Warming Seas Threaten Key Phytoplankton Species

For decades, scientists believed Prochlorococcus, the smallest and most abundant phytoplankton on Earth, would thrive in a warmer world. But new research suggests the microscopic bacterium, which forms the foundation of the marine food web and helps regulate the planet’s climate, will decline sharply as seas heat up.

A study published Monday in the journal Nature Microbiology found Prochlorococcus populations could shrink by as much as half in tropical oceans over the next 75 years if surface waters exceed about 82 degrees Fahrenheit (27.8 Celsius). Many tropical and subtropical sea surface temperatures are already trending above average and are projected to regularly surpass 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 Celsius) over that same period.

“These are keystone species — very important ones,” said François Ribalet, a research associate professor at the University of Washington’s School of Oceanography and the study’s lead author. “And when a keystone species decreases in abundance, it always has consequences on ecology and biodiversity. The food web is going to change.”

These tiny organisms hold a vital role in ocean life

Prochlorococcus inhabit up to 75% of Earth’s sunlit surface waters and produce about one-fifth of the planet’s oxygen through photosynthesis. More crucially, Ribalet said, they convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into food at the base of the marine ecosystem.

“In the tropical ocean, nearly half of the food is produced by Prochlorococcus,” he said. “Hundreds of species rely on these guys.”

Though other forms of phytoplankton may move in and help compensate for the loss of oxygen and food, Ribalet cautioned they are not perfect substitutes. “Evolution has made this very specific interaction,” he said. “Obviously, this is going to have an impact on this very unique system that has been established.”

The findings challenge decades of assumptions that Prochlorococcus would thrive as waters warmed. Those predictions, however, were based on limited data from lab cultures. For this study, Ribalet and his team tested water samples while traversing the Pacific over the course of a decade.

Over 100 research cruises — the equivalent of six trips around the globe — they counted some 800 billion individual cells taken from samples at every kilometer. In his lab at the University of Washington, Ribalet demonstrated the SeaFlow, a box filled with tubes, wires and a piercing blue laser. The custom-built device continuously pulls in seawater, which allowed the team to count the microbes in real time. “We have counted more Prochlorococcus than there are stars in the Milky Way,” Ribalet said.

Experts warn of ‘big consequences’

Paul Berube, a research scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies Prochlorococcus but was not involved in the work, said the breadth of data is “groundbreaking.” And he said the results fit with what is known about the microbe’s streamlined genome, which makes it less adaptable to rapid environmental changes.

“They’re at the very base of the food web, and they feed everything else — the fish eat the things that eat the phytoplankton and we eat the fish,” he said. “When changes are being made to the planet that influence these particular organisms that are essentially feeding us, that’s going to have big consequences.”

To test whether Prochlorococcus might evolve to withstand hotter conditions, Ribalet’s team modeled a hypothetical heat-tolerant strain but found that even those would “not be enough to fully resist the warmest temperature if greenhouse emissions keep rising,” Ribalet said.

He stressed that the study’s projections are conservative and don’t account for the impacts of plastic pollution or other ecological stressors. “We actually tried to put forth the best-case scenario,” Ribalet said. “In reality, things may be worse.”

by Annika Hammerschlag, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Annika Hammerschlag
[ed. Probably fake news. Believe them or an old bitter pedophile scammer. See also: We Are Watching a Scientific Superpower Destroy Itself (NYT):]

***

According to the latest annual Nature Index, which tracks research institutions by their contributions to leading science journals, the single remaining U.S. institution among the top 10 is Harvard, in second place, far behind the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The others are:

• The University of Science and Technology of China

• Zhejiang University

• Peking University

• The University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

• Tsinghua University

• Nanjing University

• Germany’s Max Planck Society

• Shanghai Jiao Tong University

A decade ago, C.A.S. was the only Chinese institution to figure in the top 10. Now eight of the 10 leaders are in China. If this does not constitute a Sputnik moment, it is hard to imagine what would.

But if America’s response to Sputnik reflected a nation united in its commitment to science and determined to invest in the country’s intellectual potential, we see in our response to China today a bitterly divided, disoriented America. We are currently governed by a leader indifferent to scientific consensus if it contradicts his political or economic interests, hostile to immigrants and intent on crippling the research universities that embody our collective hope for the future. The menace now is within. And with very few exceptions, the leaders of American universities have done little more than duck and cover.

Bohemian Seafood Rhapsody

via:

Salmon Farming in Alaska: 'Are You Insane?'

Raising the idea of salmon farms in Alaska, Gov. Dunleavy swims against a tide of skeptics

Amid the hubbub of President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Alaska summit last week, Gov. Mike Dunleavy, posting on social media, posed a provocative question.

“Alaska is a leader in fresh caught wild salmon. We could also be a leader in the farmed salmon industry. Why not do both instead of importing farmed salmon from Scotland?,” he wrote, sharing an article about the value of fish farming in Scotland, where Atlantic salmon are raised in net pens in the ocean. “This would be a great opportunity for Alaska.”

The answer from scientists, wild salmon advocates, restaurant people and regular salmon-eating Alaskans has come swiftly, full of alarm and often along the lines of one of the early commenters on his post, who wrote, “Are you insane?”

Love for wild salmon cuts through partisan politics. No food is more important to the state’s culture, diet, identity and economy. As such, Alaskans don’t look kindly on farmed fish. It’s tough to find it in stores and few, if any, restaurants serve it. Farming salmon and other finfish has been banned since 1990 over concerns about environmental threats to wild stocks and economic competition. But Dunleavy, who has become increasingly interested in Alaska’s food security since the pandemic, is curious about bringing in fish farms.

Last legislative session, his office introduced a bill that would authorize land-based farming of non-salmon species like trout or tilapia. That bill faced an avalanche of opposition in committee. But his recent post went further, signaling a shift feared by fisheries advocates, from a narrow focus on land-based farms to a broader look at farming salmon, the vast majority of which happens in net pens in the ocean. (...)

Dunleavy didn’t have a specific plan for how salmon in Alaska might be farmed, he said. Land-based salmon farming, something some environmental groups support, is being tried in a few markets but can be cost-prohibitive. There are concerns over open-net pens that need to be addressed, he said, as well as concerns about what species of salmon might be raised.

Salmon is the second-most popular seafood in the country, just behind shrimp, and roughly 75% to 80% of the salmon Americans eat is farmed Atlantic salmon. Atlantic salmon in the wild have almost disappeared due to overfishing and they cannot be fished commercially. Alaska provides the lion’s share of the wild salmon in the country’s fish markets. But in the world, Dunleavy pointed out, Russia provides the largest share of salmon. Farming fish might be a way for Alaska, and the U.S., to occupy a larger position in that marketplace, he said.

