October 8, 2025 — Wild salmon are super weird for a variety of reasons, including response to warming climate conditions, says fisheries researcher Peter Westley of the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
“Salmon have really evolved in places with changing conditions, including volcanoes blowing up, glaciers melting and making really good salmon habitat,” Westley said on Wednesday, Sept. 24, in a webinar from his office on the Fairbanks campus. “Salmon are experiencing the front lines of (environmental) changes. Trends across the globe since 1991, the rate of warming is much, much faster in the Arctic. Salmon are experiencing warming and rapid change of warming.”
To maintain healthy salmon populations, the fish need cool, complex, connected, clean habitat, said Westley, an associate professor and Wakefield chair of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences at UAF’s Department of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences.
Connectivity is important so that the salmon have the ability to move around, he said. It is also important to protect the processes important to the fish, like the way groundwater comes up to cool the water, and gravel has to come into the streams, he said.
“Salmon bury their offspring alive and leave them in the gravel for months on end, nine to 10 months under the gravel. They are born in fresh water, and then they decide freshwater is not for them and migrate to the ocean, and then they come back,” he said. “They can fill up streams in very high density and go back to their natal streams. They fight their way back home, and their bodies decay and become nutrients for others, including bears. Salmon are weird, but also awesome.”