How Did We Get Here?
The metal door creaks in protest as Denise Buckley drags it open, the bottom grinding against the gravel pathway outside. July sun splits through the once-contained darkness, and the shed’s occupants scatter. Their slick bodies wriggle away from the doorway and into the safety of their thirty-foot home, what appears to be an industrial swimming pool with tin siding and suspended lighting. Each salmon is about the length of my arm, torpedo-shaped, pushing gracefully against the artificial current. Two hundred fish: the entire adult population of wild Atlantic Salmon that returned to the 109-mile Penobscot River that year.
Maine is the last state in the US that Atlantic Salmon still return to. Their historic range included rivers as far south as the Hudson. Maine’s Penobscot River alone used to host up to 100,000 sea-run salmon, which came from the ocean each spring to spawn before returning to sea. Now an entire river’s returning population could be condensed to a space the size of a two-car garage.
Craig Brook Hatchery, where Buckley is Senior Biologist, sits at the end of Hatchery Road among dense woodland in East Orland, Maine. The hatchery was established by the US Fish and Wildlife Service in 1890, one of the first federal fish hatcheries.
Atlantic salmon are known as the King of Fish. They have been missing from their kingdom for quite some time now. In the mid-1800s, scientists from Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey and Michigan noticed an alarming decline in the northeast's migratory fish population. In January of 1868, Maine’s newly founded Fish Commission released their first report stating “the salmon is suffering from neglect and persecution. So peculiarly is it exposed to the attacks of man, so greedy and relentless has been the pursuit, and so regardless of their necessities has been the management of the waters, that in many rivers, both in Europe and America, it has become utterly extinct, and in very few of the remainder does it yield anything like the number that is was wont.”
I was born in the year 2000, the same year Maine's Atlantic salmon were listed as endangered. These fish have been hanging on by a thread my entire life, yet I had never heard of them before moving to Maine for the summer. Atlantic salmon are silently disappearing and have been for over 100 years. Seeing them swim in wavering synchronization against the swirl of an artificial current, it is hard to imagine that they are the last chance for a wild population.
At Craig Brook, Denise Buckley walks me through another garage with a smaller, standing pool resembling a blue clawfoot bathtub built for Andre the Giant. The door rolls open to reveal a Fish and Wildlife truck piloted by the Craig Brook interns, Jake Wells and Gage Clapp. They park the truck and hustle to work. Gage stands in the truck bed, leaning over the side of an insulated tank. He emerges after a moment holding up a flopping black tube containing the latest catch from Milford Dam. He hands the fish down to Jake, who clomps in heavy waders to the indoor tub and slips the salmon into its new home. It is July first, and only two fish have been caught at the dam today.
“When I first started here a jillion years ago,” said Buckley, who has actually worked at the hatchery since 2005, “the peak of the run was right around the 20th of June. So you were still getting good numbers of fish by 4th of July. Now it’s more towards Memorial Day, the first week of June.”
With a changing climate, migrating salmon have a smaller window where the water temperatures allow them to make the journey, the run, upstream to spawn. Once upon a time, salmon was an Independence Day tradition in Maine. We tend to think of hamburgers and hotdogs as Fourth fare, but in summers past, the Fourth of July meant salmon in the river and on the menu. Now any Atlantic Salmon consumed in America is grown in commercial aquaculture farms.
Farming Fish
Driving into Eastport, Maine, feels like driving to the edge of the world. The easternmost city in America, it sits on an island completely surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean save for a narrow land bridge back to the coast. It is a waterfront town of around 1,200 people, with small businesses and free parking. In the early September sun, the sky and ocean wear matching blue and the locals line up their wares along Water Street for the 34th Annual Salmon and Seafood Festival.
Salmon aquaculture, the practice of raising Atlantic salmon in hatcheries until they go through smoltification and can be placed in saltwater floating net-pens, has been common practice in Maine since the 1970s. Aquaculture produces 3-4 million Atlantic salmon for net-pens each year, as compared to annual wild salmon returns of generally less than 1,000 adults to the United States according to NOAA.
Aquaculture and captive breeding borrow techniques from each other, despite their seemingly opposite goals. Salmon are selectively spawned, raised, then either released into a river or a pen, depending on the end goal.
“What's the deal with endangered Atlantic salmon, because you can go to any grocery store in Maine and you can buy Atlantic salmon?” Buckley asked me, rhetorically. “A lot of the salmon that you see for sale in Maine now in the grocery stores is Maine Atlantic salmon. It's interesting, because we both have principles that guide our breeding programs. Atlantic salmon that are raised in aquaculture are bred to grow fast, to have a certain shape. They're breeding fish for meat and fast growth. We want to breed our fish to sustain their local adaptation to the river that they're from, their genetic diversity, which might mean they're not a pretty fish when you look at them, they might have really funky physical characteristics that are specific to that river.”