“What I’ve said is, basically, is the discussion worthwhile that Alaska has today, in 2025, to visit the idea of Alaska being part of that game of a new sector?” he said.

At-sea fish farming has gotten cleaner in recent decades, thanks to advances in technology and feeding practices that minimize the impacts of effluent, said Caitlyn Czajkowski, executive director of the National Aquaculture Association, a Florida-based aquaculture trade association.

“There’s a lot of things about the ocean that we know now that we didn’t know 20 years ago,” she said.

Some non-salmon operations also now farm fish that are genetically sterile, so that if they escape, they can’t mix with local populations. That technology is still under development for salmon, however. There are a number of places that used to have commercial salmon fisheries in the Atlantic region, including Maine, Canada and a number of European countries that now farm Atlantic salmon. There isn’t another place, like Alaska, where salmon farming is happening in tandem with a robust wild salmon fishery, Czajkowski said.

At Crush Bistro, a high-end restaurant in downtown Anchorage bustling with tourists this week, Rob DeLucia, owner and general manager, said he was dumbfounded by the governor’s post. Guests come into the restaurant every night and say they came to Alaska for two reasons: to see Denali and to eat wild fish, he said.

“It is crystal clear when you get a piece of salmon at a restaurant in Alaska, that thing was swimming around in the last couple of days out in the wild blue ocean, and now we’re going to have guests be like, ‘Well, is this farmed or is this wild?’” he asked.

Atlantic farmed salmon, from a culinary standpoint, is inferior in taste and texture, he said. It made no sense to promote it.

“(Dunleavy) should have his Alaskan card revoked,” DeLucia said.

by Julia O'Malley, Anchorage Daily News | Read more:
Image: Pens for farmed salmon sit off the shore of Tasmania, Australia in 2023. (AP Photo/Matthew Newton)
[ed. Not insane, just a Republican. If he really cared about salmon, gold medal branding, supporting Alaskan communities, he'd be dead set against something like this (and other self-inflicted threats, like a proposed Pebble Mine in Bristol Bay). He isn't. See also: Help wanted. Job opening with good pay, free housing, free parking, 4-year contract:]

***

Help Wanted: Unique opportunity to lead the largest state in the country, with more miles of coastline, taller mountains, more fish and game, more dreams and less reality than those other 49 pipsqueaks.
Dynamic, credible decision maker with strong personality needed to lead the second-youngest state in the nation into the future, albeit without enough money to meet all its needs.

It’s a fixer-upper job; the current employee has let a lot of things go bad, never learned to get along with co-workers, and hasn’t been working all that hard. Which means the next person has loads of opportunity to make a difference. The bar is low, but the need is high.

Applicants have plenty of time to study and do their homework; the job opens up next year.

Job candidates can use that time to think about how they will bring together disagreeable factions, confront decades-old problems, pay attention to the work at home and less attention to national media, all while winning the hearts and minds of the public — and the support of their colleagues in elected office.

Most importantly, job applicants need to tell the truth about realistic plans. The state has suffered too long with leadership that believes in crystal balls, while public services have fallen behind the eight ball.

The job pays $176,000 a year and includes free housing in a historic home in the state capital city, easy walking distance to the office that comes with a remodeled conference room, a full kitchen and reserved parking.

It’s a four-year job, which should be enough time for the right person to make a difference.

Applications are now being accepted for the job of governor of Alaska. The deadline to apply is June 1 next year. The first cut will come in the Aug. 18 primary election, with the final decision in the Nov. 4 general election.

Already, eight Republicans and one Democrat have applied for the job. By the time applications close, the list likely will exceed a baker’s dozen.

Candidates may be judged by the public on how well they can answer questions about state finances, state tax policies, school funding, social services, law enforcement, housing and the other basics of life, like water and sewage services.

The best candidates will be the ones who truly understand why a state with $82 billion in savings can seem so broke; who can explain why nonresidents who come here to work go home every two weeks without paying any taxes; why some corporations doing business in Alaska pay taxes and others don’t; why the state can’t seem to process Medicaid and food stamp applications on time; why the ferry system has shrunk and rusted away; why some cities pay for police services while others sponge off the state troopers; and why child care and children’s services come up short in the budget.

Don’t apply if you don’t want to deal honestly with the problems, and if you don’t have specific positions and proposals to share. This is not a job for vague answers, wishful thinking and fields of dreams. Remote work not allowed.

Loren Holmes, A fisherman picks salmon from his setnet at Pederson Point near Naknek, Alaska. (ADN)
via:

via:

The Problem With Problem Sharks

The Problem With Problem Sharks (Nautilus)
Image: karelnoppe/Shutterstock
[ed. A few bad actors give all sharks a bad name. See also: First Evidence of Individual Sharks Involved in Multiple Predatory Bites on People (Society for Conservation Biology). Love this image.]

Predator or Prey

1.

An old boyfriend, let’s call him K, used to tease me, saying I wouldn’t make a very good meal—“not enough fat.” He might have been talking about himself, though. He was mostly tendons and veins.

There was something sensual about killing animals with him. We trapped and hunted together in the winter, commercial fished in the summer. During those long July days, we hammered salmon heads until their bodies stiffened into the pose that preceded death. Fish slime made its way from my cotton gloves up my plastic arm guards, onto my neck, my chin, my hair. All day, my fingers worked fast to yank fish off the net, then pull a gill to bleed them. If we didn’t pick fish fast enough, seagulls would pluck out their eyeballs, seals would tear through their flesh. Most days, we caught hundreds. Some days, we caught more than a thousand.

 

I was recently reading an online essay about salmon and stumbled on a photo of myself from one of those summers. I’m wearing ripped jeans, a gray tank top, blue earrings, no shoes. A turquoise headband holds my hair and my skin is as tan as I’ve ever seen it. I look good. Blood cakes my knuckles as I work my knife along a salmon spine. In the corner of the photo, the salmon’s decapitated head sits open-mouthed and unblinking; its eyes stare back at me as I stare into the screen.

2.

I didn’t grow up killing animals, but there was a period in my mid-20s, the period that overlapped with my relationship with K, when I killed a lot. There was the beaver I retrieved by swimming naked through a half-frozen lake. The duck wings I hung like prayer flags from the porch. The organs we liberated from the belly of the caribou.

I had qualms. I’d stopped eating meat in high school, citing animal cruelty and climate change. In my 20s, I let my vegetarianism slip when I moved to rural Alaska. Eating caribou roast and moose tacos and salmon burgers seemed different than ordering a steak whose origins as an animal were concealed; these wild creatures led uninhibited lives in vast landscapes. Choosing to eat the calories from their flesh meant not eating something that had flown thousands of miles to reach me. It’s a painful inevitability: the calories have to come from somewhere.

