Tsunami debris surveys underway

By the Homer Tribune

The Marine Conservation Alliance Foundation released the results of their tsunami debris monitoring program July 3.  Further monitoring efforts are underway but additional funding is necessary to conduct cleanup activities.

Debris suspected to be from the tsunami was reported in Washington State in December 2011. In response, in January 2012, MCAF established a monitoring program to detect the presence of debris on Alaska’s shoreline and to test suspected pieces for radiation.  The program used experienced marine debris cleanup contactors in Sitka, Craig, Yakutat, and Kodiak.

As described in the newly released report, Results of the 2012 MCAF Japanese Tsunami Monitoring Program; buoys, large pieces of Styrofoam and liquid containers used for fuel were found along the shores. Experienced contactors recognized much of this was not typical debris. Near Sitka 1,600 pounds of mostly Styrofoam tsunami debris was identified from eight beaches. Styrofoam was also the biggest problem in Yakutat with 95 blocks and 52 floats identified. This was followed by the large black “oyster floats” (48 identified).

Using hand-held Geiger counters, monitors found no radiation contamination. This is consistent with expectations since the Fukushima meltdown occurred after the water had receded.

The study found that much of the debris is Styrofoam, which greatly concerned Marine Debris Program Coordinator Dave Gaudet. “Just imagine Styrofoam in the storms this winter getting bashed against the rocks. Right now the pieces are big and can be picked up, but next year they’ll be broken to pieces and nearly impossible to remove.”

Wave energy — Tidal study to map where power may be harnessed

By Naomi Klouda

This map shows the tide sampling stations in Cook Inlet.

Homer Tribune

Imagine a time ahead when tidal power will be as easy to tap as hanging up a solar panel. A time when turning on the lights involves depending on the power of storms rather than crude oil hauled from the depths of the earth.

That possibility might not be too far into the future.

Three partners launched 10 tidal monitoring stations last week from Turnagain Arm in Upper Cook Inlet to Kachemak Bay in Lower Cook Inlet for a viable start to the process. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services measures the currents and the Coast Survey Development Laboratory built a hydrodynamic model. The Alaska Energy Authority has the funding.

The project involves collecting readings from the meters over a two-month period, said Kris Holderied, manager of the NOAA Kasitsna Bay Laboratory.

“The current meters will be in place for two months and will be recovered in August,” Holderied said. “The current meter deployments are part of a partnership project between NOAA and the Alaska Energy Authority to quantify the tidal energy potential in Cook Inlet.”

New views — Climate change, urbanization impact peninsula

By Joseph Robertia

Photo by Clark Fair, Redoubt Reporter. Ice retreats from the surface of Skilak Lake.

Redoubt Reporter

The celebration of Earth Day is a time to think about the planet, the ways it may be changing and what those changes mean to its inhabitants — humans not excluded. Here on the Kenai Peninsula, many transformations are taking place with the flora and fauna, and while sometimes difficult to observe from a ground-eye view, the patterns of change are a bit easier to understand when seen from above.

To illustrate this concept, John Morton, supervisory biologist at the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, presented “The Kenai Peninsula at 30,000 feet,” as part of Kenai Peninsula College’s Earth Day celebration last week.

“The bottom line is things are changing,” Morton said. “I’m not pointing fingers to the cause or offering up solutions, I just want to put the facts out and show the empirical data to let people know this is real and happening right here.”

Using satellite imagery overlaid with various graphics, Morton was able to show one of the most easily observable changes to occur to the peninsula in the last 100 years — the human population growth and subsequent urban expansion.

Rather than an area with no roads, a scattering of small towns, Native communities and fish camps, the completion of the Sterling Highway in 1951 and the discovery of oil in 1957 brought many changes to the peninsula over the next several decades.

“Just in the last 30 years the human population has increased from 25,282 to 53,578 people,” he said.

Scientist helps others escape the ivory tower

By Naomi Klouda

Homer Tribune

When University of Washington scientists Ray Hilborn and Daniel Schindler studied the Bristol Bay salmon runs, they wanted to communicate to policy makers and the public the importance of what they found.

The reason Bristol Bay has the best sockeye run in the world is largely because of the variety of ecological niches the species occupies and the varied life cycles the fish have developed as a result, they wrote in a paper published in the journal Nature.

“They found a metaphor to describe that — it is like having a portfolio on the stock market,” said scientist and author Nancy Baron. “They called it the ‘portfolio effect’ when they published their study in Nature. If we want a population of any animal to survive climate change, we can’t predict which stock will boom or bust so you have to have a range of them. If you have a range of stocks within a population, it is more likely to survive.”

Baron has made it her role to help teach scientists to leave their ivory towers and talk to the public. She arms them with communication tools.

