Where the Rivers Run Pink
Non-native pink salmon have swarmed Norway’s rivers, prompting a relentless—and potentially fruitless—fight to beat back the invaders.
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The Grense Jakobselv River flows from northwestern Russia to the Barents Sea. For 35 of its 45 kilometers, the river also serves as the border between Russia and Norway. This means fishing the Grense Jakobselv can be fraught. Where the river narrows, a Norwegian angler might accidentally tangle a hook in the heather on the Russian side. Crossing the border to untangle the line is forbidden, but so is depositing a foreign object on Russian soil. Interacting with a Russian soldier guarding the border is also banned. This makes untangling a line nearly impossible. An angler who steps into Russia is likely to be caught on security cameras and fined €1,000. The cameras, hidden in the woodland, catch other drifters, too—moose, eagles, foxes—but they are free to come and go. So are the fish that frequent these waters.
To salmonids swimming from the ocean, the Grense Jakobselv is not a border but an invitation. With clean, free-flowing water, plenty of fly larvae to eat, and loose gravel for nesting, laying eggs, and broadcasting sperm, the river is classic salmonid habitat.
Traditionally, Norwegians have fished the Grense Jakobselv for Atlantic salmon, an iconic species in northern Europe. Over 10,000 years ago, this piscine Pied Piper coaxed some of Europe’s earliest inhabitants north from river to river, promising protein and power—irresistible lures as the climate changed and ecological boundaries shifted. Most populations of Atlantic salmon have nearly vanished across the fish’s southern range, from Spain to the southern Baltic states. They retain a hold in the north, especially here in Finnmark, Norway’s most northeasterly county, through which the Grense Jakobselv flows.
On a mid-July day in 2023, salmon have yet to arrive for the season. Fisheries biologist Jenny Jensen and graduate student Lauri Ryynänen wade the river at border marker 342, collecting sand, grit, pebbles, teeny spineless beasts, and baby fish to record the Grense Jakobselv’s ecological baseline for Norway’s Institute of Marine Research. The river’s flow is lower than usual for this time of year, with water so clear it looks like dancing sunlight. On the bank, two Norwegian soldiers chat with a police escort, monitoring our group to ensure we stay in Norway.
Even with the military presence, the river is serene. But just a few kilometers away, a crowd of relative newcomers hunkers in an estuary, waiting to invade: non-native pink salmon, introduced decades earlier by the former Soviet Union. When rain or some other cue compels the pinks upriver to spawn, thousands of them will flood the Grense Jakobselv, changing the river and, perhaps, the people who fish. Jensen and Ryynänen are here to document some of those changes.
Though Russia and Norway jointly manage the river, only Norway worries about the Grense Jakobselv’s pink salmon. Native to the Pacific Ocean, pink salmon arrived in the Barents, a sea in the Arctic Ocean that the two countries border, via a Soviet Union–era Russian hatchery program launched in 1956 to create a new regional food source. The hatcheries succeeded spectacularly: pink salmon slopped through Russian waters and into Norwegian ones and, in recent years, have surged with a boost from climate change. In 2021, the Norwegian Environment Agency pronounced the invasion a likely ecological catastrophe for the country’s precious Atlantic salmon, whose numbers there had already dropped 50 percent since the 1980s due to habitat destruction, salmon farming, and climate change.
To save Atlantic salmon, the agency initiated a program to kill thousands of uninvited pink salmon and control their influx into Norway’s rivers. Russia’s government, on the other hand, is fine with the status quo, so Norway’s efforts are barred from the Grense Jakobselv. This makes the shared river a perfect site for a cross-border environmental experiment. And in a changing climate that seems to favor non-native pink salmon over struggling Atlantic salmon, it may also make the Grense Jakobselv a portal for viewing the future; a place to glimpse some of the ways that life in this corner of the world will change as more of its rivers run pink.
