We just had to share this amazing story from Science magazine about how Daniel Schindler, a Center for Limnology alum and one of the world’s foremost experts on Pacific salmon, found himself in the middle of a fight over a mine.
By Warren Cornwall – It’s hard to think small in Alaska. The largest of the United States is home to North America’s highest mountain range. It’s a place where undammed rivers run more than 1000 kilometers, glaciers collapse into the ocean, and polar bears roam.
Daniel Schindler, however, is here hunting for something the size of a grain of rice. Crouching in tiny Allah Creek, hemmed in by alders and smeared in blood, he grasps a rotting sockeye salmon carcass and nearly decapitates the fish with a stroke of a carving knife. With tweezers, he delves into a cavity of creamy goo tucked behind the brain and plucks out a sliver of what looks like bone. It is an otolith, a bit of calcium carbonate that sits within the inner ear and acts like an internal gyroscope, helping the fish orient its movements.
Schindler, an aquatic ecologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, holds the white fleck up to the sunlight. “For some reason, picking otoliths is a very therapeutic activity,” he says, as a cluster of scarlet-sided sockeye thrashes by in the shin-deep water, frantically searching for their spawning grounds. Continue Reading –>