Still, my enjoyment in what was a kind of murder troubled me. When I was killing hundreds and at times thousands of salmon a day, I was often having a ball. Sun on my skin, slime in my hair. I was viscerally, unabashedly alive. On land, too, I found stalking entrancing: following a grouse through the forest, slithering on my elbows to sneak up on a goose, watching a beaver lodge for hours. Desire sharpened my senses, made the rest of the world recede. Desire cut through other parts of my life then, too—it was a time of wanting, wanting, wanting.

I was becoming a hunter.

I tried to pay homage to the lives I took. I learned how to use as much of each carcass as I could—baking trout liver, tanning beaver hides, boiling salmon roe. I made up rituals of thanksgiving, trying with words to honor the bodies I ate. I pushed myself to remember that the food I ate came from someone’s life. I wasn’t always sure it was enough, though. While I’d had a few close calls with other animals stalking me, my main associations with the word “predator” weren’t with carnivores of the tundra. Occasionally, I wondered: did every man who ever turned me into a piece of meat justify it by saying he was grateful?

At the time, I didn’t think of my relationship with K in such terms. If he was the hunter, that would mean I wasn’t one—it would mean I was his catch. I didn’t want to see myself that way. I wanted to live up to my namesake: Diana, goddess of the moon, the hunt, the wild.

Still, when K wrapped his arm around me, he named my body parts the way he did with a caribou: brisket, backstrap, hindquarter. Still, when we got together, I was 25. He was 51.

3.

The killing-animals phase eventually faded. I moved from rural to urban Alaska; K and I broke up; I married my husband, David, who’s never owned a gun. David and I still catch salmon every summer to fill our freezer. We don’t hunt, but we eat meat from moose and caribou and deer that our friends kill. I’m less in touch with my animal self than I once was. The wildness I lived around in my 20s, and the wildness I found within, at some point started to scare me. I got charged by bears on a few occasions. Wolves killed my dog. I thought, for a brief moment, I might end up with K. The danger—the life and death of it all—became too much. Too much hunting, too much killing, too much wanting.

4.

K used to comment on my body a lot: my curved lip, my crooked toes, my veiny forearms, my toothy smile—like none of a kind, he’d say. He teased when he praised my looks, saying he didn’t want to tell me I was beautiful too often, for fear I’d think he only liked me for my appearance. And yet, he kept telling me how beautiful I was, again and again and again.

Our romance was unsteady, unmoored; as all of my friends put it, unhealthy. As a few brave friends put it, emotionally abusive. Toward the end, there was a prolonged off-and-on period, which happened to overlap with a particularly intense salmon season. There were moody hours picking fish in silence, staring into the ocean in a rage, wanting to be back on land, wanting to push him in the water. At one point, he told me I’d gained weight when things were too good between us, let myself get soft reading The New Yorker by the fire. He made clear he preferred the version of me whittled down by stress. The ugly thing? I preferred that version of me, too: the sculpted arms, the visible collarbones, the sharp awareness of what was happening around me. I was more active, attuned, alive. Few people are as alert as a hungry hunter.

When things were back on between us, we couldn’t get enough of each other. Sometimes, when waiting for the fishing period to open, or the net to fill with salmon, we’d peel off our Helly Hansens and hide in the sole of the boat just below the bow. The plywood floor was coated in salmon scales and dried blood.

5.

A big part of my attraction to K was how much he talked about being attracted to me. It scares me, how much I’ve focused over the years, on being desired. It might be why it was such a revelation to briefly identify as a hunter in my mid-20s.

I was the one doing the desiring. I was the one in control.

I remember the first time I noticed a truck honk—I must have been 11 or 12. There was a thrill to it, a mix of terror and lust: I was wanted, yet a threat of violence threaded those exchanges. Later, when the honks and whistles grew commonplace, I used to fantasize about pushing back, staring these men straight in the eye and saying don’t fuck with me. I never did, too meek, too scared of what might happen next. Even once I identified as a hunter, it was only in the most marginal of ways. Yes, I could sight in a rifle, identify lynx, wolf, and wolverine tracks, skin a fox, dismantle a ptarmigan. But what happened when a man came onto me and I didn’t want him to? So much of the time, I still tried to be nice.

About a year after my first boyfriend and I broke up, he messaged me to tell me he’d changed: as he put it, he was less of a predator now. There have been so many times when I thought I’d changed, too, was over and done with scummy men, over and done with being prey, and yet when I was with K, he often joked that I was like an animal he wanted to trap, or an old nasty fish head a fox wants to bury for winter and keep for himself, or a beautiful hummingbird he wanted to cage. At the time, I didn’t think of myself as his prey. I found it exciting, all this talk of how much he wanted me. Exciting, of course, until I started feeling like an animal with a leg clenched in the jaws of a steel trap, eyes wild with rage. Exciting until I started wondering which of us had put me there.

by Diana Saverin, Longreads | Read more:
Image: Getty Images

Massive WA Salmon Recovery Plan Scrutinized With Latest $100M Project

PORT ANGELES — The Washington State Department of Transportation is planning a giant salmon restoration project here that could require buying out a motel owner, tearing down the building and excavating the highway culvert beneath it, at a price tag of some $100 million.

Yet even after all this work, salmon wouldn’t be able to swim up most of the stream.

As WSDOT races to replace hundreds of culverts by 2030 to meet a court deadline, lawmakers and at least one tribal leader are asking whether projects like this make sense.

 

A group of 21 tribes sued the state in the early 2000s to force the replacement of culverts that, because of their design or lack of maintenance, block salmon and steelhead trout migration. A federal judge, based on the tribes’ treaty fishing rights, ordered the state to fix or replace problem culverts running beneath state highways.

That’s how this project on White Creek landed on the state’s list. By the state’s math, the culvert replacement would open nearly 4 miles of “potential” habitat. But the court-ordered calculation doesn’t account for other problems that affect salmon, including a polluted old mill site, a partial blockage downstream on Ennis Creek and 10 more blockages upstream of the motel.

In reality, many salmon wouldn’t even be able to access White Creek, the state’s own survey shows. Near the Strait of Juan de Fuca, a city-owned concrete slab blocks fish passage under most conditions, according to the survey.

Now lawmakers and tribes are reexamining the court order, proposing new ways to target salmon restoration funds — a delicate “balancing act,” as one tribal leader put it.