Head southeast from the Grense Jakobselv estuary and you’ll find yourself on Russia’s Kola Peninsula, an arm of land enfolding the nearly landlocked White Sea, which empties into the Arctic Ocean. It was here that Russia’s previous incarnation—the Soviet Union—first embarked on its pink salmon rumpus with stock from Russia’s Pacific coast. After a few decades of experimentation, in 1985 Soviet scientists produced a promising variety of pink.
As in Norway, in Kola the rivers are traditionally Atlantic salmon habitat. But overfishing in the 19th and early 20th centuries eroded many of Kola’s Atlantic salmon populations. Habitat destruction, poaching, and flawed domestic fishing policies during the Soviet era whittled them down still more. The introduced pinks, though, thrived in the White Sea. Russian scientists reasoned that since pink salmon and Atlantic salmon prefer different spawning grounds at different times, the newcomers were unlikely to compete with the struggling native fish.
By the time Kola’s hatcheries closed in the late 1990s, pinks had been spreading for generations. Stray pink salmon from the Kola made it to Norway’s easternmost fjord, Varangerfjord, as early as 1960, eventually wandering up most of its rivers, including the Grense Jakobselv. But long before coordinated, widespread monitoring, fish biologist Rune Muladal started paying attention.
Muladal first saw pinks by the thousands on the Kola Peninsula in 1995 while working on his master’s degree on Atlantic salmon parasites. When he returned two years later, he says, the pinks had doubled their population. Muladal remembers Russian scientists telling him that it was just a matter of time before the pinks already at home in the White and Barents Seas established themselves in Norway. Out of curiosity, Muladal began tracking pinks in Varangerfjord as a sort of unpaid hobby. In 1999, he noted that their populations had risen in the Grense Jakobselv, Karpelva, Vestre Jakobselv, and other rivers. And the pink populations continued to rise in the White Sea, likely hitting the millions in 2015. Two years later, populations began to skyrocket in Norway, too, shaking the country out of complacency. Varangerfjord rivers that might have had eight pinks in 2015 recorded thousands in 2017, and the salmon also found their way to most other Norwegian rivers. That year, Norwegian commercial fishermen and anglers reportedly caught 6,289 pinks.
The best explanation for the pink population boom was a warmer ocean, courtesy of climate change, which resulted in more prey for young pinks to eat. With a two-year life cycle, pinks mostly spawn in odd years in Norway, and more fish begat more fish. In 2019, fishermen caught 13,925. By 2021, fishermen in the White Sea area caught a record number of pinks, heralding yet more increases in Norway.
Hatchery-produced pinks in the Pacific distress other salmon species. Whether the same holds true for Atlantic salmon is still unknown, but for the Norwegian government, the better part of valor was action. The Norwegian Environment Agency suggested a plan to stop migrating pinks, prioritizing rivers closest to Russia—especially those in Finnmark county—and dedicating US $90,000 for implementation. With a population of around 75,000 in an area over twice the size of New Jersey, the county has over 50 rivers with enough fish for anglers. In 2021, local hunting and fishing associations erected traps in 19 of those rivers, and caught and killed 111,803 invaders. In 2023, the federal agency invested $5-million in the fight, and local associations placed barriers in 13 more rivers in the county. They hoped their efforts would save native fish, especially what one government official calls Norway’s panda bear: Atlantic salmon, a species intensely beloved and decidedly vulnerable, even though more slippery than cuddly.
But the Atlantic salmon’s plight began long before the pink tsunami. Norway is also home to a thriving Atlantic salmon–farming industry, where fish are raised in net pens at sea. Farmed fish often escape and interbreed with wild fish, which compromises their fitness, spreads disease, and contributes to long-term declines. In fact, after decades of study, many Norwegian fisheries biologists point to fish farms as a major risk for Atlantic salmon.
