know, any, look at any run within alaska there are periods of low productivity and periods of high productivity it happens in lots of places um so you think that the problem with king is it like if you just like sort of like i i go beyond casual but i you know i take in news about fish

i have it selected for my personal news feed the fisheries yeah i'm always reading like really bad stuff about kinks could it wind up being that in 10 years we're like man did we have a rough stretch yes really it very well could yeah yeah i mean it's probably related to ocean conditions and you know though there are these regime shifts and things that occur that can't begin to understand the physics behind them but there are these regime shifts that change in the ocean it's like throwing a switch and all of a sudden things just turn around it's it's possible that could happen or it's possible that i mean like el nino la nina type activity exactly exactly or or it's possible that's that somehow we've you know affected

the the fish or their habitat in a way that it's not they're not compatible with that anymore only time will tell um go ahead no uh finish up oh i was gonna say there are there are you know certainly examples of fish having you know potentially prolonged periods of low productivity that all of a sudden something changes and they turn it around. Snap it around. But Alaska has, here we have the benefit that our freshwater river habitat is really intact.

Most of it is in really good condition. And that gives them a lot of resilience that they don't have in other places. You mentioned something to me before that I've mentioned a couple times since you told me about it. We were talking about conservation, wildlife conservation. And you were saying how, just speaking in a general sense, not applied to any particular species, but you were saying that conservation is such a different thing in the lower 48 where you guys have been in recovery mode for so long. Yeah. And in Alaska, it's more like you're not really in a recovery mode.

You're almost in a descriptive mode up here. Yeah. In a conserving mode, we're trying to learn from the lessons of lower 48. Like what exactly did those guys do down there to screw their salmon up so bad? And how can we avoid making the same mistakes? Yeah, yeah. It's interesting too,

a lot of the conservation efforts here too, and I think it's a worthwhile endeavor, but they're trying to like foster a relationship between Alaskans and salmon or to strengthen that relationship, to make salmon a real sort of cultural touchstone here so that people are more inclined to want to protect salmon. Everybody gives a shit about it, not just anglers.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly, yeah. Yeah. I think that's effort well spent. Just to increase the cultural awareness. Yeah, exactly. Cultural value. Yep, yep.

To make it be that it's more valuable than gold. Everybody cares. It's more valuable than gold or more valuable than... Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and part of that's just pointing out how economically and culturally they are important, and part of it is trying to strengthen relationships that people have.

And there's a lot of people moving in and out of Alaska all the time. And, you know, a huge part of our population is somewhat transient, but getting those people connected to salmon. What was it that caused, what was the thinking that led people to want to start beginning to introduce salmon into the Great Lakes where we grew up? Oh, so in terms of the steelheadhead i think that was largely a sport fish that was

the first of the salmon to be introduced now it's in the late 1800s well they tried steelhead first to my knowledge they may have tried other salmon they didn't take but steelhead had were introduced in they got them to go quick they're from california steelhead were introduced in- They got them to go quick. I think they're from California steelhead stock, and they introduced them in the late 1800s. Yeah, and there was a lot of hatchery production keeping that propped up, but I think that there are some self-supporting populations there. But the Pacific salmon, Chinook salmon were introduced, what, late 60s? Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, the chronology was weird.

It's not really the main point I wanted to ask you about. But yeah, the motivation was that the Great Lakes had been sort of taken over by one wave after another of invasive species. And the alewife was one that was introduced via the Welland Shipping Canal that came in from the Atlantic coast into the Great Lakes. And its population had exploded by the, I guess, late 60s, maybe early 70s. And the state of Michigan, to my knowledge, stocked the Chinook salmon in an attempt to get something to eat all those alewives up. Do you remember dead alewives when we were kids? Oh, yeah, I remember that. Like just carpeting the beaches.

It was like national news stories about all the dead owl wives. And I know that they tried multiple times to get various fish going. But like so they established a pink population in the Great Lakes. Yeah, and that was accidental. All the pinks and the salmon in the Great Lakes came from one accidental stocking at, I think it was from an Ontario hatchery on Lake Huron side. And I think they were holding pink salmon at a hatchery because they were trying to introduce, if I have this right,

they were trying to introduce a population on the Canadian Atlantic somewhere. Really? And they were holding them at a hatchery in the Great Lakes, and some escaped somehow, and that was all it took. They just adapted very quickly. In the northern waters more? Yeah, the northern maybe half of the Great Lakes. They moved from their point of release.

