Josh Sawlsville, the manager of the operation at the time, meets me at the hatchery office. These tall trees provide protection from the raging conditions at sea, allowing the fluty song of a kinglet, a tiny songbird with a big voice, to fill the air from a bough high above my head. The tide is too low for the skipper to bring the boat through the narrow channel that leads to the lagoon, so she drops me on a nearby beach where I climb five flights of old wooden stairs up a rocky cliff into a forest of towering spruce that surrounds the facility. I want to put into perspective mounting scientific evidence that these industrially produced fish are flooding marine ecosystems where they can impact everything from plankton to whales. This practice is known sometimes as salmon ranching, and seafood marketers often label hatchery fish as “wild caught.” My goal is to get a feel for the scope of the industry, which is mostly run by NGOs funded by the sale of hatchery fish. But hatcheries take advantage of a salmon’s innate homing instinct, unleashing juvenile fish to feed and complete the growing process at sea, after which they’ll return to the waterbody near the hatchery to provide fish for commercial and recreational harvests. Fish farms, which are illegal in Alaska, raise salmon until they’re marketable size.
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