Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
RED TIDE
Every spring, millions of salmon fry emerge from the gravel of the Bristol Bay region's
streams and lakes, migrate down to the bay, and swim out into the Bering Sea and bey-
ond. Once they have matured, after two to six years of roaming the ocean, the salmon
return to their natal streams, in their way to the pool they were born in, and spawn.
In dry years, you can find stretches of waterway where a thin layer of brown wa-
ter—as little as an inch deep—churns with a seething mass of red torpedoes wriggling
furiously toward home.
“It's a force of nature,” the locals told me. A “biblical flood of fish.” Because the prized
sockeye develop red sides by the time they spawn, their onslaught is known as the red
tide, or red gold.
Alaska has some of the most valuable fishing grounds in the world (if it were a na-
tion, the state would be the ninth-largest seafood producer), which generated a catch
worth a record $533.9 million in 2010. Bristol Bay is Alaska's richest commercial fishery
and the world's most productive commercial sockeye fishery. All five species of Pacific
salmon—pink, chum, sockeye, coho, and king—spawn in the bay's rivers.
In 2008, 29.3 million salmon, valued at $113.3 million, were harvested in Bristol Bay;
in 2009, 30.9 million salmon, worth $144.2 million, were taken; in 2010, bay fishermen
hauled in 28.6 million salmon, worth a record $148.2 million.
In early June 2008, I flew into Dillingham, a weather-beaten fishing port on Bristol Bay,
just as the sockeye were about to arrive en masse. A large silver sculpture of a salmon
is suspended between two poles in a small park in the middle of town. Dillingham has
three canneries, and everywhere you looked was the message NO PEBBLE MINE —on bump-
er stickers, posters, lapel pins, camouflage baseball caps, and flags flying from the radio
masts of the fishing fleet. One guy wore a black sweatshirt emblazoned with the message
PUCK FEBBLE !
People spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on equipment for the Bristol Bay fish-
ing season, which lasts only about six weeks. A fisherman can expect to pay, on average,
$325,000 to buy a new gill-netter, the thirty-two-foot fishing boats that are the mon-
ster trucks of the sea: wide, squat, stainless steel, blunt-nosed salmon-killing machines,
armed with enormous engines and big spools of netting at bow and stern. That doesn't
include the cost of gas, crew, nets, and supplies you need to survive for days at sea in a
harsh climate. But such is the nature of salmon fever.
June 1 is opening day for king salmon in Bristol Bay. A few days later, the sockeye
arrive and begin to make their way up local rivers. When enough of them have passed
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