“Using the stock market analogy, they’ve made a convincing case to policy makers about why habitat matters. Managers are now starting to say, ‘OK, so you’ve convinced me we can’t predict what will boom and what will bust.’ That’s why Alaska is a place that is so much better prepared to deal with climate change, because it has a lot of habitat that will be the secret to survival.”

If the scientists were to focus only on detailing the genetic diversity, people fall asleep or fail to grasp the importance.

What have you learned lately?

By Jenny Neyman, Redoubt Reporter

Have you stuffed a pea in your ear lately?

Maybe you should. All the cool kids are doing it. And they’re growing up to discover the quasicrystals structure, the accelerating expansion of the universe through observations of distant supernovae, and the dendritic cell and its role in adaptive immunity. Also the precise amount of wasabi needed to be released into the air to wake someone from sleeping.

Hey, we can’t all be rocket scientists. Or Nobel Prize winners, as the first three are. Discovery is still discovery. As biophysicist Aaron Klug said, “Human curiosity, the urge to know, is a powerful force and is perhaps the best secret weapon of all in the struggle to unravel the workings of the natural world.”

Klug won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1982 for his development of “crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes.”

Try saying that 10 times fast. Then try spelling it. Then go apply for a job in radio or print media, because if you can do that, you’ve got a bright career ahead of you.

While the fluid pronunciation, much less a complete understanding of Klug’s advancements in science, may be beyond most of us, we all share the impetus that got him there — the urge to know. That “best secret weapon” in the enterprise of learning.

Almanac: Bare bones history — Emerging fossil record offers hints to big wildlife of the past

Editor’s note: This story concerning mammoths on the Kenai Peninsula is a follow-up to the two-part article that appeared Sept. 7 and Sept. 14 in the Redoubt Reporter.

By Clark Fair

Photo courtesy of Richard D. Reger, Ph.D.. This portion of a mammoth tusk is one of 11 mammoth “elements” discovered on the southern Kenai Peninsula.

Redoubt Reporter

The flood of 2002 changed everything.

And in wreaking such change, the flood revealed what has thus far been the most important piece in an intriguing archaeological and geological puzzle — the existence of mammoths on the Kenai Peninsula.

Prior to the flood, Phil Gordon, of Homer, had been “putzing around” up Deep Creek for years, fighting through a mass of vegetation that he referred to as “a stinking jungle, all full of bears and brush and barely passable.”

After the flood, however, the whole lower Deep Creek area opened up.

“It changed the river and topography enormously,” Gordon said. “It was a veritable freeway.”

Usually, Gordon trekked upstream with a friend, typically on a fishing excursion. Such was the case in the late summer after the flood.

“My buddy and I were fishing for dollies,” Gordon said. “He is a great fisherman, but I am sort of an indifferent fisherman. It’s a good excuse to go, but if I don’t catch anything it can be every bit as good. He’s busy casting and fishing and changing lures and trying flies, and I’m busy seeing what I can see.”

Gordon said he found, “A variety of bear bones, a number of moose antlers and a huge variety of things that had been unearthed by that enormous flood,” and he delighted in the search at the expense of the fishing.

“I was just happy, happy, happy,” he said. “I walked across a bit of a sandbar, and there was just about 4 inches of the midpart of the tusk showing. It’s brownish and it looks like wood, but there was something about it that arrested my gaze, so I stopped and walked back.

“I often do this. I’m not great at making miles and miles and miles. I used to run everywhere, but these days I spend a lot more time just looking around. So I dug it out. It’s not a monster. It’s not the whole tusk, certainly not the whole mammoth, but it was a hoot to find because I had a pretty good idea what it was.”

Stock up on king data — Genetic testing adds to Kenai, inlet knowledge

By Jenny Neyman

Photos courtesy of Tim McKinley, Alaska Department of Fish and Game. An Alaska Department of Fish and Game technician takes a tissue sample from a monster king salmon at the Fish and Game test-net site on the lower Kenai River. Samples are run through genetic testing to determine which spawning stock the fish is from.

Redoubt Reporter

As much as we might wish them to, fish simply don’t talk. Though biologists and fishery managers in Cook Inlet are constantly trying to learn more about king salmon, especially those from the Kenai River, pulling a chinook alongside a boat and asking it, “Where you from?” “Been here long?” or “Where you headed?” does not elicit a response. At least, not in so many words.

But advances in genetic testing make it just about that easy to get much better acquainted with king salmon.

“It’s pretty simple anymore,” said Tim McKinley, research biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game Sport Fish Division. “In this business, when there’s a change in technology there’s rapid learning that goes on about your critter of interest. It’s kind of like when they put the Hubble Telescope up there. It was a whole new leap in technology for the astronomers and physicists and everything else.”

