Four Fish Read online

  The cloud ceiling fell lower, and the undesirable gray mass of St. Mary’s in the distance seemed suddenly unobtainable.

  “I’m sorry, folks,” the pilot said, “we aren’t gonna make it.”

  “Knew it,” Jac said under his breath.

  The plane banked low and hard, and we headed back toward Emmonak. We sat in silence until the now familiar town came into view once again. “Well,” Jac said, leaning forward and squinting out the window at a town where he knew nearly every person by name, “better to be here than halfway to there.”

  Back in the airport shed, I found that the airline schedule had been completely upended and my flight to Anchorage had left hours ago. But after a quick conversation and a wink from Jac, the dispatcher rerouted me on another plane going to Anchorage via the town of Bethel.

  “You better watch yourself in Bethel,” Jac said. “You take a wrong turn there and you’re gonna be writing for the Tundra Times—wha-ha-ha-ha-ha! ”

  I gathered up my bags from Jac’s parked truck and made my way toward the waiting airplane. Jac reached out and unexpectedly gave me a giant hug.

  “Damn, Paul,” he said, shaking his head, “you look good here. You could make the cut. I could mentor you.”

  I felt a strange flutter in my heart and laughed. I shook Jac’s hand and climbed aboard the plane. We took off with a short lunge forward and an easy lift, as small planes tend to do—a safer, more human-size hop upward that the big jets lack. We passed over the jagged mountains that separate the Yukon floodplain from the civilization in the warmer south, and I could still feel the dank Emmonak air lingering in the cabin. The only parts of my body that were warm were my feet. I realized that one small piece of Emmonak and the Kwik’pak Fisheries had left with me. Removing my boots and letting my feet air out, I felt Jac’s presence. I don’t think I could ever fill his shoes. But I was happy to leave Emmonak with Jac Gadwill’s socks.

  Since I left the Yukon in 2007, the fortunes of wild and farmed salmon have diverged further and the curse of the continuing downward spiral of wild salmon seems to continue to nip at my heels. In 2008 and 2009 almost no king salmon returned from the sea. The Yupik nation now faces outright starvation and its region has been approved for federal disaster relief. Nevertheless, the Yupiks recently took up a collection and donated forty thousand dollars to the Red Cross to aid survivors of Hurricane Katrina.

  As in the previous Yukon salmon dip in 2002, no one quite knows why the kings have stopped running up the Yukon. Nowadays when something goes wrong (or continues to go wrong) with a wild-salmon run and no problem can be detected in the run’s home river, most biologists gesture in the direction of the sea in a vague sort of way and say that “something is happening in the ocean.” Oftentimes this “something” is that most ancient of problems: fishermen catching too many fish. It is a problem that has already been identified with the much more dire declines in the populations of Atlantic salmon.

  In some cases the problems happening in the ocean are finally being addressed. In Iceland a former herring fisherman named Orri Vigfússon has pioneered a project to buy out the few remaining commercial salmon-fishing operations in the Atlantic in order to halt the commercial fishing of all Atlantic salmon. From the Faroe Islands south to the Irish coast, he has helped remove nets throughout the North Atlantic; indeed, he imagines a day when a kind of international salmon reserve will be created in the oceans from Russia’s Kola Peninsula all the way to Labrador, Canada. Salmon biologists agree that Vigfússon’s efforts are bearing substantial fruit. Adult salmon are not being caught and killed in the ocean and are returning to rivers in Iceland in numbers that haven’t been seen in many years.

  In the Pacific the unpredictable population shifts still confound fisheries biologists, and things tend to be summarized in the sentence “We don’t really quite know what is happening.” But there are suspicions. Jon Rowley, a seafood consultant who had up until 2007 been trying to market Yukon king salmon as a premium fish, believes it is the fault of the Alaska pollock industry.

