From Eew to Wow

By Amy Gulick, Safina Center Senior Fellow

Splashing thrashing salmon bodies wriggle their way upstream. Where the water is a shallow trickle, the fish flop and fight to get to deeper pools. Some make it. Some are on their last breath. Some are dead. It is the recently departed that I’ve come for. Walking along a spawning stream deep in the Tongass National Forest of Alaska, I’m looking for fish out of water. Fish brought to land by our non-human relatives—bears, eagles, ravens—just several of the more than 50 species nourished by wild salmon in the salmon state.

It doesn’t take long to find what I seek. A salmon with a bite in its back that only a bear can make rests on the soil that nourishes trees that shade the stream for cold-blooded fish. There are others. Or parts of others— a fish head dropped at the base of a tree, a headless carcass draped on a log, and bloody guts strewn among ferns. The stench overwhelms, but I remind myself that the smell of death is also the aroma of life. I drop to my hands and knees and crouch inches from a salmon dragged and dropped on the ground by something with teeth larger than mine. The lifeless fish stares up at the forest canopy as if it knows that its journey has not come to an end.

Fish Fertilizer

Bears and other animals drag and drop salmon from spawning streams to the forest floor. Ocean nutrients in the bodies of salmon from their time at sea decompose into the soil and are absorbed through the roots of plants.

Hunched over my camera, my knees sink into the moist moss as I photograph the body, like a coroner at the scene of an accident. Absorbed in the details of death, I don’t hear the father and his young daughter approaching in the damp forest until they stop behind me.

“Eew, yuck!” says the little girl, crinkling her nose and clutching her dad’s hand.

“Why are you photographing dead salmon?” asks the father, trying not to crinkle his nose.

A Fishy Forest

Scientists have detected high concentrations of a marine nutrient—called Nitrogen 15—in trees near salmon spawning streams that link back to the fish.

I explain that when salmon leave the ocean to spawn in the stream where they were born, they bring something special with them. Inside their bodies are nutrients absorbed from their time at sea—one in particular is called Nitrogen 15. When animals, especially bears, drag and drop salmon in the forest, the nutrients from the fish decompose into the soil and feed the vegetation. So much so that scientists have detected high concentrations of Nitrogen 15 in foliage near salmon spawning streams that link back to the fish.

The little girl stares at me, silent and still. She looks at the fish on the forest floor and then cranes her tiny body skyward.

“Wow Daddy—there are salmon in the trees!”

Amy Gulick, Safina Center Fellow, is the author/photographer of The Salmon Way: An Alaska State of Mind and Salmon in the Trees: Life in Alaska’s Tongass Rain Forest.

See: www.amygulick.com