The state’s culvert repair program is its largest salmon recovery effort ever, with $3.95 billion already allocated to replace salmon barriers with natural streambeds. To meet the looming deadline, WSDOT last fall asked for up to $4 billion more, prompting fresh skepticism from legislators, who’ve grown increasingly concerned that the state plans aren’t always the best way to help salmon. And just last month, the department revised the request to $5 billion to account for culverts that have structurally failed over the past year.

A Seattle Times investigation this spring highlighted how WSDOT spending is creating stranded restoration projects with limited value today because the state program doesn’t fix other problems in the same watersheds, like barriers owned by other parties. White Creek is a classic case, with its other salmon-blocking barriers upstream and downstream of the state’s culvert. And the potential spectacle of demolishing the motel has raised the question of whether other restoration projects would be more effective and a better use of taxpayer money.

“While we are fixing mistakes of the past, you do it in a more surgical way. You don’t do it with a bulldozer approach, you don’t do it with a meat cleaver,” said W. Ron Allen, chairman of the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe, whose traditional territory includes White Creek. The tribe was among those who sued the state and won the federal court order. Allen holds firmly to that victory but also sees the need for a flexible and creative approach to realize its benefits for fish.

“My view is, work out an agreement with the state and the court … let’s step back and reprioritize, figure out which ones are the ones that are the most important right now and zero in on that,” Allen said.

He said he also understands there is only so much money and that the public has many needs, as do the tribal nations. “There is that balancing act … and we don’t want to turn the public against salmon.”

Lawmakers are also saying they don’t have $5 billion more to spend now. But even if they found the money, it would be logistically impossible to finish the list by 2030, as required in the court injunction, state leaders have told the tribes.

Rep. Steve Tharinger, D-Port Townsend, said he is using the motel project, which is in his district, to call for change because “it’s a high cost with little fish return.”

“It’s the classic poster child of what we shouldn’t do,” he said. (...)

The motel

Chintu Patel, co-owner of the Olympic Inn & Suites, didn’t even know there was a stream or a culvert under his motel until WSDOT told him about it. Maple trees block the view to the south, where the creek flows through a ravine 30 feet below and into the concrete tunnel in question. To the north, an RV dealership and trees obscure any hint of water, as the stream transitions into lowland vegetation.

Patel and his business partner bought the rundown property in 2020 for $6.25 million and soon started fixing it up. They ripped out carpet, remodeled bathrooms and repainted the 115-room motel tan with burgundy accents. “We’ve completely renovated the property,” said Patel, who employs roughly 20 full- and part-time employees at this motel and has ownership interest in 15 other hotels or motels in the state.

After he received a letter from WSDOT two years ago, he was surprised to learn about the plans to replace the culvert. If he had known, “We wouldn’t have put in all the renovations,” he said.

Patel said WSDOT hasn’t yet broached the subject of eminent domain, the state’s legal power to seize property. But the agency has taken private property to replace culverts and compensated the landowners. He’s concerned an appraisal wouldn’t capture the property’s potential value. (...)

WSDOT may pursue the project anyway, despite the high cost and the stream’s other habitat problems. Otherwise, it would have to replace multiple culverts elsewhere to hit its 2030 target, at potentially even greater cost, WSDOT fish passage manager Kim Rydholm said.

White Creek has “little production potential” for salmon because of its many culverts, according to the management plan by the area’s official watershed planning group. The 10 upstream obstructions are owned by private parties or local governments. Technically, any barrier to potential salmon migration violates state law, but the Department of Fish and Wildlife generally doesn’t require owners to remove them. The department is working on new enforcement rules.

WSDOT asks for $5 billion more

Like stormwater rushing into a swollen creek, revelations about problems in WSDOT’s fish passage program kept pouring in over the past year.

In November, WSDOT unveiled its massive budget request to lawmakers. Then The Times investigation spotlighted some culvert projects, costing tens of millions apiece, that are essentially useless without further, big investments. This summer, Inslee and WSDOT leaders told tribes they were probably not going to hit the 2030 deadline. And now the cost estimates are even higher. (...)

They are rethinking how the state fulfills the court order while still honoring tribal treaty rights and the intent of the federal judge’s ruling. All that while navigating intratribal politics, in which each of the 21 sovereign tribal nations that are a party to the federal case can stake their own position.

U.S. District Court Judge Ricardo Martinez in 2013 ordered WSDOT to identify its Western Washington culverts blocking 200 meters or more of potential upstream habitat. Then, by 2030, WSDOT is required to open up 90% of the habitat above those culverts.

But the calculation ignored other culverts and similar barriers on those same streams, including blockages owned by cities, counties and private parties.

Tharinger, the Port Angeles-area state representative, said he recently realized that WSDOT’s list of culverts wasn’t well-vetted, causing him to reconsider the funding and strategy. (...)

“We don’t have the money,” said Tharinger, chair of the House Capital Budget Committee. For what the state does allocate, he sees it in simple terms: “How do we spend the money to recover the most fish, to create the most habitat for fish? That’s really the question — not what the court tells us.”

Instead of plowing ahead according to the court order, Tharinger hopes the tribes and state can agree on a strategy to open up the most actual habitat, taking into account the other barriers on the streams. And he wouldn’t limit it to just culvert replacements. Larger projects, such as entire flood plain restorations, should be on the table, he said.

by Mike Reicher and Lynda V. Mapes, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Fiona Martin, Mark Nowlin; uncredited

[ed. Gotta love it. How could a massive program like this ever get started without these types of issues being anticipated and resolved from the very beginning? It's beyond belief. Any halfway competent fish biologist would tell you: there's no one-size fits all solution for culverts that are everywhere, beneath buildings and roads, in various stages of disrepair, and blocked in countless ways . Which brings up the US Supreme Court's recent decision re: the so-called Chevron Deference (NRDC):

"The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling today in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo dealt a severe blow to the ability of federal agencies to do their jobs by ending the 40-year-old precedent of “Chevron deference.” Instead of deferring to the expertise of agencies on how to interpret ambiguous language in laws pertaining to their work, federal judges now have the power to decide what a law means for themselves. As a result, despite not being accountable to the people, judges will now be able to expand their role into the realm of policymaking." 

See also: Removing WA salmon barriers surges to $1M a day, but results are murky (Seattle Times).]

Sushi Worms

Studies show there are likely more ‘sushi worms’ in Alaska salmon and other fish than there used to be (ADN)

Images: Loren Holmes/Bill Roth ADN

[ed. Additional protein, no extra charge.]

Light at the End of the Tunnel

Millions of killer culverts lurk beneath North American roadways, strangling populations of migratory fish. Now with a nationwide project, the United States is trying to fix them.