They were establishing runs in nearby streams pretty quickly, and they spread around the upper Great Lakes. Does it make sense now that they've got Chinooks or Kings in the Great Lakes, there's Cohoes in the Great Lakes, there's Steelhead in the Great Lakes. Does it make sense that they were – would you look now and know what you now know and say, oh, yeah, of course Sockeyes and Chums aren't going to work in the Great Lakes, does it make sense that they were, would you look now, know what you now know, and say, oh yeah, of course, sockeyes and chums aren't going to work in the Great Lakes? You know, no, I think that's kind of hard to predict.

Sometimes they take and sometimes they don't. There's a bit of a history of people trying to move salmon around, you know. But yeah, I don't know if anyone would be able to guess as to whether or not they would take or not but yeah those are i know sockeye have been tried in the great lakes they didn't take coho i'm not even sure that they're self-sustaining anywhere there it's hatchery run i think so but man that's yeah i haven't that's another world there's a book that

i have called fishing the great lakes and it's an environmental history of the great lakes and it gets into the collapse of the native fisheries and then just that long history of people trying to make up for it yeah by rather than fixing you know and sometimes the problems are unfixable but like rather than fixing the problem let's just see if there's some other thing that might like it here. Yeah. As we do whatever. And interesting things that the logging boom where they were logging off the Great Lakes states and rafting all those logs out in the Great Lakes and the bays and estuary areas. Or it's not estuary because it's not saltwater, but the river mouths.

River mouths, yeah. estuary areas or it's not estuary because it's not salt water but the river mouth yeah and all the bark when you're floating logs the bark eventually falls away from the tree and that you have spawning areas that were covered in 12 15 feet of bark destroying fisheries and then overfishing destroying fisheries and later people being like well let's try maybe a salmon like it i don't know you know yeah and on and on to the point where they introduced the common carp alewives smell well carp was intentional others others were the carp was intentional yeah uh brown trout yeah rainbow trout almost like like in some ways like some of the biggest like ticket fish items in the great lakes

oh yeah yeah and i don't know how widely understood it is by people that live in those areas the extent to which their lakes have become sort of an experimental aquarium hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated.

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yeah i don't know if people make like a value judgment about it we sure didn't growing up i mean the coolest fish you could catch was a big king yeah i was gonna say it's when we talked who do we talk to about that about how um it's just like the the baseline that you're used to the shifting yeah baselines yeah shifting baselines that's what you came into and so it's fine but yeah but if you were out trolling for kings and you caught a laker people would be like oh laker grease ball yeah grease ball so that's like the native fish which kind of like built this state man and there was like a thriving commercial industry around that fish and all this history and the native americans that lived here would like lived off that fish and relied on it and it becomes where it comes up

you're like oh i was hoping for the one that came on a truck and got dumped i was hoping for the one that got dumped out of a barrel you know i was talking to some biologists from the Great Lakes recently, and I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the stars have sort of realigned for lake trout, and they're having a bit of a comeback now, the native lake trout in the Great Lakes. That was nice to hear. Perception-wise? No, population-wise. I think perception-wise, too.

I think they're a little more valued now than they used to be. What others, if Kings are down right now, pinks are up right now. Everything else is up. Yeah. Yeah. Numbers are great.

Like the populations are. So it might not be that we just broke something that we won't be able to fix. It might be like Kings. I mean, some rivers we just broke. Right. like i mean yeah a lot a lot of them columbia sacramento yeah just this broke is there a way i know this isn't your business but like do you think that there's a way that uh to turn around some of the broke systems, particularly like some of the rivers that are so busted in California.

Oh, man. There's a whole lot of people working on that. I used to talk to one of them. Yeah. Because up here, man, it seems to be like a general optimism about salmon. Well, I mean, yeah. like seems to be like a general optimism about salmon well i mean yeah i mean they're they're they're at at historical sort of a high point in their abundance right now um the last couple

decades have been great for salmon uh in general with the exception of Chinook having sort of a 10-year slump in productivity. Yeah. Let's say something happened, and the ocean's got a, just whatever, the ocean's got a degree or two warmer. Would that shift open up a lot of habitat to salmon that they're not currently using because it's too cold? Like, would the whole show just kind of move north? Or are there reasons that it wouldn't work like that?