To fight that problem, though, the Norwegian government would have to take aim at an enormous industry that supplies half of the 2.7 million metric tonnes of farmed Atlantics to the global market. Development along rivers is another problem with money at stake. And actively confronting the biggest threat of all—climate change—could curtail Norway’s multi-billion-dollar fossil fuel industry, an industry reliably lining the government’s coffers since the early 1970s. Prioritizing wild native fish over industries like these is expensive, impractical, and unpopular with many people. Positioning non-native pink salmon as the primary enemy, on the other hand, is a comparative bargain—and some Norwegians put them in the crosshairs with enthusiasm.
As photographer Kat Pyne and I travel along Varangerfjord, the landscape veers from old-growth birch and pine trees along the Grense Jakobselv River to giant stones that erupt from the earth near Hamningberg, an abandoned fishing village frozen in time. A freeway full of RVs, reindeer, cyclists, and roller skiers winds between the fjord’s towns like a sash someone has thrown.
It feels as if we’re in a magical realm where the sun never sets, the hills roll, the rivers rollick, the sea skips, and unseen forces animate an ancient landscape. To the Samí people, the Indigenous people of northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia, nature is magical: it’s both luohtu and luondu, physical and metaphysical, where beings and spirits call the landscape home. With little industry, you can feel the pulse of life here: the sweet smell of black crowberries crunching underfoot, salmon ascending the rivers, white-tailed eagles patrolling the skies, moose traipsing across meadows, brown bears foraging in the company of clouds, rocks, trees, and water.
We first encounter pink salmon on the Neiden River, a 90-kilometer drive west of the Grense Jakobselv and the Russian border. Just steps away from the freeway, a concrete fish ladder corrals the pinks into wooden troughs. Hired locals wielding mini-clubs and knives efficiently and humanely dispatch 450 per hour. In the Pacific, pinks caught commercially average two kilograms. The chubby ones here top three kilograms. Seasonal workers haul them away on ice in blue plastic barrels to a processing plant, where they will be stripped of roe, filleted, and ground in an attempt to not waste food. Still, the fish keep coming.
We drive north to the other side of Varangerfjord from Neiden to meet Eirik Frøiland, a fisheries adviser for the county government. Frøiland, an angler, admires how locals have adapted fish traps to each of the different streamscapes—minding fierce spring melts that can rip out infrastructure, or improvising ways to avoid trampling riverbank vegetation. “In every river, there are different challenges and different approaches,” Frøiland says. “That’s why I like these guys; they care about the fish and the rivers.”
At the Skallelv River, Frøiland shows us a fish weir made by inmates at a local prison. Gulls wheel overhead and whimbrels holler from power lines as we survey the trap and the muddied wooden planks the team has placed along the riverbank to protect it from erosion. In 2021, the team netted over 5,000 pink salmon and at least 1,000 escaped. In 2023, they will trap over 12,000 pinks in the weir with some escapees. The team also catches 949 native salmonids, including 306 Atlantic salmon, and releases them all to spawn upriver.
At another river—the Vestre Jakobselv, 50 kilometers from the Skallelv—an American company built and installed a weir, but locals added a sophisticated contraption that one visiting scientist calls “Willy’s Pink-o-matic 3000.” Its namesake is Willy Pedersen, a 30-something-year-old Samí fisherman who leads a small team from the local hunting and fishing association. At the first of a series of pools, the team placed a metal grate across the river to block the pinks and funnel them into a cage, where an underwater camera watches the fish, sharing the feed through Norway’s public television broadcaster. Any caught Atlantic salmon are released above the trap. From the cage, the pinks rise in a makeshift elevator to a DIY salmon cannon made of black plastic pipe that snakes through the trees and plops its passengers into yellow plastic tubs at the end of a short gravel road, where a company will pick them up for delivery to a fish plant. The elevated salmon cannon also protects the integrity of the riverbank and the surrounding brush, a crayon box full of colors: whites, greens, pinks, blues, browns, and golds of birch trees, vetch, juniper, goldenrod, fireweed, and yarrow.
