We are counting down the last few days until we kick off the start of FISH 110. I am super excited to get to know you all and have a great term, despite all the uncertainty and anxiety floating around in the world today. This message serves as a welcome and to cover some important logistics.
Meeting Time: We will meet in person and online via Zoom on Tuesdays and Thursdays 9:45- 11:15 am, Alaska Time. The first class is Tuesday August 30, 2022. If you are in Fairbanks, class is in O’Neil, Room 201. If you are outside of Fairbanks, you can join the class live by following this LINK. I will also send the login info via an email to your @alaska.edu or preferred email address on file. Classes will be recorded and available for watching if you need to miss class, but it is expected that you will attend in person and/or live unless you’ve communicated with me before hand. There are frequent in class activities that you don’t want to miss out on.
Course Schedule: Our class schedule is not written in stone and will be adapted based on the pace of the course and choices we make as a group along the way. The most up to date schedule is accessible HERE and is the default schedule for important dates and events. Please let me know if you find discrepancies or if you have questions.
Text books: We will be reading Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food by Paul Greenberg and excerpts of Billion-Dollar Fish: The Untold Story of Alaska Pollock by Kevin M. Bailey.
Syllabus and Grading: We will go over details the first day, but the syllabus is available online HERE. Grading will be through Canvas, which you can access with your UA credentials HERE.
I don’t know too much about global fish stock but if it’s anything like the Alaskan fish stock then I’d say it’s not so healthy. I rate it about a 7.8. From personal experience and from what I’ve grown up hearing, the fish and their returns we see now is not the same as Alaska used to get. Salmon themselves are smaller, and in some cases populations are dropping dramatically.
This summer I had the opportunity to assist on a Chinook sampling project on the Yukon River at Rapids Research Camp [between Tanana and Rampart]. I stayed at Stan Zuray’s fish camp. He’s been subsitantly relying on the Yukon as a way of life since 1970-1980 ish. To hear him talk about the way things “use to be” was a reality check for me. He has such passion for his way of life and over the last 60+ years he’s watched it diminish. He talked of how he wanted to see his son provide for his family as he got too; but that’s not going to happen with the way things are going on the Yukon. He had to kill off his dog team because there weren’t enough chum salmon to support them. He released some of his data onto his facebook which demonstrated how significant the king salmon and chum salmon are failing on the Yukon River. He states in his post “Fishing for King and chum salmon which is what makes up almost all of the peoples food here is shut down completely for the second year in a row. Almost all of the camps are empty of people. A few like me are just fishing small nets (legal gear) for whitefish to keep our few dogs left alive. The devastation to the way of life and people of the river is unimaginable here. We have gone from a healthy run of Chinook salmon of possibly 400,000 large sized fish to a final sonar count at the mouth today of 43,000 much smaller fish. This looks to be the worst recorded run of Chinook ever on the Yukon. A major source of people’s food is no more.” The day I flew out to Tanana, June 28 2022, Fish and Game and Fish and Wildlife shut down subsistence fishing for King Salmon on the Yukon River [Commercial fishing and sport fishing had already been shut down prior to this]. It was powerful to see the effect of this decision in the Tanana community. Subsistence really is a lifestyle and it’s damaging when your lifestyle is restricted. This is all due to the health of the salmon. In conclusion, it’s failing.
Here’s Stan’s Facebook if anyone wants to read his full post: https://www.facebook.com/stanzuray
I’ve attached a link to Dan O’Neill’s The Fall of the Yukon Kings which Stan linked in his facebook post: http://rapidsresearch.com/The_Fall_of_the_Yukon_King.pdf
Oops I totally just posted that in the wrong spot ahhh and I can’t figure out how to delete. Please ignore!!!