Today’s post was written by Gina Kim Perry, Archivist in Digitization Archival Services at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland.
As part of the Alaska Digitization Project, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) recently digitized the series, Auke Bay Fisheries Laboratory Salmon Project Research Data, 1882-1970 (covers 1882-1972), consisting of 116,592 digital files in 2,373 file units (National Archives Identifier 95115924). You can now search through these file units and view the images in the NARA Catalog, as well as download PDF files containing all the images from individual file units.
Tuesday’s post, “Auke Bay Laboratory Part 1. Fishing for Answers: Alaskan Salmon Research,” covered historical and general information about this series. In today’s post, we showcase select items from the wide variety of materials found in the series that include not only loose and bound textual records, but also photographic materials and artifacts.
The series contains a vast amount of salmon research data from various districts in Alaska. Among them is the following page that summarizes the first 70 years of Karluk River red salmon catch from the beginning of the canning industry in 1882 to 1952.
The same catch data up to 1937 are also presented in the following bar graph, from which we can easily observe not only the year-to-year fluctuations but also a gradual decline in the Karluk River salmon catch over those years. Thus, it appears that current concern about declining Alaskan salmon populations has its roots going as far back as the early 1900s.
This series documents the evolution of 90 years’ worth of research carried out by several generations of scientists working in the field and laboratories and keeping detailed records of their work, from handwritten data sheets and field diaries early in the last century to IBM printouts in the 1960s. For example, fish biologists – traveling to remote areas of Alaska to conduct experiments and collect data to gain a better understanding of the ebb and flow of the salmon populations – were required to keep a daily log of their activities, as instructed in detail in the following 1949 field diary.
To collect data on the lifecycle of salmon by tracking their movement from fresh lakes and rivers to the ocean and back again, fish biologists came up with a system of tagging salmon and monitoring their movement and return. Among the types of tags used were plastic and metal tags as shown below.
Here is a page from a field diary describing several tagging areas, including a drawing of one area.
The success of tagging studies required collecting fish tags from various sources, including salmon caught by canneries and casual fishermen, as shown by the following fliers advertising a monetary reward for turning in plastic and metal fish tags.
Here are a few samples of the tags retrieved in 1947 and 1955, along with information about the dates and places where they were found, and even a dried fin attached to one tag.
Fish biologists also kept detailed records of the age, sex, length, girth, and weight of the salmon population, which were collected year after year from various districts in Alaska. The drawing below shows the proper way to measure salmon length and girth, and the photograph below shows two fish being measured in the field.
The series also contains extensive data and information relating to salmon scales, which fish biologists collected and used to determine the age of the annual adult salmon population. The photograph below shows a salmon scale impression (created when a scale is compressed between glass slides), revealing the growth rings that can be read by fish biologists under a microscope to determine the salmon’s age.
Here are four additional photographs showing red salmon scales labeled with the year and class.
Although most of the materials in the series are related to salmon research, there are also certain items not directly fish-related that might be of interest to researchers in other fields of study. One such surprising discovery was finding 75 dried plant specimens collected mostly from the Bare Lake and Karluk weir areas in 1950. Perhaps they would interest botanists studying plants in those areas. Below are two plant samples identified by their scientific and common names, the first one from the Karluk weir and the second from Bare Lake.
Also in the series is the following summary sheet listing over 100 birds of Kodiak Island, which was found together with other papers from 1944. It might interest ornithologists and bird enthusiasts to discover whether all these bird species can still be found on Kodiak Island.
Now that the series is readily available in the NARA catalog, we invite the science community and the general public to explore its contents and make new discoveries.