The researchers count all the fish, dead or alive. “We literally have clickers in each hand and we walk and we click: Male, female, male, male, male, female, male,” said one of the researchers, Jackie Carter.
In the summer, hordes of salmon travel thousands of miles from the ocean to fill the streams and creeks around Lake Aleknagik. These waterways are an important part of the salmon life cycle, where adult fish come to spawn and then die.
The heavy, foul smell of rotting salmon hit immediately, and skeletons lined the shore. Carter said the researchers count all the fish, dead or alive. They count the salmon and collect data on the fish, including how much time they spent in fresh water and the ocean. More recently, the team has also been recording how the fish die —whether they deteriorated on their own or were killed by predators.
On the day Carter and the technicians were at Yako Creek, there were so many sockeye that it was difficult to walk through the water without accidentally kicking them. For most of their lives, these salmon are silver, but as they move through freshwater streams, they begin to decay. Those dead fish are just as important as the live animals. Carter explained that they bring nutrients from the ocean into this stream ecosystem.
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