What if your life and offspring depended on the success of a long-distance trip?
Before GPS, I remember my family relying on MapQuest, a web-based mapping service when navigating a trip to an unfamiliar location. As I think how far we have come in navigating travel, it prompts me to also think about other extraordinary animal travels, more specifically salmon, the focus of my research.
Fish, in general, play a vital role in food security and provide a source of income for billions of people. In fact, do you know what the most nutritious food is on the planet? You guessed it -- Salmon. Thus, it’s important to study salmon; and my focus is in the Bristol Bay Alaska area where sockeye salmon is the most economically, environmentally, and culturally important species.
Every year, millions of salmon carry out one of the most epic animal migrations on earth - traveling hundreds of miles from the ocean back to their birth streams, beaches, and rivers to reproduce and die. Once arriving at the place where they were born, they line up at the entrance of the stream much like runners at the start of a race before migrating upstream. This race is not only the most important race of their lives, but it is their last. During their upstream migration, female salmon will compete with other females for access to high-quality breeding areas, while male salmon compete with other males to establish control and attempt to court the females in hopes of being selected - much like it’s the final episode of the television series, The Bachelorette.
On the way home, salmon encounter an array of obstacles: escaping predators (e.g., bears); swimming against roaring currents, and overcoming extreme elevations as high as 8,000 feet. Every salmon will take their own path to return ‘home’; but for all salmon, the goal is the same: to find the most suitable ‘place’ to successfully reproduce to continue their family line for generations to come.
So, the question becomes: How do salmon select a place to breed? You can think of it as a person looking to buy a home. There are several things to consider when buying a home, right? Is it the number of rooms in the house? The closet and storage space? The community/neighborhood? Now imagine if you are a salmon moving upstream. What would you look for in a place to settle down? What stream or river features would you prioritize? It could be the water flow in an area; the size of the gravel; the composition of the landscape or the number of other salmon in the area (i.e. crowdedness).
These are the research questions I seek to answer by using genetics, habitat data, and complex statistical models. This information will advance our understanding of the specific environmental conditions that salmon gravitate towards. It will also help fishery managers establish more effective salmon habitat restoration strategic plans to better sustain salmon populations.
Thus, the study of salmon matters. It matters because of salmon’s significant role in the food chain. It matters because juvenile and adult salmon are sustenance for bears, seagulls, and other animal species. It matters because after spawning (aka breeding), salmon become the nutrients in the soil to stimulate the growth of trees along riverscapes. And culturally, the study of salmon matters because salmon are part of many coastal communities’ livelihoods, more specifically the Pacific Northwest tribes’ culture and identity.
Indeed, the study of salmon matters and I am extremely excited about my research.
Ashley R. Townes is a passion-driven fish ecologist, educator, and international in-field environmental researcher working in the realm of ecological restoration and natural resource management at various international agencies, NGOs, and institutions around the world. At the University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, Townes is studying both the behavior and ecology of spawning sockeye salmon ( Oncorhynchus nerka ) and the effects of marine biogenic habitat on groundfish species that are ecological, commercially and economically important.