Arctic Science Journeys
Radio Script
1996

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Internet Salmon
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STORY: About 50 adult chum salmon migrating past the upper Yukon River village of Rampart this fall will carry tiny transmitters in their stomaches. The transmitters emit a radio signal that helps biologists track salmon migrating to spawning grounds in northeast Alaska and Canada.

And starting soon, Alaska students will be able to go along--in cyberspace. Laurel Devaney is education coordinator with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Fairbanks. She wants to put the progress of the radio-tagged salmon on the Internet--on what just might be the first salmon home page. It's all part of a plan to involve teachers and students in science.

"What we're hoping to do is combine an educational component into this research to get schools along the river learning first-hand about their salmon stocks. For one thing, any school should be able to--with the proper equipment--download the information about these fish. As these fish with transmitters are heading upstream, they should be able to log into this data and if they, for example, adopt a certain fish, they should be able to know where it is within the river at any one time."

The site would be interactive, Devaney says, where schools in villages along the river can exchange information with each other and with the rest of the world.

"And some of the exciting things that could be done is that villages all along the river could share information. The high school science classes could be interneting back and forth and sharing information. For example one village might be on the river where the fish passes by and they might be having subsistence fish wheels and they could talk about how they're using those salmon for subsistence purposes as they pass. Another village might be where the fish ends up spawning, so they could share ideas about how the habitats differ or how the different places use that same resource."

John Eiler is a biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service. He says a network of 12 receiving stations will track the migrating salmon.

"So as the fish are moving upriver, as they come within range of a particular station, the signal from the transmitter is picked up and decoded. The station notes the time and the day that it's picked up and which fish it is and that information is stored. Every three hours that information is shot up to a satellite which is then bounced back down to a receiving station and that information is then filed. We're able to access those files through a modem and laptop computer. So we basically can look at the output from the various stations."

Researchers are testing the tracking system on the fall Yukon River chum salmon run. Since that run is already winding down, teachers and students won't be able to track the salmon until the radio-tagging effort resumes next summer. But by then, Devaney plans to have the web page up and running and the word out to Alaska schools. For Arctic Science Journeys, this is Debra Damron.