In a land dominated by rock and ice...
There is something very incongruous about this place. There's nobody here.
.. beasts of all sizes thrive against the odds.
He's running, he's running.
But one species seems to have gone missing.
No-one knows where it's gone and no-one knows why.
I'm Jeremy Wade, fisherman and adventurer.
For more than 35 years, I've travelled the globe hunting for monsters...
Look at this beast.
.. but mysteries are still out there.
There's something behind me.
I'm journeying into the unknown to reveal...
Yes!
.. the secrets hidden in these dark waters.
I'm in Alaska,
home of the world's longest Pacific salmon runs.
Five species of Pacific salmon have navigated these waters for millennia.
But one salmon species is in a class of its own.
Bigger and faster than the rest
and famed for their incredible feats of endurance,
king salmon are the power athletes of the salmon world.
The word coming out of Alaska recently
is that the king salmon have gone missing.
Now, salmon are born inland in the rivers.
They then migrate down to the sea,
where they spend a number of years feeding and growing.
Then they return to the river where they were hatched
and they spawn and they carry on the life cycle.
But in the last few years, the kings have not been returning.
So what has happened to them?
The other four species of salmon in Alaska,
chum, pink, coho and sockeye, are doing fine.
So how can just one species of salmon disappear?
Who or what is taking the kings?
I'm starting my investigation on the Kenai River
in the south of Alaska.
Thirty years ago a fisherman landed a king salmon here
that weighed nearly 100lb.
This is the Kenai River.
Now, this used to be the place to come
and catch king salmon on rod and line.
Phenomenal numbers of fish. Also very big fish.
The world record came from here.
But the story is that today they've all but disappeared.
Having said that, there's loads of people here,
almost shoulder-to-shoulder, a rod-length apart, sometimes less.
And I guess they're catching something,
so I'm gonna go and find out what that is.
The Kenai is just a couple of hours' drive from Anchorage
and it's the most heavily fished river in all of Alaska.
- How's your day been? - They come in spurts.
Sometimes you get a bunch, bam, bam, bam, and then nothing.
Do you fish kings as well? Not any more. The fishing's so bad.
So you used to fish? Yes. Yeah. Used to fish the rivers for 'em.
They don't come back like they used to. Right.
So, in its heyday, what was it like?
I caught nine really nice kings in an afternoon.
But now that... that's totally unheard of. Absolutely.
He confirms what I've heard.
This famous salmon river seems to be empty of kings.
But there are other species here.
These fishermen are hauling out sockeye salmon,
which appear to be running strong.
Why have just the kings vanished?
If the problem was an environmental one,
then surely all the salmon species would be affected.
Sockeye salmon are particularly sensitive to any ecological changes.
So I'm hoping the sockeye can shed some light
on the health of this river.
It's a bit of a hybrid technique I'm using here.
I'm using a fly rod and reel, but on the end, I've got some lead
and a leader about four feet long.
Something like that, and then, on the end, quite a heavy, bright fly.
Now, no way can I fly-cast with those leads.
What I'm doing, I'm just swinging it out a short distance.
And the idea is that the leads will just bump on the bottom
and the line gets caught in the mouth.
And then this will slide along
and it'll hook them on the outside of the mouth.
I've never fished the Kenai before
and this is an unfamiliar technique for me,
but it's how most locals catch sockeye here.
Yes!
Surprising, even with the resistance of the rod,
it's making headway against the current.
There it is! Mind... Mind yourself, mind yourself.
And here it is, it's right in here.
Go on.
Wow.
It's strong. It's strong.
There it is.
So, sockeye salmon. The salmon are running.
As an indicator of clean water,
this decent-sized sockeye looks bright,
clear-eyed and bursting with energy,
which suggests water quality isn't the problem.
So could something be killing off the king salmon in large numbers?
One predator immediately springs to mind.
A thousand pounds of aggression with an insatiable appetite,
the brown bear is a salmon-eating machine.
I travel across the Cook Inlet
to see if I can find any evidence of bears over-indulging on king salmon.
I meet up with Matthias Breiter, an expert in bear behaviour.
He's come face to face with bears many times
in his 30 years of research, and he's not taking any chances.
That's a marine flare, so doesn't matter whether it gets wet.
And you pull it, and it shoots out a flame
about this long, smokes a lot, hisses, and it lasts about seven minutes.
And we've used it on bears
when they try to get into food caches,
and I've always been able to drive off bears easily with it. Right.
So that I don't wave my arms too much, can I put bug spray on my face? Yeah, that's fine.
This place is full of bears and they're all here for the salmon.
One, two, three, four, five. That's five over at that point.
