How is the decline of the king salmon affecting the people and ecosystems that depend on it? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Adam Weymouth, author of Kings of the Yukon, on Quora:
This annual surge of king salmon from the ocean has for millennia provided a reliable source of protein for the indigenous people who live along the rivers' banks. Every summer they would make fish camp, coming down to the Yukon from the hills and lakes where they would have spent the spring. Cultures and economies formed around its abundance. And whilst the Tlingit, the Athabascan and the Yup'ik are no longer nomadic, the ritual of the fish camp, passing a month or two with family on the Yukon's banks, sharing stories, teaching the children, catching and cleaning salmon and drying them for the winter, remains as important as it ever did. A time for the enriching of traditions and the spirit, as much as the stocking of larders. Except now, the salmon are vanishing.
As traditional sources of food disappear, people are forced into buying from the stores, food which has often been flown thousands of miles and with a price tag to match. As diets change, instances of once unknown illnesses, heart disease and diabetes, are escalating. Forced into a cash economy, but with few jobs available – these villages are often many hundreds of miles from the nearest road - there is a widening gap between rich and poor, a growing dependence on food stamps and government handouts. Aimless, rootless, many people are turning to drink, and alcoholism and its associated symptoms – crime, domestic violence, suicide – are taking a heavy toll on all of the villages I visited. As the culture erodes so does the language, and a sense of pride in the unique way of life of some of the planet's last remaining hunter-gatherers
The ecosystem, too, is changing as the kings disappear. The salmon bring to the Yukon the nutrients and minerals amassed from a life at sea. There is perhaps no image more iconic of the northern wild than a bear haunch‐deep in the turbulence, fielding leaping salmon like a goalkeeper. They can get through forty salmon in eight hours. Bear density can be eighty times higher than what is typical where the salmon are plentiful, and the amount the grizzlies put away before hibernation directly influences the number of cubs they will have the next spring. There are more than fifty mammals that draw sustenance from the Chinook.
As the salmon carcasses break down into the soil, the carbon and nitrogen and phosphorus and fat that the salmon carry in their bodies from the oceans are spread throughout the ecosystem, drawn up through the roots of trees towards their branches. Along some streams, the concentration of nitrogen and phosphorus in the soil can be so high that it exceeds that of commercially produced fertilizer. Imagine, if you like, the salmon swimming up the capillaries of the spruce and birch; it is not so far from the truth. Up to 70 per cent of the nitrogen in these forests had its origin in the sea. Up the Porcupine River, where the Chinook no longer come, the forests are dying.
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