The leap for fishery biologists came with improvements in genetic testing that led to much easier and cheaper ways to derive information from tissue samples. Twenty-five years or so ago, genetic sampling of salmon was a time-intensive, technical, expensive and deadly process.

“If you were going to take genetic samples from fish you had to kill the fish because you were taking all kinds of weird stuff — like heart tissue or kidney or liver and blood. And then, once you took that sample, it had to be preserved using stuff like liquid nitrogen,” McKinley said.

Running the genetic testing lab work could cost a couple hundred dollars per sample.

“If you needed to run dozens or hundreds or thousands of samples, it gets ridiculous,” McKinley said.

Plugged In: Bulbs can color how you see photography

By Joe Kashi, for the Redoubt Reporter

How a photograph, or any artwork, is displayed and lighted is just as important as how it was taken and printed.

The appearance of even the finest artwork is often ruined by poor lighting. That’s particularly true of photographs, whose crucial subtle tones and colors are lost when lighting is poor. Conversely, good lighting can really illuminate a painting or photograph and make it shine.

To understand how to properly display and light photographs and artwork, we should understand how people perceive light and color. Seeing color is actually quite complex, involving everything from quantum physics (literally) to neuropsychology.

Although different light sources emit varying “colors” of light, the human perception of color is not an absolute physical phenomenon. Rather, an object’s “color” is the interpretation by the human brain about how certain wavelengths of light interact with the biological structures in our eyes.

When everything is biologically wired and interpreted in the normal way, then we see colors in the manner that humans deem normal. Some people have subtle neurological differences and are thus color-blind to specific colors. Other species react in varying ways. That’s why dogs apparently only see black and white, even when looking at a brightly colored flower that humans, some insects and some birds find intensely colorful.

Hatching enthusiasm for learning

By Joseph Robertia

Photo by Joseph Robertia, Redoubt Reporter. Two incubators are used to keep goose eggs at the proper temperature and humidity level in Diane McBee’s class at Kalifornsky Beach Elementary School.

Redoubt Reporter

With voracious curiosities and a whole new world of knowledge to explore, kindergartners aren’t known for their patience. That’s why teachers, like Kalifornsky Beach Elementary School instructor Diane McBee, sometimes need an extra dose of it.

McBee has had no trouble getting students interested in an ongoing lesson that is looking to answer the age-old question of which came first — the chicken or the egg. She just needs to be prepared for the ongoing questions.

“MzBee, how many more days?” one child asked.

“MzBee, how many will be boys and how many will be girls?” another queried.

“How many more days is it again?” still another asked, even though the question had just been answered.

McBee was taking all the questions as a sign the class project she had picked was a good one.

In addition to the typical science curriculum, kindergarteners at Kalifornsky Beach Elementary School are literally studying the age-old question of which came first — the chicken or the egg.

Science of the Seasons: Simple plant has place in complex web

By Dr. David Wartinbee, for the Redoubt Reporter

Photo courtesy of Dr. David Wartinbee. Lemna minor plants, also called duckweeds, float on the water’s surface. Their thalli are only about one-eighth of an inch to one-quarter of an inch long. The single root of each plant can be seen dangling in the water below.

While learning to take off and land on floats this summer, I visited a large number of lakes on the Kenai Peninsula. I developed a fondness for one particular lake because of the variety of different organisms I saw there.

Along the edge of this (to be unnamed) lake, I spotted one of the largest bull moose I have ever seen. There were all kinds of waterfowl in the area, including grebes, loons and a family of swans. I carefully watched for this swan family and if they were anywhere near my intended landing spot, I went to another lake to practice. On a couple occasions, I stopped to wander around the shoreline and was rewarded with a number of ecologically interesting discoveries.

Like many peninsula lakes, this one was home to a large population of freshwater mussels that live in the bottom substrates. Along the shoreline, I found a couple places where river otters had frequently dined on mussels and left their shells in large, scattered piles. Their short slides and spraint areas were also well-used.

In other areas of this lake were signs of beavers harvesting aspen saplings and some early construction work on a bank lodge. Here and there were signs of bears visiting the shoreline, as well.

Kenai king season lacks luster — Low run, inaccurate sonar frustrates fishermen

By Jenny Neyman

File photo by Patrice Kohl. Fishing boats ply the lower Kenai River during a July king fishing season. This year’s late-run Kenai king season resulted in the lowest harvest in recent years.

Redoubt Reporter

King salmon season on the Kenai River this year was a good example of why it’s called fishing, not catching.

“Yeah, it was ugly. It was a weak run and anybody in town will tell you that,” said Robert Begich, area management biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game Division of Sport Fish.