So, this is a bay where a river meets the sea,
and at the moment it's round about high tide
and the tide is gonna start going out.
When that happens, there's gonna be,
erm, a number of small channels,
and any salmon that are here are likely to get stranded.
So that is what the bears are waiting for.
Bears need to eat up to 30 salmon a day
if they're to bulk up enough to survive through the winter.
He's running. This one's running, he's running,
it's running, it's running. Fishing has started, I think.
I'm so focused on the action in front of me
that I don't see what's coming from behind.
I'm in Alaska, in bear country.
I'm trying to find the famous king salmon,
but I'm caught off guard by a male brown bear.
There's a bear coming behind us..
They'll pretend to be not interested in us
and try to get closer and closer.
He's actually a good boy, walking around us.
So it's fishing time, yeah? Yeah.
Thankfully, the bears are far more interested in the fish than us...
..so we move closer to find out what kind of salmon they're feeding on.
It's hard to tell for sure, but they don't look big enough to be kings.
Do they go for kings if they're available?
Well, I'm sure they would
because the fat content is even higher. I've never seen it.
They spawn in water that is just simply
too deep for the bears to fish successfully.
In anything deeper than two feet, the bears really can't get the fish.
Yes. With kings, they tend to hug the bottom of the deep water,
and that's sort of beyond... Yeah. .. what the bears can fish in.
Yeah. So, if the bears get kings,
they are spawned-out ones that are dying. Right.
So that's not going to impact the spawning, then.
Of all that I've seen, I would say
that king salmon is the least impacted fish species.
With the kings swimming in water that's too deep to reach,
the bears can't be blamed for their disappearance.
But another predator has been hunting king salmon in Alaska
People.
I head into the heart of the state to the mighty Yukon River,
where indigenous people have been fishing for kings for 8,000 years.
They'll know king salmon better than anyone,
and they will feel the salmon's loss the hardest.
I land in Galena,
a small, remote community where the Yukon River
is an important source of food - in particular, king salmon.
Vehicles parked up. I'm not seeing any other vehicles on the road.
I haven't actually seen a person, either,
which is a bit odd, but I have been to other places
in the world where people do live...
a similar kind of subsistence lifestyle.
And what's going on is a lot of those people, they...
A lot of the time, they are not in the population centre.
They are out. They're on the land or they're on the water.
I'm lucky to find a ride upriver.
I'm guessing everyone is out fishing,
taking advantage of the salmon runs and stocking up for the winter.
But the river looks deserted.
It should be lined with fishing camps at this time of year.
I stop at a small village called Ruby
to see if there are any fishermen to speak with.
Hello.
People in the village have told me to talk to Billy McCarthy,
and he's down on his boat at the moment.
I believe this is him here.
Hello. Hey!
Billy is a native elder who has lived here all his life.
Nice meeting you.
I can remember as a young kid that there were so many fish.
Every fish camp along the river had racks of fish
and there was never a shortage.
Ruby depends very much on the king salmon. Right.
If the king salmon are not here, what happens to the village? What happens to the people?
Well, of course there's all sorts of fish out there...
.. but to me, our main food is the king salmon.
They're gonna have a tough time.
It's a serious situation.
Subsistence fishermen only take what they need to feed their families,
which should protect their precious resource for future generations.
If the subsistence fishermen are not catching king salmon here
and if the bears are not eating them, what else could be wiping them out?
Morning. You started to pull 'em in.
- You got something in there? - Yeah. Yeah? Yeah.
Is this, sort of, a normal catch for a night?
This is a very normal catch for this time of year.
These are predominantly chum.
You'll dry some of that, you'll smoke some of that... Yeah, yeah.
I will go and cut some right now if you'd like to see.
Jake tells me he is originally from Russia
and has been fishing this same spot on the Yukon
every day for the past 24 years.
What is the story right now with the king salmon?
Something is impeding them.
The fish are much smaller and the runs are just smaller.
This is slightly different from what I've been hearing so far.
So, reports that they've gone, that's a bit of an exaggeration.
They're still here, but you say there is a problem.
Yes. Yes, absolutely.
Do you worry, given that trend,
that they might disappear completely? Is that a possibility?
I think it's a distinct possibility.
I ask if there are any predators that might be affecting them.
There are lots of pike in the river. Pike?
How big have you seen them? Somewhat around 50 inches. Right. About 50. OK.
There are stories of giant pike. Of course, pike do terrible things.
You know, I found entire ducks inside, and muskrats.
So there's a little bit of kind of superstitious fear.
Pike are voracious hunters that can grow up to 50lb, possibly bigger.
Their mouths are packed with viciously sharp teeth.