Every year, hundreds of muscular, sea-bright fish—chum salmon, chinook, coho, steelhead—push into the Columbia River from the Pacific Ocean, swim over 200 kilometers upstream, and turn left into Hardy Creek. They wend through rocky shallows shaded by alder and willow, cold water passing over flared gills. Plump with milt and eggs, they pump their tails furiously, striving for the graveled spawning grounds in southern Washington State where they’ll complete their life’s final, fatal mission.

And then they hit the railroad.

In the early 1900s, Hardy Creek was throttled by BNSF Railway, the United States’ largest freight railroad network. When the company built its Columbia River line, engineers routed Hardy Creek under the tracks via a culvert—a 2.5-meter-wide arch atop a concrete pad. The culvert, far narrower than Hardy Creek’s natural channel, concentrated the stream like a fire hose and blasted away approaching salmon. Over time, the rushing flow scoured out a deep pool, and the culvert became an impassable cascade disconnected from the stream below—a “perched” culvert, in the jargon of engineers.

“It’s an obvious barrier,” says Peter Barber, manager of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe’s habitat restoration program. “A fish would be hard-pressed to navigate through that culvert.”

The strangulation of Hardy Creek is an archetypal story. Culverts, the unassuming concrete and metal pipes that convey streams beneath human-made infrastructure, are everywhere, undergirding our planet’s sprawling road networks and rail lines. Researchers estimate that more than 200,000 culverts lie beneath state highways in California alone, nearly 100,000 in Germany, and another 60,000 in Great Britain. In Europe, they thwart endangered eels; in Australia, they curtail the movements of Murray cod. In Massachusetts’ Herring River, snapping turtles lurk in culverts to devour passing fish, largely preventing herring from spawning. Taken as a whole, these obstacles are a major reason that three-quarters of the world’s migratory fish species are endangered.

Compared with dams, however, culverts have historically escaped public attention; most people drive over them every day without noticing. “I used to tell people I assess culverts,” recalls Mark Eisenman, a planner at the Alaska Department of Transportation. “They’d say, what the hell’s a culvert?”

In 2022, however, the US Federal Highway Administration launched a US $1-billion program to replace culverts that block oceangoing fish on streams like Hardy Creek—among the largest pots of money ever devoted to these humble pipes. Fixing the countless barriers that underlie infrastructure, according to Barber, is “one of the best ways to restore our salmon runs locally.” But given the sheer scale of the culvert crisis, even a billion dollars will only go so far. Can we repair our faulty culverts while there’s still time to save sea-run fish? (...)

In 2021, the United States’ culvert-funding shortfall caught the belated attention of politicians. That November, Congress passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a $1.2-trillion package that included money for everything from high-speed rail to electric vehicle charging stations to basic highway repairs. Tucked deep in the law’s thousand-odd pages was a section that attracted little media coverage, but had immense consequences for fish: the National Culvert Removal, Replacement, and Restoration Grant Program. (...)

Mud Creek also illustrates another deficiency of culverts: they frustrate human movements as well as fish migration. Several times a year, says Golden, incoming storm surges overwhelm the Mud Creek culvert and gush onto Montague Island Road, damaging its surface and denying locals access to their homes. This is an increasingly common predicament. Culverts, already the Achilles heels of road networks, are becoming even more vulnerable as the climate changes. They’re swamped by king tides, clogged by landslides, and battered by deluges; during 2011’s Tropical Storm Irene, roughly 1,000 culverts washed out in Vermont alone, closing many roads. The same enlarged culverts that help fish are also less liable to get plugged by debris or inundated by storm surges. “We can address a maintenance need, a fish passage need, and a resilience need, all at the same time,” Golden says.

Perhaps the most powerful virtue of culvert replacement is that it fundamentally reconnects land and sea. Fish-blocking culverts are forces of disunity that prevent anadromous fish from contributing their oceanic phosphorus and nitrogen to forests, and starve marine predators dependent on healthy stocks. In western Washington’s King County, for example, culverts within the Bear Creek basin have curtailed populations of chinook salmon, a key food source for Puget Sound’s beleaguered killer whales. A grant of nearly $7-million will allow the county to replace three inadequate Bear River culverts—and, with luck, restitch the torn linkages between marine and terrestrial environments.

“We’re allowing those ocean nutrients to once again go up the watershed,” says Evan Lewis, who leads the county’s fish passage restoration program. “Salmon are self-propelled bags of fertilizer.” (...)

Around the world, other countries are also kicking lousy culverts to the curb. In France, faulty culverts have been torn out for the sake of Atlantic salmon and brown trout; in New Zealand, they’ve been removed for smelt, eels, and torrentfish. In British Columbia, home to more than 90,000 fish-blocking culverts, a host of conservation groups and government agencies is developing a strategic plan to remove the most egregious blockages. The United States is leading the charge, but its $1-billion culvert replacement program is no piscine panacea. The Washington State Department of Transportation recently estimated that it would cost around $7.5-billion to deal with the hundreds of fish-blocking culverts it’s required to fix on behalf of Indigenous tribes—to say nothing of perhaps 20,000 more on roads owned by counties, towns, and private entities.

The program is also limited by geography. Although the only culverts eligible for funding are those that obstruct sea-run fish, many landlocked species also migrate. In the Great Lakes region alone, perhaps 250,000 culverts confound suckers, pike, brook trout, and other freshwater denizens. These fish won’t benefit from federal largesse, yet they need help as surely as any coho or chum.

by Ben Goldfarb, Hakai Magazine | Read more:
Image: Maggie Chiang
[ed. In Alaska, culverts were a major headache. We had staff at the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game who spent years assessing impacts on fish populations, trying to find solutions (scientifically, politically, economically) to mitigate the damage they cause. Here are a few examples of their effects: creating impenetrable barriers to fish passage when debris gets washed downstream and lodged at their openings; becoming perched several feet above streams due to discharge scouring from flood events (or initial bad engineering); designed too narrow so that water velocities exceed the swimming capabilities of young fish (fire hose example); and frequently becoming magnets for predators (including humans) who find pooled fish in a single location easy pickings. Migrating salmon are famous for their spawning imperative and endurance - I did a fish survey in Anchorage one time that found coho salmon fry upstream of a culvert that stretched half way across the city under numerous roads, business parks and subdivisions - over a quarter mile long. But, only a handful of fish could have survived that gauntlet, and I didn't find many fry in that sample. This is a massive problem, not only because there are so many culverts in fish streams (in various stages of disrepair), but also because replacing or retrofitting them is usually prohibitively expensive (tearing up roads, installing bridges or larger culverts, etc). Nevertheless, I'm glad to see some effort is finally being made to recognize the problem. Every little bit helps.]