Despite favorable fishing conditions, a low return of late-run kings that were smaller and younger than usual made for a slow July on the river, with even experienced local anglers and longtime fishing guides left with empty nets after full days spent on the water. Adding to the frustration of infrequent bites were sonar counts that were biased high, making it appear as though thousand-plus slugs of kings were entering the river a day, when in actuality, far fewer were making their way upstream.

This was the worst king season in 20-plus years of guiding memory for Reubin and Mindy Payne, of Alaskan Widespread Fishing Adventures. They estimate their Kenai king catch rate was about half what it would be in a typical season.

“I’ve never seen this poor fishing,” Reubin Payne said. “It’s not just me. Maybe I had a bad day, I couldn’t get in front of a biter. But my wife, Mindy, she grew up fishing on this river and it was bad for her, too. And it wasn’t just she and I — it’s across the board. There were some real concerns within the guide community and private fishermen.”

A low king run and resultantly slow fishing was compounded by higher expectations for a better season. Unlike last summer, when flooding events led to muddy water in the Kenai, which is not conducive to king fishing, this year there appeared to be no good reason why kings weren’t biting.

“As far as conditions go, water clarity and flow I’d say were favorable to good fishing, particularly when counts are high,” Payne said.

Sonar counts were high for much of July, but inaccurately so.

Payne said he has no doubt that Kenai River sonar king counts were inaccurate, as evidenced by a low harvest.

“I don’t know why the counts were skewed but I know that on days when I sit out there for 10 hours and see three fish caught out of 250 boats, and then I listen to the fish count and it says 1,400 kings came into the river, I know that when 1,400 kings come into the river I see more than three nets up,” Payne said.

Wandering sockeye lead count awry — Improved technology shows promise for increasing king sonar accuracy

By Jenny Neyman

Images courtesy of Debby Burwen, Alaska Department of Fish and Game. The dual-frequency identification sonar system being tested on the Kenai River creates images of fish on a screen, making it easier to count and size them, and differentiate kings from sockeye salmon.

Redoubt Reporter

Judging by the in-river sonar estimate numbers, this summer’s late run of Kenai River king salmon had the potential to be a smoking hot fishing season. The count started July 1 with 843, hit a high daily total of 2,654 on July 21, and finished strong with a 1,277 daily count Aug. 4, for a healthy cumulative total of 48,343.

But those numbers did not translate into bent rods, wet nets and happy fishermen. Far from it. Anglers on the river, harvest reports, creel surveys and test netting all tell a far different tale of Kenai king fishing this July. Fishery managers are estimating the run to be at the lower end of the escapement range, around 17,800 fish, with a weak run total in the 32,000 range, rather than the robust 48,000-plus indicated by the sonar estimate.

Kristy and Evertt McCullough, of Alaska’s Last Frontier Fishing Lodge, were two of many guides and private anglers left scratching their heads over the dichotomy between high expectations for a good season and the poor results that were actually netted. Sonar counts were good, water conditions were clear and favorable for king fishing, and boat traffic seemed a little lower than usual, Kristy McCullough said. But all that accounted for a big fat nothing of a season, as the kings simply didn’t show up.

“They weren’t there,” McCullough said. “River conditions were good. That is the scary thing. Last year we had flooding and very dirty water for a while there, but this year we had beautiful, clear-water days and still had very low catch rates. And that’s just the double whammy when fishing’s bad even with fewer boats out there. Even the drift-boat days. The very last drift-boat-only Monday, it’s usually just a blowout day, and this year we actually got one (king) on that Monday, but we only saw two others caught and we were out there that whole day.”

Low catch rates weren’t in the McCulloughs’ or anyone else’s imagination.

“It was a poor run. All indicators are it was a weak run,” said Robert Begich, area management biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game Division of Sport Fish.

The older split-beam sonar system, right, results in dots on a screen.

All indicators, that is, except the sonar count, which clocked a healthy late-run king return. Debby Burwen, regional sonar biologist for Fish and Game, said the sonar was likely fooled by a combination of factors. The king run unexpectedly consisted of a lot of younger, smaller kings, which can be difficult for sonar to distinguish from sockeye salmon. And sockeyes, for some unknown reason, swam in the middle of the river more often than they usually do. Sockeyes usually tend to stick closer to shore, whereas kings are more often found midriver.

“We believe (the late-run king sonar counts) were biased high, and that’s no secret. We put it in the paper and on our website, everything like that. And the reason we think they were so biased high was because there was an extraordinary number of sockeye out in the middle of the river,” Burwen said. “Both the split-beam (sonar) and netting program (which is only operated midriver) showed we had more sockeye out in the middle of the river than prior years. We always get some sockeye out there, but this year was an extraordinary high number.”