LAB TESTS PREDICT WHERE SALMON WILL BE RUNNING
SPILL MONEY FUNDS FISH AND GAME GENETIC WORKSPILL SCIENCE: A LOOK AT RESEARCH FUNDED BY THE EXXON VALDEZ SPILL SETTLEMENT

By NATALIE PHILLIPS
Daily News reporter

ANCHORAGE- As the sun was rising over Anchorage on Tuesday, a Cessna Caravan landed at the Anchorage airport to deliver a cooler crammed with hundreds of laboratory vials packed on dry ice.

Each vial held the heart, liver, eyeball or muscle tissue of Cook Inlet red salmon caught by commercial fishermen a few hours earlier.

The cooler was rushed to the state Department of Fish and Game genetics laboratory, where a dozen lab techs in white coats and blue latex gloves were waiting.

For five years, using roughly $2.2 million of the $900 million settlement from the Exxon Valdez oil spill, they have been working on a way to pluck returning salmon out of the Inlet and determine exactly where the run is headed -- the Kenai, the Kasilof, the Susitna, or the Yentna rivers.

They now have their science perfected.

It is called genetic stock identification, and it's a tool that could help defuse the long-standing battles over Cook Inlet's bounty between the commercial fleet and sport fishermen in the Mat-Su area and on the Kenai Peninsula.

''We applaud it,'' said Ben Ellis, executive director of Kenai River Sportfishing Inc.

About 24 hours after receiving the salmon tissue samples early last week, state Fish and Game geneticist Lisa Seeb called managers in Soldotna with preliminary results. About 61 percent of the 347,000 fish caught by the commercial fleet on Monday was headed for the Kenai River.

Fisheries managers spent Wednesday and Thursday poring over that information -- along with sonar counts, and off-shore tests of fish movement -- and announced Thursday that there would be no restrictions on the Friday commercial fishing opening.

Two weeks ago, they went through the same steps and discovered about 30 percent of the commercial catch was Kenai River fish. So during the next opening, the commercial fleet was ordered to stick to the east side of the Inlet with hopes that salmon bound for the upper reaches of Cook Inlet, where runs in some streams have been weak, would get through.

Now that the genetic stock identification program is perfected, the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council won't be funding the study any further. State officials must decide if they want to fund the program.

''So it may be one of those great inventions that sits on the shelf,'' said Paul Ruesch, a state Department of Fish and Game management biologist based in Soldotna.

Because salmon instinctively return to their natal stream, those from a certain stream maintain distinctive characteristics. Scientists have long been looking for a foolproof way to say where returning salmon are headed.

One study focused on fish scales. The thinking was that like rings on a tree, the scales would show growth rates and could be tied to various river drainages. But after a few years' work, the theory proved flawed. Another study focused on parasites. Maybe salmon from different streams sported unique parasites. That theory didn't hold up, either.

But the genetic fingerprinting -- which involves analyzing protein structures in the fish tissue -- is a proven method first tried back on the Kenai River in the 1970s and currently being used by the Pacific Salmon Commission in the battle between Canadians and the state of Washington over pink salmon.

The early genetic studies of Kenai salmon didn't go anywhere because they didn't have comparative data from salmon in all the Cook Inlet drainages.

Seeb and a crew of state Fish and Game scientists proposed using oil spill settlement money to build the genetic data base needed to make the program work. They also thought that the lab work could be turned around quickly enough to be used while salmon were running.

The United Cook Inlet Drift Association lobbied hard for funding, said Theo Matthews, the organization's executive director. ''We promoted it as a management tool from day one.''

The work began in 1992, with dozens of Fish and Game biologists and technicians traveling to spawning beds on 35 river systems in Cook Inlet. A helicopter was used to reach some remote places, including the West Fork of the Yentna River in Denali National Park. They collected samples from 7,700 fish, at least 100 from each site.

''It took three years to gather all the data, because they all spawn at the same time and we couldn't get to them all at once,'' said Ken Tarbox, a Soldotna-based research biologist for Fish and Game.

''It is exciting when you start seeing the differences,'' Tarbox said.

One discovery was that the red salmon that spawn above the falls on the Russian River are genetically very different than the salmon found below the falls, Seeb said. And above the falls, the early run and late run salmon are genetically different, too.

''The genetic diversity among Kenai River populations is clearly far greater than previously documented,'' Seeb wrote in a report.

By 1994, their data base was taking shape and they were ready to randomly pluck returning fish from Cook Inlet to see if they could make a match. Tarbox once threw samples from a chum salmon in with the mix of fish headed for the Anchorage laboratory just to see if the genetics lab techs could spot the deviant. They did.

This is the second summer the genetic mapping is being used to help manage fisheries.

When the commercial fleet brings its fish to processors, Fish and Game techs are on hand. They work through the night gathering samples from 10 fish from 40 commercial boats. By 4 a.m., some of their samples are ready for a chartered flight for Anchorage.

At the state Fish and Game laboratory on Raspberry Road, lab technicians use a process that produces a hardened gel with a series of dots and dashs resembling the Morse Code. Geneticists translate that information and plug it into a computer. At the end of the day, they compare the information to the data base. They check and re-check their work.

Cook Inlet commercial fishing periods are generally open for 12 hours on Monday and Friday. Returning salmon tend to linger in Cook Inlet for four to 19 days before heading for their spawning grounds. So samples collected on Monday are processed, translated and back to fisheries managers quick enough for them to restrict Friday's opening, if necessary.

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