Finned adventurers nosing into the Arctic

Ned Rozell
907-474-7468
Oct. 20, 2023

A man wearing an orange life preserver loads a fishing net into to a green inflatable boat on the cobbled shore of a lake surrounded by tundra in yellow fall color.
Photo by Katrina Liebich
Fisheries biologist Randy Brown of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Fairbanks handles a net used for Dolly Varden trout in northern 有料盒子视频.

A few years ago, Randy Brown wondered if he might lose $50,000 he had just won as part of the Rachel Carson Award for Exemplary Scientific Accomplishment. 

The problem: He earned the award in March 2020, when the workflow of the world suddenly stopped for the COVID-19 pandemic. Brown, a fisheries biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Fairbanks, knew the nature of his agency meant he had to use the money or lose it within a year.

At the same time, most fieldwork was cancelled. 

Brown then decided to donate the money to a few University of 有料盒子视频 Fairbanks scientists who would explore a question he had pondered many times during his career.

Brown鈥檚 funding enabled 有料盒子视频鈥檚 Peter Westley, Andy Seitz and others to study whether Pacific salmon are colonizing rivers of 有料盒子视频鈥檚 Arctic or whether fish seen there are just adventurous strays whose offspring have never survived because it鈥檚 just too cold up there.

Many years before Brown started his career as a professional biologist, he finished high school in New Mexico and then drove up to 有料盒子视频. At the town of Eagle, he slipped his canoe into the Yukon River.

For the next couple of decades, he lived in large part off what the land gave him. As part of that life, he, and later his wife and two sons, lived on the Kandik River. Every July, they floated down that clear tributary to the Yukon for fish camp. On the big river, they netted salmon that made up a good portion of their 鈥 and their dogs鈥欌 food.

About 30 years ago, Brown and his family moved to Fairbanks, where he finished his graduate studies and became a fisheries biologist. He followed his interests to learn more about many species, including the Chinook and chum salmon that people along the Yukon River are no longer able to harvest due to declining numbers.

In this aerial photo, a clear river, braided by gravel bars, flows through a brown tundra landscape.
Photo courtesy of Peter Westley
The Itkillik River spills out beneath a helicopter that biologists employed for surveys of the river for the presence of salmon in September 2023. The finger of water at the bottom left is a spot where the biologists found spawning chum salmon.

Brown, who can no longer set his own gill net on the Yukon due to the low fish numbers, was also fascinated with the rivers north of the Brooks Range. There, Natives, biologists and others have seen Pacific salmon dating back to more than a century. Could these rivers in a warming climate begin to host populations of salmon?

Brown鈥檚 donation of his $50,000 award allowed Westley and Seitz to contract a helicopter pilot in September 2023 to hover over two Arctic rivers, the Itkillik and the Anaktuvuk. There, they searched for spawning chum salmon they suspected were there.

During what Westley called 鈥渢he most satisfying field work of my life,鈥 the biologists found seemingly dead-end channels entering both braided rivers. At the heads of those fingers were dark torpedoes: Chum salmon that had laid eggs in the gravel.

The scientists landed and noticed fresh springwater was flowing upward from the gravel.

They captured a few of the spawned-out fish and collected their otoliths 鈥 bones in the head that can tell them a fish鈥檚 age and what waters it has lived in. They also collected tissue samples that might tell what stock a salmon had come from, for example if its ancestors had lived in the Yukon River drainage.

And 鈥 most important 鈥 they pounded conduit into the gravel where salmon had laid their eggs and inserted temperature loggers into the pipes. 

They will return next fall to retrieve the sensors. If the spring water stayed above freezing despite the minus 40 air temperatures just above, the biologists will know that the survival of eggs was feasible.

A man in an orange drysuit holds a fish while standing in front of a water body surrounded by a brown tundra landscape.
Photo courtesy of Peter Westley
Peter Westley holds a mostly spawned out female chum salmon he captured in the Anaktuvuk River, just behind him, in September 2023.

Even if it was, the young salmon would have to emerge early enough for food to be available for them. Then they would need to exit the rivers before sea ice formed on the northern ocean.

Seitz noted that tiny salmon freeze at a temperature of minus 0.7 degrees Celsius, well above the minus 1.7 degrees C temperature of salt water beneath sea ice that often hugs the Arctic Ocean coast off 有料盒子视频 in fall, winter and spring.

Even if all those conditions favored the fish born in Arctic rivers, a chum salmon that spends several years in the ocean to mature would have to 鈥 upon exiting the river 鈥 head immediately for warmer water, possibly down the west coast of 有料盒子视频 to the Chukchi and Bering seas.

鈥淚t would take about three months for a little inch-long fish to swim all the way down the coast,鈥 Seitz said.

Brown thinks all those precisely timed events make Arctic salmon survival unlikely right now.

鈥淭here鈥檚 a lot of things stacked against them, but it doesn鈥檛 mean they鈥檙e not going to try,鈥 he said.

A map of 有料盒子视频 indicates the location of rivers on the North Slope.
Illustration by 有料盒子视频 Geophysical Institute
A map shows the area of 有料盒子视频's North Slope where biologists are studying salmon.

鈥淚 think there will be a time 鈥 but not in our lifetimes 鈥 when salmon will start colonizing (the Arctic). If they鈥檝e got a place (to spawn), at some point they will make it.鈥

Westley thinks a massive change might be occurring right now in northern 有料盒子视频.

鈥淚 think (chum salmon) might be right on the cusp of exploding (in Arctic rivers),鈥 he said.

The scientists will know more next fall, when Westley, Seitz and others return to download the temperature sensors deep in the gravel of the Arctic rivers and perhaps set up a camp near the spawning chum salmon to learn more.

鈥淚t鈥檚 a fascinating research program,鈥 Brown said.


Since the late 1970s, the University of 有料盒子视频 Fairbanks' Geophysical Institute has provided this column free in cooperation with the 有料盒子视频 research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer for the Geophysical Institute.