Buckley compared the aquaculture population of salmon to Butterball turkeys: perfect for dinner, but not equipped to survive the trip from ocean to river and back again.
At the Eastport Salmon Festival, Cooke Aquaculture hosts their Salmon Dinner under a large white tent next to a towering fisherman statue, right in the heart of town. People line up for their meal next to a sign reading, “Maine Aquaculture - Keeping Working Waterfronts Working.” As charcoal warms the grills holding slabs of juicy pink salmon flesh, a plane flies overhead with a banner trailing. It reads, “Fish can feel. Can you? Try vegan. PETA.”
The band plays “I Shall Be Released” as people fill their plates and their stomachs. The singer leans into his mic and addresses the crowd, “The salmon gave it up for you, so let’s give it up for the salmon!” There is scattered applause.
Fishing for wild salmon is prohibited due their endangered species status. For traditional fishermen facing license and resource restrictions that prevent them from harvesting wild fish, working in aquaculture – with a large corporation to handle the legal specifications– is a viable change. Salmon farms produce between 65-85 million dollars worth of fish each year, which contributes to rural waterfront economies. Yet, even farm-raised fish are not safe from the impacts of climate change. Aquaculture pens hosted in Maine harbors are facing the same rising water temperatures wild salmon populations fight, and it may be a losing battle.
“Climate change requires us switching to more heat resilient species, or moving,” Maine Aquaculture Association Executive Director Sebastian Belle said.
On the opposite front, environmentalists and local business owners have fought the development of new aquaculture facilities in Frenchman Bay, where Norwegian company American Aquafarms – named somewhat ironically – planned to raise 66 million pounds of salmon annually. Fears of pollution, disruption to local fisheries, and dissuasion of tourism were voiced by advocacy groups such as Friends of Frenchman Bay, and in August of 2021, over 100 boaters formed a “Save the Bay” flotilla protesting the commercial salmon farm. American Aquafarms' permit was terminated by the state of Maine in early 2022, but the company continues its efforts to build.
Folks gather at Breakwater Pier to take a tour of Cooke Aquaculture’s net-pens, part of their dinner ticket. We file onto a boat with Jolly Roger flying and begin our voyage. Floating along Eastport’s coast, it is easy to see that industry lines the water. Boats, cranes, and semi trucks sit alongside the slow-churning ocean. The tour-goers lean over the railing as we near the salmon pens and stop to see the seemingly-empty nets, their occupants hidden below water. Someone flips a switch and the feeder arm, a metal pipe in the center of the pen, begins to turn and spew fish pellets into the enclosure. A few hungry salmon leap out of the water to take their meal.
Frank Lank, Production Manager for Cooke Aquaculture, stands to answer questions. A tourist asks him, “How does commercial farming affect wild salmon?” Lank sighs.
“It’s hard, because we all want to have wild-caught salmon, but their habitat can’t support that. People need a source of protein, and salmon is one of them.”
Twenty-Four Degrees
Peter Ruksznis, drives a rumbling black truck with Department of Marine Resources (DMR) plates down a dirt road into the backwoods. He passes only one other person, a hunter with a truck bed full of hounds, likely out looking for black bear. They exchange a wave. Ruksznis has not visited this stretch of river in a year, yet as he parks his truck amongst the goldenrod and steps into thick green waders, he makes an easy beeline for the temperature tracker hidden under a rock in the Mattawamkeag River, a tributary to the Penobscot.
The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than 96% of the world’s waters. Ruksznis, who is responsible for the Maine DMR management of the Penobscot salmon population, has tracked the temperature changes over his 29-year career as a Marine Biologist. He wades into the shallow, tannin-stained water to dig up the tracker, fitted in a homemade PVC pipe housing, and plugs it into his laptop to record the year’s temperature changes back at the truck. His brow furrows.
Cool water is necessary for salmon to survive. Their bodies cannot handle temperatures above 24 degrees Celsius. The temperature tracker reads 25 degrees that day. “There’s a place in my heart for salmon,” Ruksznis said, “but I’ve been here 30 years and we’re not any better off than we were before.”
Ruksznis explained that in an ideal situation, salmon would be able to adapt to climate change through natural selection over many generations and many years. However, with such a limited population and low ocean returns, that is near impossible for Atlantic salmon.
Unlike their Pacific counterparts, Atlantic salmon do not immediately die after spawning. According to NOAA, Atlantic salmon can live between five to eight years, spending their early life in freshwater, then going out to sea to grow and develop for one to three years. The fish then return to the river they were born in, earning the right to continue their legacy for several spawning seasons. Or at least, they should.
Marine survival is very low, with changing food webs and water temperatures as the likely culprits. Damming, gutting river bottoms, polluting and overfishing have taken a century since their initial discovery as fish-killers to be fully addressed, and still they are slow solves, with years of damage left to undo. Climate change will not wait that long. Predictions by Carbon Brief suggest the 2 degrees Celsius global climate change threshold will likely be exceeded between 2034 and 2052.
