The Paradox of Salmon Hatcheries 🐟

Over a decade ago, I began research on a book about Pacific salmon. I started by reading the works of Canadian fly fisher and naturalist Roderick Haig-Brown. I scored a first edition of my favorite—Return to the River, published in 1941—at a local used bookshop. Haig-Brown thought like a fish. In Return to the River, the central character is a chinook salmon named Spring, and the reader follows her life from stream to ocean back to stream and death. I tried to emulate how Haig-Brown observed the natural world from a variety of animal perspectives.

Along with fieldwork, I read countless scientific papers and interviewed dozens of researchers. But I weeded out the papers about salmon hatcheries—they muddied the story I wanted to tell, a story about the resilience of Pacific salmon. I also felt it was its own tale, one full of blind faith and avarice, hope and despair, and a lot of argument.

I’ve wanted to take a wholistic look at hatcheries ever since I began researching my book, and when Hakai Magazine launched in 2015, a story about hatcheries lurked in the corners of my mind. Then the magazine hired audience engagement editor Vanessa Minke-Martin in late 2020. Minke-Martin studied salmon ecology. We had a lot to talk about, and out of those conversations we decided it was time to treat salmon hatcheries to an editorial package, one that would avoid a bash-fest and unveil a deeper story, one that would reveal a complex story that could help move the conversation about hatcheries forward.

As I wrote in “The Hatchery Crutch: How We Got Here,” we have a grim duty to look around, take our bearings, and say, “Well, where do we go from here?” Let the conversation begin.

Jude Isabella
Founding editor

PS. In the spirit of good ideas that can veer into dangerous territory, next week’s online event, “Salt, Sweat, and Grit,” takes a closer look at ocean adventure races. On June 7 at 2:30 p.m. Pacific time, I’ll be talking to adventure psychologist and yacht racer Paula Reid; Karl Krüger, the first person to complete the 1,200-kilometer Race to Alaska by paddleboard; and Douglas Smith, a first-time Race to Alaska competitor. Join us.

This Week’s Stories

The Hatchery Crutch: How We Got Here

From their beginnings in the late 19th century, salmon hatcheries have gone from cure to band-aid to crutch. Now, we can’t live without manufactured fish.

by Jude Isabella • 4,000 words / 20 mins

Too Many Pinks in the Pacific

Evidence is mounting that pink salmon, pumped by the billions into the North Pacific from fish hatcheries, are upending marine ecosystems.

by Miranda Weiss • 3,800 words / 19 mins

The Hail Mary Hatcheries

As wildfires, droughts, and floods deal a blow to coastal habitats, wild salmon are disappearing from waterways like California’s Russian River. Can conservation hatcheries save endangered runs?

by Vanessa Minke-Martin • 5,300 words / 27 mins

Tribal Hatcheries and the Road to Restoration

In the US Pacific Northwest, tribal hatcheries uphold Indigenous communities’ treaty rights to salmon, while buying time to rehabilitate lost habitat.

by Ashley Braun • 5,700 words / 28 mins

Salt, the Great Chemical Threat

Mounting levels of salt in waters and soils threaten crops, drinking water, and human health.

by Fred Pearce • 1,900 words / 9 mins

What We’re Reading

On the coast of Cornwall, England, beachcombers scour beaches for scuba tanks, spearguns, diving flippers, octopuses, ship’s rigging, submarine parts, sharks, portholes, and life rafts—all miniature, made by Lego, and washing up courtesy of a container spill in 1997. These are flashier—or at least more fun to find—bits of flotsam cast into the sea when container ships sink or lose containers at sea, but they’re far from the only items that find their way into the drink. Kathryn Schulz digs into containers, what they carry, and “what we can learn from junk that washes up on shore.” (New Yorker)

And speaking of cargo ships, they don’t all sink when they get into trouble, so how do you rescue one when it gets stuck, malfunctions, or starts to burn? Salvors for the save. (BBC Future)

