2,000-Year-Old Salmon DNA Reveals Secret to Sustainable Fisheries

Genomic analysis of ancient chum salmon bones and cultural knowledge from the Tsleil-Waututh Nation suggest that people in the Pacific Northwest managed fisheries for thousands of years by harvesting males and releasing females.

Written byDan Robitzski

| 5 min read

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Small, circular bones individually labeled and packaged in plastic bags

Ancient chum salmon (Oncorhynchus keta) bones collected from ancient fisheries

Image credit:HUA ZHANG

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A team of scientists partnering with the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, one of the Coast Salish peoples that have inhabited the northwest coast of North America for millennia, has uncovered how local Indigenous communities managed salmon fisheries for thousands of years without exhausting them. Based on ethnographic surveys and genetic data from ancient remains: the key was that fishers harvested mostly males, the researchers report November 10 in Scientific Reports.

“Without the DNA stuff, we wouldn’t be able to trace the history of this Indigenous practice,” says Simon Fraser University archaeologist and lead study author Thomas Royle. “And without the Indigenous knowledge, if we just discovered a bunch of male salmon, we wouldn’t have known what happened.”

“These types of collaborations are the future of ecological studies and require an investment of time and an openness to new ways of seeing the world around us,” Lia Chalifour, a salmon ecology and conservation ...

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Meet the Author

Dan Robitzski
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Dan is an award-winning journalist based in Los Angeles who joined The Scientist as a reporter and editor in 2021. Ironically, Dan’s undergraduate degree and brief career in neuroscience inspired him to write about research rather than conduct it, culminating in him earning a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University in 2017. In 2018, an Undark feature Dan and colleagues began at NYU on a questionable drug approval decision at the FDA won first place in the student category of the Association of Health Care Journalists' Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism. Now, Dan writes and edits stories on all aspects of the life sciences for the online news desk, and he oversees the “The Literature” and “Modus Operandi” sections of the monthly TS Digest and quarterly print magazine. Read more of his work at danrobitzski.com.
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