Pederson tells me that when he caught his first pink at 12 years old, he had no idea what it was. “I’ve been fishing this river all my life,” he says. “The people fish the Vestre Jakobselv for food, but it’s more than that—we have culture here. If the Samí people stop harvesting here, they will lose their connection to the language, the names, the river, the ways to fish, the ways to talk about nature. That vanishes if you don’t use them all the time.”
Although Pedersen considers the pink tide to be a “radical change,” it’s unlikely to compel him, or anyone else I meet, to stop fishing. In Finnmark—and maybe all of Norway—babies seem to be born wearing waders and holding fishing rods. At six months, they’re probably rolling their own cigarettes and tying flies. Despite the tooth-and-nail fight against the pinks, at some point Norwegians will probably be forced to accept them.
I ask the same questions of random locals I meet while buying coffee at a cafe, sharing a kitchen at a hostel, replacing power cords at an electronics store: Have you ever caught a pink salmon? Have you ever eaten one? The answer to both varies depending on geography, which perhaps reflects the timing of the invading salmon’s arrival and how much time locals have had to grow accustomed to them. A vacationing older Norwegian from the south saw a pink for the first time in 2023 in his local river. He has yet to eat one. A young Varangerfjord fisherman tells me he’s salted and smoked around 40 kilograms of pinks he caught fresh from the sea in the past few weeks. “They’re very good,” he says.
Some people are visibly disgusted when I bring up the fish. At a Thai restaurant in Vestre Jakobselv one evening, our server, Anja, recounts helping haul dead pinks off the river as part of a volunteer cleanup crew. Genteel Atlantic salmon spawn in their natal rivers, but they don’t leave putrid corpses everywhere, and some return to the ocean, spawning more than once before dying. Pinks, on the other hand, have one shot. Thousands or millions of them transform rivers into copulatory carnivals even as they disintegrate from the long journey that ends with death. “They have holes in their sides,” Anja says, gesturing toward her waist and grimacing. “And they’re still alive!”
At a table next to us, a group of older men feasts on king crab—an invasive animal Russia introduced into the Barents Sea. Once reviled, it has become the cash crab of Norwegian fisheries, so lucrative that it’s now regulated. The men, most of them anglers, have a laptop open to watch footage from an underwater camera trained on the Vestre Jakobselv’s fish trap where pink salmon wriggle and waggle inside the cage. They make room for us at the table to chat. One of the men, an angler named Johnny Nordgård, offers to take us fly fishing.
The next morning, on the banks of the river, Nordgård rolls a cigarette before casting with a homemade fly of moose hair and feathers. As he fishes, the 64-year-old chats about growing up 440 kilometers west of Varangerfjord, on the Alta River, still legendary for its healthy Atlantic salmon run. Nordgård’s father taught him to fish when he was around five. The first Atlantic salmon he caught was 11 kilograms, Nordgård says, as he pantomimes a big struggle. A fish story? Maybe, but he was only eight years old at the time.
The fish are not biting. Mosquitoes and mayflies lift from the brush as we tromp along the river then drive to a bluff on the opposite bank. Below us, two fly fishers whip their slender poles in arcs, again and again and again. It strikes me that fishing is the practice of being present—not worrying about the past or the future. Perhaps it’s the act of fishing itself, rather than the species one catches, that binds people to the present: to their families, to their communities, and to their rivers. It’s nice to catch a fish, but it’s just as nice to be out fishing.
One evening at our cabin near the Vestre Jakobselv, a group of Thai and Norwegian fly fishing buddies invites us to join them for dinner around a firepit. Laid out on a table are king crab (bought), a filleted native brown trout, and sashimi made from pink salmon that one of the Thai fishers caught just a couple of hours earlier. “They give a good fight,” says one of the friends, Morten Blom, waving his arms as if reeling in a strong fish. For Blom, who teaches fly fishing to war veterans with PTSD, a worthy quarry probably matters most. Plus, he adds, pinks “taste good.”