The January 2022 eruption of the Hunga-Tonga volcano was so massive that audible booms could be heard in Alaska, more than 9,600 kilometers away; tsunami waves hit the Caribbean; and winds from the blast “briefly redirected the flow of electrons around the planet’s equator.” Recent work by two teams explains the reasons behind the colossal explosion. (Wired)

A graduate student in Croatia has managed to craft a beer using a yeast isolated from seawater. Its name? Morski Kukumar (sea cucumber). (Nature)

We can make all the marine protected areas (MPAs) we like, but if we still allow destructive practices—such as bottom trawling as seen in 90 percent of the United Kingdom’s offshore MPAs—is there much point? (The Guardian)

Scientists are tasking a variety of marine animals to be their research assistants, using a variety of sensors, tracking devices, and even tiny cameras, to gather information about just what’s going on in the ocean’s depths. (Knowable)

Brilliant pink lagoons in Oaxaca, Mexico, may look pretty, but the reasons behind the odd coloration are anything but. (El País)

The Race to Alaska is one of the most grueling at-sea races, taking participants from Port Townsend, Washington, to Ketchikan, Alaska, as they navigate complicated currents, narrow rocky channels, and inclement weather. The premise is simple: travel more than 1,200 kilometers with no motors and no support. But what drives people to take on such extreme adventures?

On June 7, 2022, at 2:30 p.m. Pacific time, join Hakai Magazine editor Jude Isabella and guests for a free online event exploring what compels people to undertake extraordinary pursuits at sea.

Look closely at this microscopic jellyfish, and you’ll spot another creature hidden inside its bell-shaped body. This jelly—belonging to a group known as hydrozoans—was in the middle of snacking on a tube-shaped crustacean called a copepod when it was scooped up for its moment under the microscope during the Hakai Institute’s plankton bioblitz on Quadra Island, British Columbia. Most copepods measure less than two millimeters long, but despite their tiny size, they are a key component of the marine ecosystem, providing food for myriad ocean organisms.

Minuscule predator-prey dynamics like this will be explored in the Hakai Institute’s upcoming series on life in the plankton. Subscribe to the Hakai Institute’s YouTube channel to get episodes of Microworlds: Plankton when they’re released!

Photo by Faye Manning

Lots of organisms in the ocean can glow. But what is bioluminescence? And how is it used? Find out in the latest episode of the Hakai Institute’s Long Story Shorts series. (Video length: 1 min 48 sec)

Behind the Story

Vanessa Minke-Martin, author of “The Hail Mary Hatcheries,” walks the dry streambed of Mill Creek, a critical spawning area for endangered coho salmon that has been sapped by central California’s ongoing drought.

On the day that I left Victoria, British Columbia, for California’s Russian River last September, I woke up to a rainfall warning. As my partner drove me to the airport, truck tires were splashing cold water across our windshield and hard drops bounced off the pavement. But in San Francisco, I walked out of the airport into the golden warmth of California’s perennial summer.

You probably don’t need me to tell you that large swaths of the state are in a major drought. At the time of my visit, 269 days into the year, the city of Santa Rosa, in Sonoma County, had received less than 25 centimeters of precipitation in 2021. Incredibly, though, there was a chance of rain in the forecast when I drove to Warm Springs Fish Hatchery, home of the recovery program for the Russian River’s endangered coho salmon. I told hatchery manager Ben White that I’d packed my raincoat. “You brought some good luck for us,” he said. White had seen the weather report on British Columbia’s deluge, too. “Oh, trust me, I watch it,” he said, chewing a stick of yellow gum with the nervous energy that comes with having to make life-or-death decisions for an endangered species. “The rain always stops, like, right around here.” In two decades of working in the watershed, White has noticed precipitation shifting northward and later in the year. The once-reliable October rains now come as patchy, unpredictable December storms.

Photo by Drew Bird

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