I ask an oceanographer. No, I think there are fish running rivers further north now, like into Arctic Alaska and presumably Arctic Canada. That maybe didn't have runs in the past yep yep but see that gets another question i wanted to ask you but expound on that for a minute and then i'm gonna ask you no fish or salmon are certainly you know moving further north of the bering sea and beyond but um yeah i don't think you can assume that that you know just just given the shape of that basin, right, you're losing. If you just shift the entire envelope of salmon further north, you have a lot less habitat to work with.

Oh, I mean, because it shrinks as it gets north. Yeah, yeah. So I'm just, yeah. But the idea that they shift, like, you could have a northern river that right now doesn't get fish and it's just too cold or whatever. Yeah. So let's say there was this idea that a river would have fish turn up in it. That brings up a really interesting question is that their fidelities or their home stream must not be entirely strict. It's not absolute, no.

Because how would a fish ever find a new river if he has to go back to where he was born i mean go back 15 000 years and you know most of alaska salmon habitat was under ice uh yeah so what accounts for that that's a good point so during like you know the the all the different glacial periods yeah there was no salmon run because it was just... Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, you know, built into their sort of life history is a certain propensity for a small number of individuals to go to the wrong river. What percent do they know? Oh, it's small, it's small.

And it varies by species and it varies by... It's sort of an adaptive trait. It's sort of bred into the system, you know? Oh, it's great that some of them would make a mistake. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it makes perfect sense. It allows for a little genetic mixing among population. It allows for colonization of new habitats.

So, yeah, it's built into their life history. Do you remember in Sault Ste. Marie? So, I'm going to paint this picture for for the listeners in sioux saint marie michigan you have a uh the saint mary's river drains lake superior and it falls i think 22 feet or 18 feet or something like that 14 something yeah falls some number of feet more than 10 through the sioux rapids and then the saint mary's river flows down after draining lake superior flows down the St. Mary's river and flows into Lake Huron. In Sault Ste. Marie,

there's a, there's a hydroelectric project where they cut a channel to funnel some of that water that's coming down the St. Mary's to flow through a hydro electric canal that then goes out and, and pushes a bunch of electric turbines so it's like they chiseled off a branch of the stream to power and hydroelectric dam yeah it goes from above the falls loops around it dumps them below yeah they're capitalizing on that whatever it is i guess 14 feet 14 to 18 20 whatever hell number feet it is it capitalizes

on that fall to get a good head of water going to push to turn the turbines in a dam and this dam has a bunch of turbines but some of the turbines that were given over to a fish lab you know where i'm going with this yeah and all the the the the turbines or tunnels would have names and there's one through whatever the hell yeah and they would rear atlantics as a part of this experimental project to like establish atlantics in the great lakes they would rear atlantics in a certain in a certain tunnel i think it was number one yeah he's on the end of the building yeah and you could go there and we would go there to fish whitefish and you could go and look and

you could just see the atlantics that were returning and they would return to the fish lab do you remember this yeah they returned to that tunnel i mean they go to they'd nose into a lot of those tunnels but they would like the one that they were coming from you would look in the like wait there'd be like 10 in that one three in the next one yeah and then maybe like one in the next one and you can sort of see like how good they were hitting the right spot whatever they were smelling or keying oh yeah it's scent yeah and then there was some other ones who were like close but not quite yeah yeah shifting around down there um yeah these are separated by yards yeah yeah yeah no that that they uh there's a a window of time when those salmon are young where they sort of memorize or imprint the scent of their stream

and that's all that's the last you know bit of migrating they do they're doing it by their nose what's the first bit of migrating they do oh it's sort of like i don't understand biologically how it works but it's sort of like a um they're triangulating their position based on like sun angle and magnetism and things like that so they have sort of a think of it as like a mental map and they're using that to get in the rough vicinity and at some point their nose more or less takes over so if you went on the high is is it believed that if you went on the high seas okay you have a you have a salmon that came out of a specific river so it came out of the kenai river and he's out on the high seas and you went and caught him

and blindfolded him and then hell he looked hell he lifted him two miles and put him back in the ocean do you feel like he'd turn up at the same river oh he can't be backtracking oh where did you catch him i'm just saying you pick him out of the high seas somewhere and blindfold the middle of the ocean and move him 100 miles oh oh oh but then you unblindfold them then you unblindfold put it back in the river you have no problem so it's not like it's not like he remembers his route no no no it's something else no he has like a he has some way of fixing his position on a mental map yeah man we are we studying that right now that how they a lot of work has been done on this yeah the i read about the magnetism stuff and yeah

