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2003
RIVER
RESCUERS
UM'S NEW RIVERINE SCIENCE CENTER
POISONED
HEARTS
ARSENIC EFFECTS ON CARDIOVASCULAR HEALTH
WATER
WIZARDRY
BIO STATION'S NEW FLOOD PLAIN MODEL
RIVERS
THAT TIME FORGOT
AN UNDISTURBED RUSSIAN WILDERNESS
SODIUM
SOLUTIONS
COALBED METHANE IN EASTERN MONTANA
HEAVY
METAL
SCIENTISTS STUDY IMPACT OF METALS ON MICROBES
COTTONWOOD
CONUNDRUM
MONTANA'S DISAPPEARING RIVER TREES
WATER
WARDENS
UM'S WATERSHED HEALTH CLINIC
TALLYING
TADPOLES
STUDYING MONTANA AMPHIBIANS
FISH
FINDERS
DNA IN WATER REVEALS LOCATION OF FISH
WET
AND WILD
A PRIMER ON MONTANA AQUATIC LIFE
WATER
THAT WAS
THE SECRETS OF GLACIAL LAKE MISSOULA
NEWS
TO USE
THE WEIRD LIFE CYCLE OF SWIMMER'S ITCH
BACKTALK
GIARDIA: A WATER DRINKER'S GUT-WRENCHING SURPRISE
By CARY SHIMEK
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| Unexplored vastness: The horizons of an eastern Russia flood plain. (Photo: Jack Stanford) |
Jack Stanford, director of UM's Flathead Lake Biological Station, says adventures abound in the Kamchatkan wilderness on Russia's Pacific Rim.
As an example, one night Stanford's wife, UM microbial ecologist Bonnie Ellis, woke him as they slept in their semi-permanent tent camp. "My bed just lifted up," she whispered. "Go see what's out there."
Stanford stuck his head outside and saw that a 1,000-pound grizzly had stepped on a floorboard outside the canvas tent wall, raising his wife off the ground. "Get out of here!" Stanford yelled at the behemoth. It only moved a few feet, so Stanford went outside and shouted again. The grizzly jumped in the nearby river, but it didn't leave. It just paddled around sniffing and snuffing at the unfamiliar human scent.
"He wound up living near us for a month," Stanford says. "We named him Clarence or something like that."
Kamchatka has a lot of bears, who live among some of the most pristine rivers remaining on Earth. It was the rivers and untouched fisheries that first lured Stanford to Kamchatka in 1999, and he's returned every year since, sometimes for two months at a time.
"I wanted to see functioning salmon rivers that had no roads, no harvest, no fishing pressure and had big giant flood plains with cottonwood galleries 10 to 100 times the size of what we have here," Stanford says. "And that's what we found."
During the Cold War, Kamchatka was a top-secret land, home to an excellent deep-water port at Petropavlovsk and Soviet nuclear submarines. The Soviets purposefully depopulated the Kamchatkan countryside, concentrating people in the port city, and jealously guarded their eastern peninsula. This had the unintended consequence of protecting an undisturbed wilderness laboratory for modern-day researchers.
With partners such as Russia's Moscow State University and the Oregon-based Wild Salmon Center, Stanford's team is exploring an intact ecosystem teeming with salmon and steelhead trout. The research is funded partially by anglers who accompany the expeditions, paying $5,000 to $6,000 apiece to experience some of the best fishing on the planet. The scientists sample fish using the anglers, whose number has included Gordon Moore, chairman emeritus of Intel Corp.
"You can't imagine these salmon runs until you've seen them," Stanford says. "I've seen 35,000 red salmon on one gravel bar."
As
part of the Kamchatka Salmon Biodiversity Project, Stanford
and his team study rivers that could become templates for
fishery restoration efforts around the globe. In the field
they collect information about how juvenile salmon and steelhead
interact with various
habitats, and how these habitats shift around in time and space.
The work involves cruising across massive flood plains in jet boats or flying in a helicopter to the headwaters of a never-explored Kamchatkan river and rafting down it.
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| UM microbial ecologist Bonnie Ellis holds a Kamchatka steelhead. (Photo: Jack Stanford) |
"We once landed in a place that made tears come down our faces, it was so beautiful," Stanford says. "There wasn't a single human footprint or indication there had been a human there, ever."
Of course all this wilderness work leads to all sorts of adventures. Stanford says they often follow bear paths and can encounter up to 20 half-ton grizzlies a day. The researchers also typically live off the land, but once they were stranded on a river without a salmon run and had to subsist on fish-head soup for several days. And he says most Americans look panicked when they first experience the old, Russian MI-8 helicopters they fly around in.
Working
in such an intact environment — with
its clean water and native species that have unobstructed
access to the ocean — already has led
biological station staff to discover that rainbow trout
and large, seagoing steelhead are actually the same fish.
It's just that in Montana, like most places in America, rainbows
are prevented from
journeying to the ocean and growing into their steelhead
form.
"That's part of our research, studying what makes a steelhead vs. a rainbow," Stanford says. "We think that a rainbow living in the river who gets enough voles and salmon to eat is too lazy to go to the ocean, basically. He doesn't need the ocean. But in Kamchatka, competing against nine other species of fish, he might not get so fat and lazy, and this stimulates him to head for the ocean and get big."
Stanford says UM wants to be part of efforts that protect Kamchatkan rivers forever. To this end, the station recently landed a $2 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation that will allow study of 12 river systems in Kamchatka, Alaska and British Columbia using the UM model developed at Montana's Nyack Flood Plain.
As part of the Kamchatka Salmon Biodiversity Project under the guidance of the Wild Salmon Center, Stanford says, some Kamchatka rivers also will become Pacific Salmon Observatories — places where researchers and students can experience firsthand a great salmon river swarming with fish. The goal is to learn how to restore fisheries and thus improve overall river health.
"There are a lot of places on our planet that don't have enough fresh water, and human suffering is increasing every day," Stanford says. "We are finding tools that will help to alleviate that by fully understanding these very pristine rivers."