Review: Invitation to a Banquet, by Fuchsia Dunlop

Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food, Fuchsia Dunlop (W. W. Norton & Company, 2023).

China is a food-obsessed society. People are always talking about their next meal. People talk about it incessantly. The Chinese equivalent of talking about the weather, a way of making polite chitchat with strangers, is to mention a restaurant that you like, or a meal that you’re looking forward to. A standard way of saying “hello” in Mandarin is “你吃饭了吗?” In Cantonese it’s “你食咗飯未呀?” Both of them literally translate as something like “have you eaten yet?” and produce a natural conversational opening to begin immediately discussing food. Perhaps most uncanny to foreigners, Chinese people will sometimes discuss their next meal while they are in the middle of eating a fancy dinner. Dozens of gorgeous little dishes spread around them, chomping or slurping away at exquisite cuisine, and happily chattering about what they plan to eat tomorrow.

None of this is remotely new. If anything, between the Revolution and the famines, Chinese food culture is actually tamer than it used to be. We know this from literary and historical accounts, from archeological evidence (China had fancy restaurants about a thousand years before France did), and from the structure of the language itself. They say the Eskimos have an improbable number of words for snow, but the Chinese actually do have a zillion words for obscure cooking techniques. What’s more, many of the words are completely different from region to region, which is hardly surprising since the food itself is bewilderingly different from one side of the country to the other.

How food-obsessed are the Chinese? One of the most priceless artifacts belonging to the imperial family, the one thing the fleeing Nationalists made sure to grab as communist artillery leveled Beijing, now the most highly-valued object in the National Palace Museum in Taipei is… The Meat-Shaped Stone. A single piece of jasper carved into a lifelike hunk of luscious pork belly, complete with crispy skin and layers of subcutaneous fat and meat. Feast your eyes upon it.

Between the foreignness and the sheer, overwhelming size of the topic, it might seem impossible to conduct an adequate survey of the history, vocabulary, and vibe of eating, Chinese-style, for Western readers. But that’s why we have Fuchsia Dunlop. She’s an Englishwoman, but she trained as a chef at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine (the first Westerner ever to do so). She’s written some of the best English-language cookbooks for Chinese food, and now she’s written this book: her attempt to communicate the totality of the subject she loves and which she’s spent her life studying. But the topic is just too damn big to take an encyclopedic or even a systematic approach, and so she wisely doesn’t try. Instead she writes about the weirdest and tastiest and most emblematic meals she’s had, and ties each one back to the main topic. So the book lives up to its name. Like a banquet, it doesn’t try to give you a thorough academic knowledge of anything, but rather a feast for the senses and a feel for what a cuisine is like.

What is it like? Well, Dunlop barely manages to cover this in a 400-page book, so I hesitate even to try, but let me hit a few of the high points. First, diversity. China is a continent masquerading as a country, both in population and in geographic extent, so its cuisine is comparably diverse. Most cooking traditions have one or two basic starches, China has four or five. China extends through every imaginable biome, from rainforest to tundra, desert to marshlands, and much of the genius of Chinese food lies in combining the delicious bounties offered up by this kaleidoscope in interesting or unexpected ways.

One way to think of Chinese eating is that much of it is a sort of “internal” fusion cuisine. Because China was ruled from very early on by a centralized bureaucracy with a fanaticism for river transport, the process of culinary remixing has been going on for much longer than it has in most places. The Roman Empire could have been like this, but the shores of the Mediterranean all have pretty similar climates, so there were fewer ingredients to start the process with. Already very early in Chinese history, before the 7th century, we hear of the imperial city being supplied with:

oranges and pomelos from the warm South, […] the summer garlic of southern Shanxi, the deer tongues of northern Gansu, the Venus clams of the Shandong coast, the “sugar crabs” of the Yangtze River, the sea horses of Chaozhou in Guangdong, the white carp marinated in wine lees from northern Anhui, the dried flesh of a “white flower snake” [a kind of pit viper] from southern Hubei, melon pickled in rice mash from southern Shanxi and eastern Hubei, dried ginger from Zhejiang, loquats and cherries from southern Shanxi, persimmons from central Henan, and “thorny limes” from the Yangtze Valley.

If we think of chefs as artists, the Chinese ones have since ancient times had the advantage of an outrageously diverse set of paints. But these ingredients aren’t combined willy-nilly, without respect for their time or place of origin. The Chinese practically invented the concept of terroir, and their organicist conception of the universe in which everything is connected to everything else implied strict rules about which foods were to be eaten when, both for maximum deliciousness and to ensure cosmic harmony. (...)

The obsessions with freshness and seasonality come to their culmination in the one area where Chinese cuisine stands head and shoulders above all others: green vegetables. In the West, “eating your greens” is a punishment, or at best a chore, and it’s easy to see why. In much of the world vegetables are bred for yield and transportability, kept in refrigerators for weeks, and then boiled until no trace of flavor remains. Dunlop and I have one thing in common: when we’re not in China, of all the delights of Chinese cooking it’s the green vegetables that we miss the most.

When I bring American friends to a real Chinese restaurant, sometimes they’re shocked that the vegetable dishes cost the same amount as the main courses. Why does a side dish cost so much? But no Chinese person would ever think of a vegetable course as a “side” dish, they’re part of the main attraction, and more often than not they’re the stars of the show. In the West, you can now get decent baak choy, but this is just one of the dozens and dozens of leafy greens that the Chinese regularly consume, many of them practically impossible to find outside Asia.

My own favorite is the sublime choy sum. I remember once getting off a transoceanic flight, starving and exhausted, and being offered a bowl of it over plain white rice. The greens had been scalded for a few seconds with boiling water, then tossed around a pan for no more than a minute — just long enough that the leaves were so tender they seemed to dissolve in your mouth, but the stems still held snap and crunch. The seasoning was subtle — maybe a few cloves of garlic, some salt, a splash of wine or vinegar. Just the right amount to bring out the deep, earthy flavors of the vegetable, to somehow make them brighter and more forward, but not to overpower them. It was one of the most delicious things I’ve ever eaten. I think I’ll still remember it when I am old.

Did you notice that in the previous paragraph I spent almost as much time describing the texture of the food as its flavor? That’s no coincidence. Of course the Chinese care about flavor, everybody does (except the British, ha ha), but relative to many other culinary traditions the Chinese put a disproportionate emphasis on the texture of their food as well. I’ll once again draw on a bastardized version of the Whorf hypothesis: English is a big language with a lot of borrowings, so we have a correspondingly large number of words for food textures. Imagine explaining to a foreigner the difference between “crunchy” and “crisp”, or between “soft” and “mushy”. That is already more semiotic resolution than most languages have when it comes to the mouthfeel of their food, but Chinese takes it to a whole ‘nother level.