it's fascinating man you know on the they work on it with turtles a lot oh okay how do those turtles know to find that beach you know on the scent end there were some cool studies done in the great lakes back i want to 60s or 70s, probably when they were first introducing salmon there. But they held these young salmon in a, I think they held them in a stream and they dripped some certain chemical in that stream. And those salmon imprinted on that smell and they released those salmon and let them roam around the Great Lakes for a couple years and when that salmon were maturing and coming back,

they went like a few miles down the beach and dripped that same chemical into the wrong stream and all the salmon went to the wrong stream where the chemical was being dripped. So when they're closing in, when they're closing in, they just pick up that scent and follow it in yeah dude it blows your mind yeah how can be so unique each area you know oh but you figure all the

different ions you know dissolve all the different types of ions from all the different rocks and soil and everything in that water it's like they have this whole portfolio of concentrations and like they just learn that smell you know can you real quick talk about uh this is the last thing i have you explain can you talk about the function of moving marine resources how salmon is a is a mechanism that moves marine resources inland? Yeah, yeah. They're a sort of vector to move energy and nutrients up rivers. Like we said earlier, in high latitudes, fresh waters are much less productive than ocean waters. And salmon do this cool trick where they go out to the sea. And it's not

intentional. It's just a byproduct of their life history. But they go out to sea and they put on a bunch of weight and then they swim upstream and bring with them all of this fat and protein and phosphorus and nitrogen and all the different forms of fertilizer that the fish that rear in those streams and the insects and the algae. And so they're sort of fertilizing that stream. Feeding bears, feeding birds.

Yeah, yeah. And that river is, you you know it's flowing is taking spending all this time taking nutrients from the landscape and bringing them out to the ocean and then salmon sort of reverse that flow uh once a year and and bring in you know in in cases with big runs many many tons of nutrients back to the land um Yeah, and it has a lot of sort of feedbacks within the ecosystem in terms of feeding. So do you feel that there's probably places where if you eliminated the salmon,

you could feasibly trigger a sort of ecological collapse? Yeah, it would certainly be bad for, you know, large mobile consumers that move around and eat salmon like bears and, you know, eagles and other scavengers. I've been involved with this showing that juvenile salmon that are exposed to large volumes of salmon, eggs, and other types of resources will grow faster than those that don't have access to as much salmon, eggs, and flesh and other marine resources. There's a whole lot of literature out there. The juveniles are directly feeding off the carcasses of the grown. Yeah, the carcasses and the eggs, you know. And yeah, there's been a whole lot of work

in different places around Alaska looking at different aspects of this. But, oh, like for instance, out in Bristol Bay in Southwest Alaska, where there are trophy rainbow populations out there that are fished by anglers from all over the world you know from the state of high-end lodges and it's a it's one of alaska's sort of premier trophy sport fisheries but um those trophy rainbow trout out there get you know a huge fraction of their

their annual nutritional intake just by eating salmon eggs it It's a huge diet item for them. And it comes in a pretty short period of time. It's our late summer, early fall. They're getting most of their caloric intake for the whole year. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Then they just chill out.

Just chill out. Water gets cold, their metabolism slows down, and they just kind of hang on to that weight until the next year. Yanni, you got more questions? When those salmon are out in the ocean, I believe there's a term for this for two different types of fish out in the ocean, ones that are just like constantly moving and constantly eating

versus one that actually has a resting time. Do you understand my question? It kind of changes the flesh too, right? The type of flesh the fish has. has a resting time. Do you understand my question? Yeah. It kind of changes the flesh too, right? The type of flesh the fish has. Yeah, but salmon are all on the same page with that. Right, they are. They are, but what's that called?

Oh, like a... I mean, yeah, like a cruising pelagic fish. They're mobile. They're always swimming. They never go down to the bottom and sit there? No, they're not going to go down like a halibut or a rockfish and hang out on the bottom, yeah. But they're a roving epipelagic predator.

And he's just eating just constantly. I mean, it's just like that's his... Oh, I'm sure they slack off at certain times. But yeah, I mean, they're an actively swimming mobile fish. They never sleep like how we perceive of sleep. Huh? No, I'm asking. Oh, I thought you were making a statement

because this is something I've never really looked into. But I mean, they can't go lay down. I guess you're right, yeah. You know when we used to go out as kids gigging frogs? I shouldn't say this because now we know you're not supposed to do it, but you're not supposed to gig frogs in michigan with artificial light but we would go out with artificial lights remember yeah to look for bullfrogs and crayfish that's

perfectly legal we'd go out to do that and you'd catch bluegills we're like that blue is asleep yeah you catch bluegills just like completely zoned out you almost like walk up and grab them yeah you know i around the shack i have seen salmon where they're sitting at the surface still with their fins out of the water sometimes. Oh, really? Holding still? I don't. Maybe that's sleeping.

