An Underwater Winter In Brooks River
Post by Ranger Masaki Mizushima of Katmai National Park
As Lake Brooks and Naknek Lake freeze over during the Arctic’s cold winter, Brooks River continues to flow, its currents carrying wind-swept white spruce trees and icy sludge downriver.
However, beneath the truculent waters, Brooks River is alive with life. Small, translucent, orange-red salmon eggs jiggle within the protection of pebbles and sediments along the river’s bottom. Depending on when an individual sockeye spawned during the summer and fall seasons, newborn salmon will emerge from their fragile eggs in about four months’ time in January or February. At this stage they enter a second phase of life where they are known as alevin. This is an intriguing time when, although exterior to the egg, each newborn salmon remains attached to their yolks, the life source of edible sustenance in order to survive Mother Nature’s severe welcome to this world.
Although typically obscured within their pebble fortresses, alevin face the natural dangers of being on the bottom of the food chain. Rainbow trout and arctic char gluttonously devour eggs and alevin by the hundreds if not thousands. Red-breasted mergansers and common goldeneyes keep them surveying the waters above. Then there is the chance of an unexpected wader-covered foot or even a 500 pound bear paw crashing down on one’s home and crushing each newborn salmon to death.
If not eaten or crushed, suffocation may occur if an alevin’s gravelly home is out of reach to enough flowing water, obstructing oxygen from cycling into openings in the ground and streaming through each developing gill.
A sockeye salmon’s life begins fragile, challenging, and dangerous. This is only the beginning of such magnificent creatures, a mere season, with so much against them. Yet, the instinct and urge to grow, survive, and, ultimately, reproduce, is ingrained within their sockeye salmon genes – an impulse which will keep thousands upon thousands of them alive each year, returning only to die where each was born.
