It is tough to see that hefty and handsome salmon lands in the waste barrel, headed for the dogs. According to eyewitness more Alaskan salmon caught here end up in the dog pot these days, their orange-pink flesh fouled by disease that scientists have correlated with warmer water in the Yukon River. Scientists said that cold temperature barriers are giving way, allowing parasites, bacteria and other disease-spreading organisms to move toward higher latitudes.
Marine ecologist Kevin D. Lafferty, who studies parasites for the U.S. Geological Survey, told that climate change isn’t going to increase infectious diseases but change the disease landscape. It is fact that the emergence of disease in Alaska’s most prized salmon has come as a shock to fishermen and fisheries managers. Fishermen and regulators have been caught unprepared to deal with forces beyond their control.
Gene Sandone, a regional supervisor for Alaska’s Fish and Game Department, opined that the chinook salmon they pulled from the Yukon River about 700 miles inland didn’t smell right. It wasn’t an instant, gag-inducing stench. It was more subtle but grew into an unpleasant odor of fruit rotting in the hot sun.
Mary Ruckelshaus, a federal biologist with the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, said that salmon will become extinct without aggressive efforts to preserve the clear, cool streams needed for spawning, such as planting trees to shade streams and curtailing the amount of water siphoned off by farmers.