Yeah. But they are, they tend to use the top of the water, the light, the lit version of the water. Oh, yeah. Even when they're out at the middle of the ocean. Yeah. They're just using the top of the water column. Yeah.

Not down deep. Dirt, final questions? I got a couple, actually. Lay it on me, man. So, finning, I did a little purse seining years ago. Oh, yeah. And we'd always sit around in a finning group in jumpers. Oh, yeah.

And what's the purpose of both of those when they're kind of like close to it oh like what are they accomplishing with that behavior when they're all pooled up with their fins out of the water and what do they do when they jump yeah and like i've heard various opinions of what they're trying to do oh yeah i don't even have one yeah you know one of the things people say what loosen it loosens their eggs up oh i mean how do you answer that question i guess yeah yeah no it's cool to be around that when like when uh you really know that there's it's cool to be around all that life you know you can just look out there and see salmon fin sticking up out of the water there's jumpers everywhere and there's you know it's way larger below.

Yeah. That's a good point. But is that them just feeding? It's like seeing an iceberg float there. All you're seeing is the... Yeah. So there's not a good theory about why salmon... Oh, somebody might have one.

I just don't. Yeah. There's not a tested theory. Yeah. I think it's a difficult one to test. And then the other one, I really want to ask about the burbot leech, but that wouldn't make sense at all.

We caught a burbot with a parasite on it. It looked like a leech. Oh, it probably was. Oh, okay. Cool. I mean, I know there's leeches around. And then one more, and this one's a little more philosophical.

There may not be an answer to it, but just because you've had such a, I mean, as a fish biologist, that intimate relationship with each species do you find yourself prone to be particular to one of those five that we talked about in your region of study oh or is that not a fair question no i yeah i mean professionally i really like hoho uh because they're just everywhere and they're abundant and they live in fresh water a long time and i work in fresh water and um yeah i think they're just everywhere and they're abundant and they live in fresh water a long time and I work in fresh water. And yeah, I think they're super cool fish.

Cool. And that's prioritized over like the angling of them or eating of them. It's like their activity as a species. Oh, it all works together. You know, I got a thing for coho. I like cohos because I like mooch and cohos. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

That's the one I root for, man. Yeah, angling and my professional life all sort of get intertwined. But yeah, I really do have a thing for, I really love catching kings too. I'm fascinated by them and it's just a huge accomplishment to me to catch one of those things, especially out in saltwater. I love it. Is that cool on you? it's great okay i got one last thing i forgot to ask about this is gonna suffice as my concluder then you can do a concluder if you want you told me an interesting thing one time where

you're saying that um it's possible to have or it's maybe possible it's an idea that could be entertained that it's possible to have too many fish go up a river yeah because you would think like the more fish the better like bring them on bring them on up the river but there's a point at which you might get like a diminishing returns can you talk about that for a minute? I don't know if this is more of a theoretical concept or if it has like applicable. It has some application and there's some data behind it. But in terms of the bears and the eagles, there can't be too many salmon.

Yeah. But yeah, so that's actually a really big can of worms. You just opened. So I'm not sure where to start with this, but, um, I can tell you what I understood you to be saying. No, no. Yeah. Go ahead.

Go ahead. Okay. We were out one time. I don't know what you, I was just hanging around with you and we were doing some work and we were out checking minnow traps. I think you were like, we were out checking minnow traps because you were out trapping baby cohoes in a river. Yeah, I remember this.

And you were looking at things of like what's the density and what's the tolerance of competition of cohoes when they're spending all this time when they're spending these two years in the stream where they were born and you were saying that you were talking about this idea that um it could be that you could have less cohos less coho babies in the river but they're all so much more healthier because they're not suffering from too much competition and you could have been like trying an idea out no no and maybe like sending out 50 that are super fit and had like a great resource of food could in the end be better than

and sending out 200 emaciated 200 emaciated fish that weren't they weren't doing good yeah yeah yeah so yeah you'd wind up with a better healthier return yes yes so um you know a river of any size has a finite amount of spawning and rearing habitat. And so when you get to a point where there are, if you have an exceptionally large run and lots and lots and lots of spawners, you get into a position where you have a wave of fish come in, they start building nests, they spawn there, and then the next wave of fish comes in, digs all those nests up,

lays more nests on top of them, right? And so only the last batch of fish that spawn there are going to really have any output, right? You had a lot of excess. Oh, so they could excavate and destroy each other's nests yeah yeah and in the in the trade they call it nest superimposition they're just building nests on top of other nests and the thought is that those you could have harvested a lot of those fish without having any negative impact on the return but the same thing plays out too in the rearing habitat especially for those fish the species that rear in fresh water, right?