Anyone who has fished for food will tell you that fish taste exquisite when their last shiver of death occurs closest to dinner time. It’s no different here. When I bite into the sashimi, the flesh is silky and the taste is like the feel of a cool rain shower on hot, grimy skin.
In a river near my home in British Columbia, I once snorkeled downstream to the Pacific Ocean as thousands of pink salmon wriggled upstream to spawn. They never touched me, but I could feel the percussive energy from their rhythmic movements, making the water literally vibrate with life. Most were likely from hatcheries.
Russia, the United States, and Canada all have hatcheries that release high volumes of pinks into the Pacific Ocean. Although pink salmon are native to these waters, scientists have found that the hatchery fish outcompete their wild counterparts, including bigger species like chinook and sockeye, while also causing trouble for other marine life like seabirds. Whether Russian-hatchery pink descendants are outcompeting Atlantic salmon in Norway is as yet unproven, as are the fish’s impacts on ecosystems generally. Scientists in Norway have embarked on close to 40 different pink salmon projects to begin to answer those questions.
To get a sense of some of that work, we meet up with Paul Aspholm, a research scientist at the Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research. He’s a bear of a man, with kind hazel eyes and a tendency to pause while chatting and point out a short-eared owl. At a river called Karpelva, we shimmy into wetsuits and follow as he snorkels from the estuary upstream to a fish trap. The water is shallow, but we have to grab onto rocks to make progress against a strong current. After the water deepens and warms to 20 ˚C, pink salmon envelop us, bump us, and whirl around and around. A nearby trap will restrict most of their spawning, but some will escape upstream and others may simply spawn in the estuary, as they do in their native range. Thousands of females lay thousands of eggs, and though only a fraction survive to adulthood, Norway’s rivers will never cease cradling pink salmon. Traps may stem the pink tide, but pinks have already altered and will continue altering Finnmark’s habitat, and Aspholm is among the scientists trying to figure out how.
Looking at the genetics of fish caught in 2019 and 2021—plus a few collected from 2015 and 2017—Aspholm knows that in Varangerfjord, especially at the Neiden River, pinks are returning to the streams where they hatched, a behavior called “homing.” More eggs successfully hatching here means more pinks returning to more Norwegian rivers—and beyond—in the future.
Snorkeling below the surface, Aspholm has also witnessed pink salmon behaving much more aggressively than they do in their native habitat, which may affect the system over time.
When the water is low, at a depth of half a meter or less, the pinks act like a gaggle of cornered geese and start snapping. “They are insane compared with Atlantic salmon and brown trout,” Aspholm says. Males charge and bite other fish; females protecting their eggs charge and bite anything, including Aspholm. He’s seen native fish with open wounds from bites, and says it appears that Atlantic salmon are afraid of pinks. Fear plays a big role in ecology, sometimes instigating maladaptive behaviors. In this case, it might even cause native fish to avoid ideal habitat.
When the water is deeper—say, three meters—pink salmon tend to be calmer, simply forming an undulating wall of life. Their transformation from saltwater fish to their freshwater morph is evident after about three days. After 10 days, the drive to spawn becomes irresistible. Females dig redds—shallow holes to nest thousands of eggs—and other holes slightly upstream so sediment will flow and settle over the nest. The result looks like potholed roads, or, as Aspholm describes it, like farmers’ fields dug up by wild boars. Aspholm has noted that a pink can move a two-kilogram stone in the river—a feat that an Atlantic salmon couldn’t hope to accomplish unless it weighed something like 20 kilograms.
This has implications for freshwater pearl mussels—Margaritifera margaritifera—one of the most endangered taxa in the world. These shellfish normally tuck deep into crevices between rocks. When those rocks are upended, the mussels become ready meals for predators, including invasive American mink.