  The Alaska pollock industry is the largest wild fishery in the United States and a fishery that has been twice certified as “sustainable” by the world’s foremost sustainable-seafood endorser, the Marine Stewardship Council (more on this later). Two years ago, over 120,000 king salmon were caught accidentally as “bycatch” in pollock nets; a third of these salmon were probably destined for the Yukon River. That amount is more king salmon than all that the Yupik manage to harvest in a good year, killed as accidental bycatch. By law these unintentionally caught fish must be dumped overboard, dead. When I asked Rowley if anything had been done to challenge the “sustainable” certification of Alaska pollock and the effect they are having on the Yupik, he answered that the chiefs were making their way to Anchorage to testify before the regional fisheries management council, but, he concluded, “there is intense lobbying by the pollock industry to do little or nothing.” Climate change is likely also affecting the Yukon kings, but no one quite knows how to quantify such an epochal shift.

  Meanwhile, at the same time as Yukon kings and other wild salmon are having greater and greater difficulty swimming through the various impediments humans have thrown in their paths, another kind of salmon is gradually slipping through a different kind of obstacle course. The farmed-fish breeding effort the Norwegians have undertaken has brought about many results, some of them good, many of them questionable. We have successfully selected for fish that can come to market having needed half as much food as their wild ancestors. But, taken too far, the endless quest for a more and more efficient animal ultimately leads us up a dubious alley—an alley that goes beyond selective breeding into the realm of outright genetic manipulation.

  AquaBounty of Prince Edward Island, Canada, is today the leader in trying to make a more efficient salmon through DNA manipulation. According to AquaBounty’s Ronald Stotish, the attempts to genetically engineer a faster-growing salmon began in the late 1980s, when researchers started to look at the antifreeze genes that allow fish to survive in subzero-temperature water. But, as Stotish wrote, “Once the research progressed, they also realized that these interesting proteins had other potential applications.” The antifreeze-gene research looked promising for a number of different medical, food, and cosmetic uses, and that research was spun off into a separate enterprise.

  But perhaps the most lucrative thing the initial antifreeze research pointed to was faster growth. Stotish continued, “We were also interested in exploring whether or not we could improve the growth rates and economics of growth for Atlantic salmon by adding a second copy of a salmon growth hormone gene.” Since they had figured out how to turn the antifreeze gene on and off, they realized they could use those same “switches” in association with the salmon’s growth hormone. A trial was run, and researchers witnessed spectacular increases.

  With more research and development, AquaBounty was eventually able to create a salmon that grew twice as fast as the already double-growth speed of selectively bred salmon. The new fish, trademarked as AquAdvantage Salmon, was recently submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for approval. To date there is no genetically engineered salmon on the market, but there could be a few years hence.

  Looking at the two examples, the wild Yukon king salmon on one side and the modified AquAdvantage Salmon on the other, it struck me that the human/salmon relationship has been polarized into two intense extremes, either of which could collapse under the weight of its own presumptions. On the one hand, there is Kwik’pak Fisheries, a pure and noble attempt to bring a pure and noble fish to the world market. But a wild salmon is a resource that is ultimately so limited and variable that any attempt to maintain it in a world market is a risky endeavor.

  At their root the wild strains of salmon in Alaska have a very narrow threshold for exploitation, and their move from niche item to world commodity could lead to a classic fisheries collapse. If we are going to continue to eat wild salmon, we must eat the
m sparingly as the rarest of delicacies and their price should reflect their rarity in the world. Even though the pink and chum salmon of the Alaskan rivers farther south are of lower quality than the Yukon kings, one could argue that there is little logic in supplementing their numbers artificially so that they can be sold in supermarkets at two dollars a can.

  At the other extreme is the headlong effort toward efficiency at any price. AquAdvantage, a salmon so efficient that it will require very little feed and will ultimately be extremely cheap, will be capable of grabbing a huge market share if consumers can ever get past their discomfort with genetically modified food. AquaBounty’s Stotish says that the risk of genetic contamination is minimal. “Our product will be all female, and sterile (unable to reproduce),” Stotish wrote. “Furthermore, we have applied to grow the fish in physically contained production systems. Examples of this could be tanks, raceways, etc. that prevent the escape of the fish.” This is somewhat in line with what a number of environmentalists advocate. “Closedsystem” aquaculture, in which salmon are raised in tanks away from natural systems, is the only way to guarantee that wild and domesticated forms of salmon stay separate. But these systems are costly. A modeling exercise conducted in 1998 by a consulting firm in the Bay of Fundy found that the only closed-system, out-of-sea models that showed a profit after five years were those that grew transgenic salmon. If your goal is to grow the most salmon by using the least amount of feed, then logic dictates genetic manipulation to be the best avenue.