So if you have way too many, I struggle with the term too many. I'm already seeing where I messed it up. So if you have a really large sockeye run and you have a lot of spawners that are all producing fry that are then migrating to a rearing lake and the lake has the sort of scenario that you're describing with the coho and many you have a you know a huge biomass a huge number of juveniles there and the per capita food resources that are low and there's a lot of competition and you know that those fish can't all get big right so yeah there's so that's kind of how salmon are managed in alaska and elsewhere they they they take a lot of a long time series of data where for a given river um they observe how many salmon are going in that

river to spawn and then from that given brood year and subsequent years, how many salmon come back? And so for every spawning run, they calculate how many subsequent returns were produced. And over a long period of time, you can sort of develop this empirical relationship between the number of spawners that you let into a river and the number of salmon that come back later from the spawners. I understand now where I was messing it up. At least in theory, you'll see sort of, you know, that relationship if you picture a graph with, you know, the number of spawners on the X axis, you know, at low numbers of spawners, you're going to get a lot of returns, right?

But that levels off eventually. You can, at some point, you can put more spawners into the system, but you don't get back a lot of fish because of competition for nests and competition for food and that sort of thing so you might be looking at a river thinking we're gonna have let's just use simple numbers a hundred fish are gonna um come back up here next year and we might be able to harvest half of all the fish that come up, and you're still going to have 100 come back or some such. Yeah, and that's a good rule of thumb, actually.

In most of Alaska's fisheries, I think over the long term, about maybe 40% to 60% of the returning adults, and these things only spawn once, so they're being harvested before they ever have a chance to spawn. But every single year, every single run, about roughly half, give or take, of the population is killed before it has a chance to spawn. But that's sort of a testament to the productivity of these fish

because this has been going on in Alaska for over 100 years in most places, and those fish just keep coming back and coming back. And they're at – populations are, for the most part, doing great. I'm so happy to hear the salmon are doing all right generally. I mean, up here at least. Yeah. Yeah.

Pacific Northwest is a bit of another story but it's a totally different story wasn't there a closure on king fishing to retain the oh there's a lot of that going around yeah i mean last year i remember specifically when we were out at your guys because they couldn't tell because there's kings up here that belong down there yeah it was something they didn't want them get there's so few down there they didn't want whatever ones might happen to be running around up here getting killed and they might be turning up down there later. Am I getting that right?

Well, the sport and commercial seasons were closed for king salmon in southeast Alaska starting in August last year. There are a handful of the transboundary rivers in Southeast Alaska, like the Stikine and the Taku and the Eunuch, rivers that drain from British Columbia into the mainland Southeast Alaska. The King Salmon runs in all those rivers

are in pretty bad shape right now. And so they closed the fisheries in Southeast Alaska. To maximize return. Yes, yes. And a lot of those fish feed sort of locally. So even by the time August came around last year, most of that year's spawners were already, if not all of them, already in the river.

But I think that they were closing that to preserve immature fish feeding in that sort of coastal Southeast. that that alludes to that sort of canada u.s interplay of salmon management yeah there are some there are some uh treaties on those rivers too i believe yeah like just because it flows out in your country doesn't mean that you can run the show yeah you can run the show when we need to have our fish to have our fish cross the border and come back up to where we're at. Yeah, there's a lot of habitat in Canada, yeah.

All right, do you have any things that you wanted to wedge in that we didn't get to? No, I had a list, but we got to them, yeah. Really? Where's your list? On my head. Oh, you had a mental list. And you guys are good?

Yeah. I'm ready for a taco. Fish taco? What kind of tacos do we have? Moose, but we do have a little bit of halibut and rockfish we could heat up, though. Left over from a couple nights ago. No salmon? Nope.

Man, I got very little salmon left in the freezer, man. I like to have that stuff gone. You got to get it gone, man. Yeah. You can sit on a piece of deer meat for a couple years, but salmon, I like to get in and out. Yes. Yes. In and out. yes same here but

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