Above the trap, we hover over algae-covered cobbles. Aspholm and a research partner glide along with knives and bags at their waists looking for mussels. Aspholm holds up one specimen and we surface briefly. “This is probably 200 years old. It was around during the Napoleonic Wars,” he says, before dipping back under to find a safe spot for the invertebrate. Europeans once scoured these rivers for pearls—typically found at a rate of one per 3,000 mussels—to make jewelry for the wealthy. The pearls encrusting most European crown jewels show that the mussels’ decline started long before the pinks’ arrival here. Mussel larvae depend on Atlantic salmon and brown trout, maturing on the fish’s gills for nine to 11 months before dropping to the riverbed as tiny mussels. And with fewer native fish around, they are dwindling even more. We count just 58 mussels on the bottom.
But while pinks may harm mussels, their impact on the other end of the food chain could be more beneficial. After our snorkeling trip, Aspholm takes us to the estuary of Botnelva River, five kilometers from the Karpelva, where we wade into ankle-deep water. No trap cuts across the Botnelva, and the pink salmon amass like troops waiting for a signal to charge. Once they spawn and die, scavenging animals will find them. On the west coast of North America, salmon-spawning season is a feast for bears. With those extra calories, coastal brown bears grow to epic proportions compared with their inland cousins.
Norway’s few brown bears all live in Finnmark, where they roam the forests and wetlands of the 100-kilometer-long Pasvik Valley, a greenbelt and nature reserve that Norway shares with Russia, close to where both countries meet with Finland. Right now, the handful of bears counted in the last survey—10 females and 12 males—binge on berries, shoots, roots, and some moose. And they’re smaller than salmon-eating bears. “The hypothesis is that they’ll be getting fatty oils from fish so will grow bigger” as more and more pinks surge inland, Aspholm explains, standing in the creek’s rocky mouth.
Just then, a male pink salmon shoots past us at a ferocious speed, through water so low his hump clears the surface, a creamy sliver of muscle, a Formula One car screaming around a track strewn with rocky obstacles. We laugh, surprised but not surprised that the fish has chosen this moment to streak by like a cosmic sign. Whatever the outcome, change has already arrived.
Fear of change can push people into a state of reverie for what once was: nostalgia is a powerful emotion, an ache and longing that can be oddly tinged with pleasure. It feels good to remember good times, when the “right” fish—the beloved fish of generations past—were plentiful. But as documentary filmmaker Ken Burns has suggested, nostalgia is also a strategic oversimplification of the past. It’s easier to cast pink salmon as an enemy of Atlantic salmon (and sea trout and Arctic char and freshwater mussels) than it is to tackle the machinery of the economic and energy systems that have spurred Atlantic salmon declines.
Back in Grense Jakobselv near the Russian border, I meet up with Kathy Dunlop to try to further understand the changes that, at this point, seem all but inevitable. Standing in the river in chest waders and insulated boots, Dunlop, a marine ecologist with the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research, seems painted into a tableau of blues and grays. The sky is slate, the river steel, and the rocks some variation of the two, which has the effect of transforming the greenery across the river in Russia into a vibrant oasis.
Dunlop and her colleague Hallvard Jensen are visiting each site Jenny Jensen and Lauri Ryynänen sampled three weeks earlier, when I first arrived. By this time of year, in early August, the pinks have finally turned up in the river in numbers, their humps gracefully cutting the water’s surface. I find myself in awe of them, marveling over how they came to be, what natural forces have propelled them, how human forces have kept them coming, how traps and nets stop them. I marvel over how they wriggle and leap, fight and die.
Dunlop also marvels at the influx of pinks. A native of Scotland, Dunlop arrived in Norway during that big pink salmon year, 2017. “I had never heard about [pink salmon] here before,” she says. “And the more I thought about it, I had so many questions.” The past few years have been a quest to find answers about basic pink salmon behaviors in Norwegian rivers and how their eggs and dead bodies might be changing the broader ecosystem of the region’s rivers and forests.