  It would be wonderful if all the salmon we eat could be wild. But as one marine ecologist said to me recently, to continue to eat large wild fish at the rate we’ve been eating them we would need “four or five oceans” to support the current human population. Over the last two hundred years, by reducing the amount of habitat that can support salmon and, at the same time, fishing hard on the stocks that still do exist, we have been eating our way into a deficit situation. We are eating into the principal, so to speak, of salmon stocks instead of harvesting the annual “interest,” which is what people like the Yupiks used to remove modestly when the salmon returned to the Yukon every year.

  A solution, of course, would be for those who don’t live in salmon country to stop eating salmon altogether and eat smaller fish that have a smaller overall footprint on the sea. The idea of good consumer choices as a driver of change in ocean policy has become a leitmotif for contemporary chroniclers of the ocean’s crisis. In this vein one writer suggested in an opinion essay for the New York Times in 2008 that New Yorkers should dispense with lox and bagels and have sardines with their cream cheese instead.

  But the salmon industry is now a multibillion-dollar business, active on every continent in the world. A dip in consumer demand occurred in the wake of the PCB scare but resumed shortly thereafter and continues to grow by the year. Indeed, salmon is now a key-stone industry at the very core of the international food industry. As one salmon farmer told me, “Most supermarkets wouldn’t even have a seafood section if it wasn’t for salmon.” The power of consumer choice is a pleasant notion, but it has so far motivated little change.

  What seems to me more necessary is a move to reform the laws and practices that govern the salmon industry. Salmon aquaculture is still a very young endeavor, less than forty years old in most countries. It is not yet set in its ways, and it is not necessary that the worst practices of the past become the standard practices of the future. There is still a chance for incorporating all we have learned about the problems of terrestrial monocultures into the relatively new frontier of aquaculture.

  In July near the end of my salmon research, I found the beginnings of this new way of thinking when I drove up the coast of Atlantic Canada to the town of St. George on the Bay of Fundy. It was there that I met Thierry Chopin, a cheery and optimistic French transplant to Canada who signs off his e-mails with an encouraging quote from Jules Verne: Tout ce qui est impossible reste à accomplir—All that is impossible remains to be accomplished.

  Chopin works in conjunction with the largest fish farmer in Maritime Canada, Cooke Aquaculture, developing a practice called integrated multitrophic aquaculture, or IMTA. This method of farming combines species that require feed (such as salmon) with other species (such as seaweeds) that extract dissolved inorganic nutrients and species (such as mussels and sea urchins) that extract organic particulate matter, to provide a balanced ecosystem-management approach to aquaculture. Like Kwik’pak Fisheries, IMTA’s basic concept is very old. The world’s very first aquaculturists, the Chinese who farmed carp starting four thousand years ago, began as polyculturists. Early Chinese silk farmers found that carp would naturally congregate under the mulberry bushes where silkworms would spin their cocoons. Eventually it was discovered that carp could be a crop in and of themselves. This original two-way relationship expanded over time. Carp feces, it was found, would stimulate the growth of rice and other useful grasses, which the Chinese harvested. These grasses also fed ducks that could be slaughtered for meat. Thus a four-way polyculture developed, with silk, fish, fowl, and grain all coming out of the shared and multiply repurposed fertility of a single pond.

  When modern-day salmon aquaculture was launched in the 1960s and ’70s, the concept of polyculture for some reason got lost. Early farmers were so thrilled by the prospect of bringing a high-value species to market for very little money that feedlot-style monocultures quickly sprouted up in some of the most pristine salmon country along temperate coasts around the world. Little attention was given to the siting of farms, the effects of effluent, or the spread of disease. In time, places like the Bay of Fundy became practically open salmon sewers, where effluent was released unchecked, cloaking the bottom with the ooze of salmon refuse.

  After facing a series of crises and opposition from environmentalists throughout the late ’90s and early 2000s, the industry began to restructure itself. In 1996 there were early signs of the presence of infectious salmon anemia in New Brunswick. This caused the New Brunswick provincial government and the industry to develop and implement, in 2005, a system of bay management areas (BMAs) that more carefully allot salmon sites. The move reduced the density of fish per site, introduced biosecurity measures, and required portions of the Bay of Fundy to be left fallow on a regular basis.

  All these changes in the aquaculture industry also opened up the door for Dr. Chopin, a seaweed expert who had been doing research on kelp in Atlantic Canada since 1989, when he moved from France to the University of New Brunswick-Saint John. Seaweed, it turns out, is an integral part of the food, cosmetics, and textiles industries and constitutes a $6.2 billion market. Chopin had been working on the production of carrageenans, the thickening or emulsifying agents extracted from red algae that are particularly useful to industry. In an “aha” moment Chopin saw that the inorganic waste from salmon farms could be used to grow those very valuable algae species.

  “Coming here to Atlantic Canada, I realized, ‘Wow, with all this salmon aquaculture, we have all these nutrients in the water,’ ” Chopin told me as we motored out to one of Cooke Aquaculture’s IMTA sites. “Instead of wasting these nutrients, why not recapture them?” Chopin recognized that larger organic particulate waste would also have to be dealt with. Collaborating with Dr. Shawn Robinson, from the St. Andrews Biological Station of Fisheries and Oceans Canada, he discovered that mussels could recapture midsize waste particles suspended in the water column. Later they found that they could also add organisms feeding on the heaviest particles of all—the ones that fell to the bottom. Valuable sea urchins and sea cucumbers, it turns out, are particularly fond of this kind of waste.

  Still, IMTA is very much a pilot project. Chopin and Robinson started their collaboration with two smaller salmon-farming ventures, one of which was Heritage Salmon. When Glenn Cooke, the CEO of Cooke Aquaculture, acquired Heritage Salmon in 2005, he decided to scale it up. The polyculture experiments are still only a tiny part of Cooke’s overall footprint, but they are expanding.

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sp; As we left the circular salmon pens and motored past the rectangular rafts of seaweed, Chopin drew my attention to a series of cages supporting hanging socks of blue mussels. Grabbing a mussel and opening it with a knife, he pointed to the delicate shimmering meat inside—it was spread out almost to the edge of the shell. “You can see here, it has almost thirty percent more meat than mussels that are typically available in grocery stores. And the nutritional profile is very favorable, too. There are significant quantities of omega-3 fatty acids, particularly the heart-healthy ones, EPA and DHA.” Mussels turn out to do another interesting thing on a salmon farm. Evidence suggests that they may absorb some of the infectious salmon anemia virus; adding mussels to the aquaculture equation could serve to break the disease cycle that is rife in some of these salmon-farming operations.

  None of the polyculture species can do anything about sea lice, perhaps the most pernicious effect of salmon farming. Nevertheless, there did seem to me to be a better future, one where “feed-conversion ratio” would not be simply a matter of pounds of feed going in to pounds of salmon going out. Rather what would result would be an array of seafood products in a cycle. Even Chopin, who has a love of graphs and charts and PowerPoint presentations, can’t quite get a handle on how much food could be generated from such an operation. “In the chart the arrows are going everywhere, and I just can’t calculate it yet,” he told me.

  Finally, IMTA could lay the groundwork for the elusive “closed circle,” the quest of quests for sustainable seafood producers, one where the inputs and the outputs emerge from a single unit, with zero feed having to go into the system. This may not be as far off as we think. As Rick Barrows, an experimental-feed developer for the USDA, explained to me, “Fish require nutrients, not ingredients.” It turns out that the nutrients, particularly the omega-3 fatty acids, present in the oft-criticized wild-fish feeds can be duplicated by seaweeds. The omega-3 fatty acids that occur naturally in salmon ultimately derive from seaweeds that smaller fish ingest before being eaten by salmon.