March 29, 2019 — Scientists know surprisingly little about a salmon’s life outside of their freshwater and nearshore habitats, but an ambitious study is attempting to change that. The International Year of the Salmon put together an expedition with 21 international scientists in the Gulf of Alaska, all in the hopes of understanding more about the mysterious lives salmon lead in the open ocean.
The International Year of the Salmon is a quasi-international organization aimed at bringing attention to all five species of Pacific salmon as warming ocean temperatures affect their survival at sea.
“We will set the conditions that we need for salmon and people to be resilient as we’re dealing with this change in climate,” Mark Saunders explained.
Saunders works for the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission and he helped establish the International Year of the Salmon initiative. The project is brining scientists, fishery managers and policy makers together from Japan, Russia, the U.S. and Canada in the hopes of making salmon management in the Pacific Ocean an international effort.
“We’re looking for those projects that we believe are transformational and then going after the funding to do it,” Saunders added.
One of the projects was a five-week expedition that acted as a first-of-its-kind stock survey for salmon in the Gulf of Alaska.