So Dunlop and Hallvard Jensen measure everything they possibly can: how many fish there are, how much the fish weigh, and how their arrival may affect everything from riparian vegetation to local wildlife. While they collect data on land, other scientists snorkel in the river. We bump along the dirt road, passing fishing holes named Storøya, Svaberghåln, Bulderhåln, and many others identified with wooden signs, as well as an angler on foot and another pushing a bicycle.
At each stop, scientists tie wildlife cameras to birches that fill the air with the treacly scent of sap. They sample water, weigh dead pinks, take tissue samples. At one spot, Dunlop dangles a dead, eyeless pink salmon from a scale: 1.885 kilograms. The fish’s tarnished silvery and lilac hues bleed into each other, with dabs of white shining around its mouth and underside. Slashes of sun-colored fungus cling to the dorsal fin and to the fish’s belly in a line from pectoral fin to tail. This fish has dematerialized as if under the enchantment of some mystical force.
The answers are far from definitive but offer clues about a pink-colored future. Just as pink salmon may someday benefit brown bears, they’re already providing a bounty for many other animals and plants. Dunlop and her colleagues have documented Eurasian magpies, hooded crows, ravens, herring gulls, redwings, and mergansers scavenging pink salmon carcasses. They found that red foxes carried away more dead fish than any other observed species, likely gifting marine fertilizer to the trees, shrubs, and flowers a distance from rivers. The motion-activated cameras meticulously placed along the Grense Jakobselv, however, will yield nothing useful: so many pink salmon cruised upstream in 2023 (despite Norwegians catching 350,000 of them), they triggered the cameras and ran down the batteries. But a 2024 paper reports that the white-tailed eagle is the primary predator-scavenger, scattering large amounts of dead and dying pinks—aquatic compost for heather, birches, and willows—along the riverbank.
In some waterways, scientists think pink salmon might recreate river bottom habitat lost as Atlantic salmon have declined. Rune Muladal and another fish biologist, Gregor Wierzbinski, snorkel in the Grense Jakobselv to count fish and in the process swim over hundreds of evenly spaced redds, a pattern they see in other rivers. In the absence of a healthy Atlantic salmon population, a river bottom can become like concrete. “What we’ve seen in such places, it’s almost a dead zone,” says Wierzbinski. But after pinks come to these locations, he and Muladal have found that the salmons’ strong digging skills churn up river bottoms in ways that benefit other spawning native fish and juveniles. “You come in to the same spot, and suddenly it’s crazy,” Wierzbinski says. “Juveniles coming because they have suddenly a whole new habitat.”
When it comes to pink salmon, “I’m sure there are risks,” says Dunlop. “I think that we just don’t know which are the biggest risks, and they will vary by river or area.” It could end up being that pinks are a net benefit for big rivers with flat, mucky bottoms but a net negative for the small, rocky rivers, like the Karpelva with its mussel-friendly crevices. One thing is clear already: pull on one thread in the web of life, and the effects will range from trivial to massive. Throw in climate change and the web twists even more, in ways hard to parse just yet.
As we chat on the bank of the Grense Jakobselv, five moose and a fox erupt in a clearing across the river in Russia, a white-tailed eagle hovering above them all—a reminder that they can come and go, even though we cannot. Like them, pink salmon don’t know borders or countries. They don’t break rules; they simply seek life. Their strange abundance reminds me that this is only the beginning—it’s not just pink salmon and it’s not just Varangerfjord. Change is the crossing of all kinds of borders: comfort zones, belief systems, expectations. In some ways, we have already crossed a border, and we all have an undiscovered country to face.
That night, we camp next to the Grense Jakobselv estuary, by border marker 393, on a carpet of crowberries—a native plant that has crept over the landscape, a potential winner in a warming climate, much like non-native pink salmon appearing to succeed in warmer seas and rivers. The crushed berries smell divine, and being ensconced atop them in a one-person tent feels ambrosial, as if I’ve been baked into a tart. Somehow, even in the embrace of so much change, I don’t feel as if I’m inside a catastrophe.
This story was made possible by the Fund for Environmental Journalism (FEJ), a grant-making program of the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ).