The Broughton Is Alive

June-July 2006

This is an article from WaveLength Magazine, available in print in North America and globally on the web.
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by Alexandra Morton

The Broughton is a living organism. It breathes. It moves. It lives. A circulatory system transports food, waste, oxygen, salt, water... the things of life. The sheer beauty of this life catches my breath at unexpected intervals. But no time in the Broughton is more divinely perfect than spring.

Spring is spawned here in the violent indecision of March. The long dominant southeasters do not want to back down to the fresh young westerlies and so they pummel us on this coast, but the westerlies always win.

For me, however, spring begins when my oars cause tumbling light in a myriad of sizes and intensities that look like galaxies. At first these new plankton are not visible during daylight, only through their phosphoresence at night.

In early March this year, before the plankton bloom, the water of the Broughton was exceptionally clear. As I traveled the coastline taking its vital signs, I saw deep, deep down, over 15 meters in some places. It was a world revealed. There were walls of the diaphanous white Plumose Anemone. There were congregations of translucent, pale-hooded nudibranchs swaying in unison. Starfish standing on their tip toes spawning. In one bay a red rock crab was at the bottom of a cone-shaped pit. He lowered one claw and pushed it uphill through the sand. As he crested the rim he flung the sand over and started again.

The Kingcome herring are always a revelation and that day was no exception. One moment I was gazing 15 meters down at rocks edged in sand and then I saw a tumult of life so great it concealed the landscape. Each fish was blue-silver and spinning in pursuit of shrimp. The arching fish created the effect of flickering fire in the sea. Such congregations often press against the leading edge of the last of the ebb tide. Where the ebb meets the flood and the two currents bend and slide along each other, the water dimples with whirlpools and boils. These tide lines are the banquet table. If you want to get a quick look at what is happening in Broughton, check her tide lines. All our garbage is there, as well as the spawn and spore of the forest and ocean.

I caught a few of the shrimp that escaped from the herring and put one under the microscope when I got home. As the animal glided into view I whispered “wow” in awe. The beauty of this little fellow was hard to take in. There were huge midnight silver-edged eyes, covered over in a multifaceted lens as brilliant as diamonds. His legs were beating frantically, he looked desperate, and I realized he must be very hot. I ran him down the rocks, dipped the microscope slide into the water and breathed relief.

Why is one thing beautiful and one thing not? I have thought about this a lot. Perhaps it has something to do with a brainstem level of recognition of life, or more precisely a recognition of something that works. Like wine tasting, appreciation of beauty can surely be refined, but I am talking about the gut sense of awe that the natural world causes. We can’t know energy intimately, but I think we know it when we see it.

The crystal clear waters of Broughton are tinder. When touched by the spring sun, the plankton ignites. Like a spark on a wire this pulse of energy streaks through every creature connected. The salmon takes the power of the sun through its tiny prey, and the rest is the stuff of legends. The salmon feeds its world: the trees, the amphibians, the whales, us.

A smile plays across my lips just thinking of the little pink and chum salmon fry I track for my research. The center of the Broughton is the hub of a wheel with four spokes, the four long channels leading out from here to the sea. My life is spent watching the salmon trickle down the legs of the wheel to the center and seeing which door they use to get out. The first little fish are alone. They are the pioneers. I never touch these fish. They are the most vulnerable and precious. They are outliers, an ace in some hole their race might fall into. The only thing on their side is that the predators have not yet assembled.

This year, it began with sighting of five to ten fry, then hundreds, then thousands, until my deckhands, Oline and Amy, and I came across a school that snafued our computational abilities. The fish were half-hidden by darkening waters and glinting sunset, but wherever we caught a glimpse, we could see tiny fish streaming like a river, with thousands more following. We stopped, turned off the engine and tried to take it in.

Baby fish have no experience yet and they trust me much more than they should. I have dipped up thousands in small nets over the years. One strike is all they give me—if I miss, I will never get close to them again. But these fish at Glacier Falls did not know me and they surfaced and began to pirouette in tiny half circles. I knew they are eating something in the plankton.

This big school of salmon had been progressing west through the spoke of the wheel called Tribune Channel. Because this school had few sea lice, I guessed it was the Ahta’s fish. Ahta is a river whose name means ‘grandmother’, arising in the waters of the most southerly virgin forest on this coast. These fish were her babies. The Kakweikan River’s life was in Tribune too. I suspected her fish were the ones with lice a week or more old. The lice were markers. When wild salmon go by a salmon farm, that school becomes marked, and doomed.

Both Ahta’s fish and Kakwiekan’s must pass the Burdwood Islands where young lice were already sprinkled over the pioneers. In a few weeks they would start picking a door to sea, towards a place we have named “Bay of the Damned”. There, young salmon can be picked up easily from the surface, overwhelmed by too many parasites at too young an age.

If beauty is the energy which is life, what do we call the thing that interrupts life, causing the spark to tumble chaotically off track, dimming all the lights further down the line? We should name this force because we humans wield it.

The scent, the warmth, the emotions that are spring come from a working, living system. We can decide to sabotage that system, throw a wooden shoe into its gears, or we can embrace it and become part of it. If we are as smart as we think we are, we should be able to do this. And if not, then how dare we mess with perfection?

ANOTHER AWARD FOR ALEX!

This spring, Alexandra Morton was awarded the prestigious Murray Newman Award for Excellence in Aquatic Conservation, bestowed annually by the Vancouver Aquarium to recognize the outstanding efforts of scientists in furthering research and conservation of ocean ecosystems. In this case the award was given for her tireless efforts to study, publicize and act to protect the health of wild salmon. “This award is well-deserved,” said Dr. Daniel Pauly of the University of BC Fisheries Centre. “Alexandra’s work to document the impacts of sea lice on wild salmon populations has helped to focus public, media and political attention on this critical issue. I’m delighted she is being recognized for her dedication to good science, integrity and resolve.”