Dunlop gives the following “non-exhaustive” list of positive texture words (there’s another list of ones with negative valence): (...)

I agree that this is non-exhaustive: I can think of several more. What many of these words have in common is that they’re “multidimensional.” For example consider the Taiwanese slang “Q”, which translates to something like the Italian al dente. Noodles that are “Q” (or even better, “QQ”) have a paradoxical combination of textures: they’re soft and chewy, so your teeth sink into them and your jaw gets a workout, but they’re also elastic and bounce around in your mouth. This is a simple example of a multilayered texture, or you might say of a food with multiple “texture notes”. Chinese chefs delight in combining textures in surprising ways, almost as much as they do flavors. In many dishes, the texture is the whole point, or at least a major one. The Cantonese dim sum snack haa gow — shrimp steamed in translucent wrappers — strikes some people as bland. But a good haa gow is only partly judged on how well it brings out the subtle inner flavors of the shrimp. Most of it is about how the skin combines pertness with falling-apart softness, and how this contrasts with the sometimes unsettling springiness of the shrimp inside. The chef will go to extreme lengths to achieve that interplay of textures with techniques that include salting, starching, shocking with cold or hot water, prolonged refrigeration, and physically beating or smacking the ingredients.

This sensitivity to texture is a big part of why the Chinese eat so much “weird stuff.” Believe it or not, chicken feet don’t actually taste great. In fact, they barely taste like anything, being composed almost entirely of bone, cartilage, skin, and gristle. What they do have is a totally unique mouthfeel, and that’s why they’re in such demand. Similarly, the brains of animals don’t have a very distinctive taste, what they have is an unctuous fattiness and creaminess, difficult to replicate in any other kind of meat. And Chinese people have a great fondness for the tails and the heads of fish — the bits a Western chef usually cuts off and leaves in the kitchen — because they offer an interesting tactile experience. I have a lot of memories of Chinese people hunting for the eyeballs of the fish, popping them into their mouths, and rolling them around with their tongues in a culinary rapture. Which brings me to the fact that this love of odd food textures also implies a different approach to table manners:

You should only eat a giant carp’s tail in the company of someone you know well, because it’s a brazenly messy business, with an unavoidable soundtrack of sucks and slurps. The only actual flesh is a tiny nugget cradled in a curve of cartilage at the distal end of the tail, which you might even tackle with chopsticks. After this easy picking, you must take the tail in your fingers so you can prise apart its two layers of spines, which are interleaved with thin seams of a sticky, ambrosial jelly. This you will want to lick out like nectar, using you teeth to scrape and your tongue to suck along each quill to extract every last delicious thread, leaving nothing but clean spines on the plate. (...)

Given all of this, it might be easier to discuss the Chinese culinary tradition in terms of what isn’t eaten. One clue comes from the cycles of assimilation and tension between settled, agrarian Sinitic people and nomadic Southeast Asian hill peoples as chronicled by James C. Scott. In ancient Chinese ethnography, the language used to describe the mostly Sinicized barbarians was “cooked”, whereas their wilder cousins were “raw.” Sure enough, Chinese people don’t eat a ton of raw foods. There are exceptions (including some I’ve already mentioned), but by and large eating ingredients in their natural state, untransformed by fire and by human craft, was considered a “barbarian” thing. Dunlop claims that the Chinese actually invented sashimi, and brought the practice of eating raw fish to Japan, but later gave it up to differentiate themselves from their neighbors.

by John Psmith, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf |  Read more:

Images: Meat-Shapped Stone; Jaddite Cabbage (Wikipedia)

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Catch, Cook, Serve: Hong Kong’s Legendary One-Stop Fish Market

Bon Appétit joins chef Lucas Sin to try some of Hong Kong’s freshest steamed fish at Ap Lei Chau Market. Steamed fish is a traditional Cantonese dish and the fresher the better–at Ap Lei Chau Market they're serving fish caught in the harbor that morning straight to your plate.

via:

"I spent a morning perusing the Hemingway papers at the JFK Library in Boston and came upon this sketch of his from fishing off the coast of Havana."

via:

[ed. From the comments: Big Game fishing and IGFA records were a thing in Hemingway’s time. I wonder if that relates to record-catch submissions? The drying part may be to sumbit proof of the catch/species to IGFA officials (without sending in rotting flesh)?]

Ohno Bakufu, Crucian Carp, Surinaka River

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Nitrogen Cycling by Microbes in Native Hawaiian Culture

Peeing in the pool

via: Aeon

[ed. He’eia fishpond. A success story (for now), but how will climate change affect coastal communities and fragile ecological systems like this in the future. Nice documentary on my home though, far removed from the usual tourist attractions.]

Eat, Poop, Die

What happened to Washington's wildlife after the largest dam removal in US history. Sometimes the best thing we can do to restore nature is just get out of the way.

The man made flood that miraculously saved our heroes at the end of O Brother Where Art Thou were an actual occurrence in the 19th and 20th century — and a fairly common one at that — as river valleys across the American West were dammed up and drowned out at the altar of economic progress and electrification. Such was the case with Washington State's Elwha river in the 1910s. Its dam provided the economic impetus to develop the Olympic Peninsula but also blocked off nearly 40 miles of river from the open ocean, preventing native salmon species from making their annual spawning trek. However, after decades of legal wrangling by the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, the biggest dams on the river today are the kind made by beavers. (...)

When construction began in 1910, the Elwha Dam was designed to attract economic development to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, supplying the growing community of Port Angeles with electric power. It was one of the first high-head dams in the region, with water moving more than a hundred yards from the reservoir to the river below. Before the dam was built, the river hosted ten anadromous fish runs. All five species of Pacific salmon — pink, chum, sockeye, Chinook, and coho — were found in the river, along with bull trout and steelhead. In a good year, hundreds of thousands of salmon ascended the Elwha to spawn. But the contractors never finished the promised fish ladders. As a result, the Elwha cut off most of the watershed from the ocean and 90 percent of migratory salmon habitat.

Thousands of dams block the rivers of the world, decimating fish populations and clogging nutrient arteries from sea to mountain spring. Some have fish ladders. Others ship fish across concrete walls. Many act as permanent barriers to migration for thousands of species.

