On a cool morning in August, Stephen Payton stood at the edge of a dock in Seldovia, Alaska, dragging a fine, conical net at the end of a pole through the rippling ocean water. Screaming crows and gulls wheeled above us in the damp air, as the long-limbed 30-year-old watched his ghostly net wend its way underneath the surface. A small plastic bottle at the net’s narrow end captured and concentrated particles from the water.
Harmful algal blooms, however, are occurring more frequently in Alaska’s northern coastal regions, across more months of the year, making harvesting at any time a risk. Recent research found that blooms in the Arctic Ocean increased by more than 50 percent between 1998 and 2018. The frequency and intensity of dangerous blooms are likely to rise even further as northern latitudes warm.
The intertidal harvest also sustains vital knowledge and cultural lessons. “When the tide is out, the table is set” is a traditional saying that speaks to the shore’s bounty: clams, mussels, sea urchins, Dungeness crabs, sea cucumbers, hard-shelled chitons, octopi and snails. Researchers suspect some or all of the animals may contain toxins. In Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula region, two thirds of residents who collect clams live in low- to medium-income households.
No Safe Beaches Phytoplankton, commonly referred to as algae, are a keystone food source for countless marine creatures, from clams to baleen whales. The single-celled organisms have evolved into a riotous array of species, colors and shapes. Given the right combination of light, heat and micronutrients—from natural sources such as glaciers as well as agricultural and sewage runoff—algae can grow out of control, or “bloom.
Potentially lethal algae are steadily drifting northward along Alaska’s largely unmonitored coastline, with only a handful of unsung sentinels like Payton standing in its way. Although media reports about HABs usually focus on problems in U.S. West, East and Gulf Coast regions, the state with the worst algal blooms, NOAA’s Kibler says, is Alaska.
The state’s position is not good enough for Seldovians, either, who have devoted time and resources “trying to make sure that what we had as children is here for our children and our grandchildren,” says Michael Opheim, Payton’s uncle. As head of environmental work for the Seldovia Village Tribe, he is also Payton’s boss.
I met Wright inside the white hallways of Anchorage’s Department of Environmental Conservation. We walked into a state-funded lab escorted by its director, Patryce McKinney; it is the only facility in Alaska that is federally approved to test shellfish for human consumption, which it does for the oyster and geoduck industries. Wright greeted a technician who had just injected three mice with a cooked slurry of oyster flesh and was waiting to see if they would die.
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