Students fly 1,777 miles northwest of Seattle and spend a month with the Alaska Salmon Program at their field stations on the banks of Lake Aleknagik and Lake Nerka. Part of the larger Wood River system, these lakes, their creeks, and the surrounding wilderness serve as a “living laboratory” where students are immersed in one of the most valuable salmon fisheries on the planet.

By Ben Miller, SAFS student
When you first arrive at the community of Kampong Phluk, your neck cranes up bamboo stilts to meet the chatter of families in houses high above. From the top of what guidebooks call “bamboo skyscrapers,” locals gaze over the tops of submerged trees, a glittering, island Buddhist temple, and clusters of floating fishing villages in the distance. 

SAFS faculty Jacqueline Padilla-Gamino and graduate student Jeremy Axworthy just returned from a trip to Hawaii where they performed coral bleaching experiments to understand the effects of stress from heating on coral feeding and reproduction. Their study aims to find biomarker molecules to identify corals that are most likely to recover and reproduce after a bleaching event, improving predictions of coral responses to bleaching events. 

The U.S. is weighing changes to the main act that governs U.S. federal fisheries in the planned reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act. Fisheries science was the focus of the fourth meeting by the Senate subcommittee on this action, and SAFS Prof. Ray Hilborn was invited to testify, pointing out that U.S. fisheries are largely successful, with most overfished stocks now rebuilding, and overall fish biomass increasing in the U.S.  

To celebrate International Open Access Week, the University of Washington Libraries posted profiles and interviews with two SAFS faculty, Julia Parrish and Steven Roberts, about how they conduct their research openly. The interview with Julia Parrish focuses on her citizen science work, which involves trained members of the public identifying and pinpointing the locations of more than 10,000 dead birds on the Pacific coast each year, and making the data available openly as well as in scientific publications. 

Each summer, aquatic and fishery sciences professor Daniel Schindler and his students travel to Bristol Bay, Alaska to observe one of the most valuable fisheries in the world. 

Through the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, Sarah Schooler, ’15, spent six weeks in the Alaskan bush, collecting the same data in the field she’d been studying in the classroom: salmon and the hungry habits of grizzly bears. 

A warm water mass in the Pacific Ocean is impacting forage species and stirring up more conversations about the need for ecosystem-based fisheries management. SAFS Professor Tim Essington weighs in. 

Brian will be presenting this thesis entitled:

The cat’s out of the bag – Revealing the behavior of invasive predators to inform management decisions.

WHEN: Monday, August 10th at 2:30 PM
WHERE: FSH 203
FACULTY ADVISER: James Anderson

All are welcome to attend. 

Brittany will be presenting her thesis entitled:

Implications of climate change for strategic conservation and restoration of tidal wetlands

WHEN: Thursday, August 13 at 10:00 AM
WHERE: FSH 203
FACULTY ADVISER: Charles Simenstad

All are welcome to attend.