By the 1980s, there was growing concern about the effect of the Elwha on native salmon. Populations had declined by 95 per cent, devastating local wildlife and Indigenous communities. River salmon are essential to the culture and economy of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe. In 1986, the tribe filed a motion through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to stop the relicensing of the Elwha Dam and the Glines Canyon Dam, an upstream impoundment that was even taller than the Elwha. By blocking salmon migration, the dams violated the 1855 Treaty of Point No Point, in which the Klallam ceded a vast amount of the Olympic Peninsula on the stipulation that they and all their descendants would have “the right of taking fish at usual and accustomed grounds.” The tribe partnered with environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and the Seattle Audubon Society, to pressure local and federal officials to remove the dams. In 1992, Congress passed the Elwha River Ecosystem and Fisheries Restoration Act, which authorized the dismantling of the Elwha and Glines Canyon Dams.

The demolition of the Elwha Dam was the largest dam-removal project in history; it cost $350 million and took about three years. Beginning in September 2011, coffer dams shunted water to one side as the Elwha Dam was decommissioned and destroyed. The Glines Canyon was more challenging. According to Pess, a “glorified jackhammer on a floating barge” was required to dismantle the two-hundred-foot impoundment. The barge didn’t work when the water got low, so new equipment was helicoptered in. By 2014, most of the dam had come down, but rockfall still blocked fish passage. It took another year of moving rocks and concrete before the fish had full access to the river.

The response of the fish was quick, satisfying, and sometimes surprising. Elwha River bull trout, landlocked for more than a century, started swimming back to the ocean. The Chinook salmon in the watershed increased from an average of about two thousand to four thousand. Many of the Chinook were descendants of hatchery fish, Pess told me over dinner at Nerka. “If ninety percent of your population prior to dam removal is from a hatchery, you can’t just assume that a totally natural population will show up right away.” Steelhead trout, which had been down to a few hundred, now numbered more than two thousand.

Within a few years, a larger mix of wild and local hatchery fish had moved back to the Elwha watershed. And the surrounding wildlife responded too. The American dipper, a river bird, fed on salmon eggs and insects infused with the new marine-derived nutrients. Their survival rates went up, and the females who had access to fish became healthier than those without. They started having multiple broods and didn’t have to travel so far for their food, a return, perhaps, to how life was before the dam. A study in nearby British Columbia showed that songbird abundance and diversity increased with the number of salmon. They weren’t eating the fish — in fact, they weren’t even present during salmon migration. But they were benefiting from the increase in insects and other invertebrates.

Just as exciting, the removal of the dams rekindled migratory patterns that had gone dormant. Pacific lamprey started traveling up the river to breed. Bull trout that had spent generations in the reservoir above the dam began migrating out to sea. Rainbow trout swam up and down the river for the first time in decades. Over the years, the river started to look almost natural as the sediments that had built up behind the dams washed downstream.

by Andrew Tarantola, Endgadget |  Read more:

Image: Hatchette Books
[ed. Long, long overdue, here and elsewhere. An artifact of competition between the Bureau of Reclamation and Corps of Engineers over land development and water policy in the western United States during the post-Depression era, when over 250,000 dams were contructed (as described in the excellent Cadillac Desert).  Next on deck: Klamath River (Iron Gate Reservoir). See: After the Flood (Science):]

"In early 2024, operators will open the floodgates on the 49-meter-high dam that blocks the Klamath River, allowing the more than 50 million tons of water it impounds to begin to drain. Once it’s gone, heavy equipment will dismantle the structure. All that will remain of the 11-kilometer-long reservoir that filled the valley for 60 years will be steep-sided slopes coated in gray mud, split once again by a free-flowing river."

What Social Change Movements Can Learn From Fly Fishing: The Value of a Care-Focused Message

Summer and fall are prime times for getting outdoors across the U.S. According to an annual survey produced by the outdoor industry, 55% of Americans age 6 and up participated in some kind of outdoor recreation in 2022, and that number is on the rise.

However, the activities they choose are shifting. Over the past century, participation has declined in some activities, such as hunting, and increased in others, like bird-watching.

These shifts reflect many factors, including demographic trends and urbanization. But outdoor activities also have their own cultures, which can powerfully affect how participants think about nature.

As scholars who think about organizational theory, management and entrepreneurship, we are interested in understanding effective ways to promote social change. In a recent study, we analyzed the work of the nonprofit group Trout Unlimited, which centers on protecting rivers and streams across the U.S. that harbor wild and native trout and salmon.

We found that since its founding in 1959, Trout Unlimited has pursued a unique type of social change. Historically, people fished to obtain food – but Trout Unlimited has reframed the sport as a vehicle for environmental conservation. It did this by gradually shifting members from catch and keep practices to catch and release, with fish carefully returned to the water. In our view, this strategy offers a powerful example of energizing social change through care, rather than disruptive strategies that emphasize power, anger and fearmongering.

by Brett Crawford, Erica Coslor, Madeline Toubiana, The Beacon via The Conversation | Read more:
Image: Shane Anderson / Swiftwater Films via

[ed. Ducks Unlimited is another example. There are many more.]

Bajau: Last of the Sea Nomads

The Last of the Sea Nomads (The Guardian)
Image: Enal with his pet shark. Photograph: James Morgan

Diana Botutihe was born at sea. Now in her 50s, she has spent her entire life on boats that are typically just 5m long and 1.5m wide. She visits land only to trade fish for staples such as rice and water, and her boat is filled with the accoutrements of everyday living – jerry cans, blackened stockpots, plastic utensils, a kerosene lamp and a pair of pot plants.

Diana is one of the world's last marine nomads; a member of the Bajau ethnic group, a Malay people who have lived at sea for centuries, plying a tract of ocean between the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia. The origins of the Bajau diaspora are recounted in the legend of a princess from Johor, Malaysia, who was washed away in a flash flood. Her grief-stricken father ordered his subjects to depart, returning only when they'd found his daughter.

Over generations, the Bajau adapted to their maritime environment and, though marginalised, their knowledge was revered by the great Malay sultans, who counted on them to establish and protect trade routes. They are highly skilled free divers, plunging to depths of 30m and more to hunt pelagic fish or search for pearls and sea cucumbers – a delicacy among the Bajau and a commodity they have traded for centuries.

Since diving is an everyday activity, the Bajau deliberately rupture their eardrums at an early age. "You bleed from your ears and nose, and you have to spend a week lying down because of the dizziness," says Imran Lahassan, of the community of Torosiaje in North Sulawesi, Indonesia. "After that you can dive without pain." Unsurprisingly, most older Bajau are hard of hearing. When diving, they wear hand-carved wooden goggles with glass lenses, hunting with spear guns fashioned from boat timber, tyre rubber and scrap metal.

[ed. More pictures here. See also: Freediving: is this a sport – or ‘French existentialist swimming’? (On the new Netflix documentary The Deepest Breath).]