Where pike have been introduced, they've been known
to decimate established salmon populations.
I'm wondering if that is what has happened here.
Pike hunt in slow water,
so I'm staying fairly shallow, at the edge of a tributary.
They are predominantly visual hunters,
so I'll be using that knowledge to try to catch one.
I'm fishing a very simple lure.
It's just like a metal spoon, and that'll just flash and wobble,
so it's sending out light and vibration.
So anything predatory that's in the water's gonna go for this.
That was a hit.
There it is again. There it is again.
I'll net this.
Well, there's definitely pike in here.
But I need to find pike bigger than this
to be any real threat to the kings.
OK.
See if I can go out a bit further.
Yes.
Well, that's something small.
Oops!
Let's get it on the bank.
So, this is a pink salmon or what they call a humpy salmon,
which is the smallest of the five salmon species.
And "humpy", well... Don't really need to explain it, do I?
Big humpback. And all salmon do this thing where
they change colour and shape when they come into the rivers.
But they've got this rather sort of ugly, hooked jaw going on.
And I think, maybe, put it back.
Presence of these pinks and other smaller fish
is maybe not a good sign when it comes to looking for a monster.
Yes, that's something. That's something.
It's off! It's off. See the swirl there.
I saw a flash of colour. It was greenish.
It was about that long. It wasn't a big one, but that was a pike.
Anyway, let's...
see if there's more.
Pike are well-known cannibals,
and if there were giant pike in this area,
they could easily eat these smaller ones.
I cast further out, close to the reeds
to see if a monster could be lurking there.
Yeah. This feels bigger.
Get my feet unstuck and see if I can...
See if I can just...
beach it quickly before it has a chance to get off.
It's still not the giant I'm after.
So, that's a pike of three or four pounds, lots of teeth.
They're not cutting teeth, they're for gripping something.
So, a fish this size
could swallow something almost its own length,
but normally, it's gonna eat something just a few inches long.
So it wouldn't be a serious threat to adult king salmon,
but they might well make inroads into the young salmon
on their way down to the sea.
Young salmon can spend up to two years in fresh water
before heading to the ocean.
During this time, they are easy pickings
for top predators such as pike.
But this is true of all salmon species,
and it's only the kings that are disappearing.
So, this is the Yukon. Here's the mouth, the delta.
Historically, the king salmon, they enter the river mouth,
the delta here, they run upstream, and some of them will be peeling off
on routes going up the side tributaries to spawn.
But some of them will go all the way upstream,
all the way, and end up in Canada.
Where I am is here, Galena. Now, what they're telling me
is that the kings are showing up here,
but only in a fraction of the numbers that they should be.
What's interesting is - no problem with all the other species of salmon.
They are still running strongly.
Now, whatever is causing this decline
is clearly not gonna be happening upstream.
It's gonna be happening somewhere down here.
So this is clearly the direction I need to travel.
I need to go downriver.
I head towards the coast where the river empties into the sea.
It's where the ocean-dwelling salmon come back into the river
on their way upstream to spawn.
I stop at a fishing port called St Mary's, nearer the river mouth,
to find out if the king salmon are being fished out here
before they even get a chance to swim upriver.
There is something very incongruous about this place.
You have this wilderness with nobody out there and then you've just got
this cluster of buildings, and it's got a very functional feel to it.
There's a lot of dead machinery sort of lying around rusting.
But it's also... It's a bit like a ghost town.
There's nobody here. And, erm...
Believe it or not, this is 10:00 at night.
It's like it's sort of one continuous day.
But I do find some late-night activity down at the docks.
Judging from the rows of containers,
this is a fish-buying station where locals can sell their catch.
Could a high commercial demand for kings
be destroying the population?
What do we got here?
Yeah. So, those are chum.
Are you getting kings as well? We don't buy kings. You don't buy kings.
So this is all chums here. Yeah. All chums.
The reason you're not buying kings at the moment, why is that? Their low numbers.
But at the moment, it's not enough to... Not enough to fish for. Right.
And then the fishing boats start coming in with the day's catch.
Did you find any monsters? We're hoping you got some in there.
They're all chums, are they? Yeah.
What's that? A white fish, like a cisco.
Is that, like, a she-fish? Yeah.
A white fish, but more importantly, lots of chum.
Their numbers are high enough for them to be caught and sold commercially.
Kings aren't being fished for here, which rules out overfishing
as an immediate cause for their disappearance.
Hello. How are you doing? I watch your show.
You're Jeremy Wade, right? That's right.
You're out in the Yukon! Hello there.
You know, I've heard that the kings' numbers are down.
They're pretty low.
So, I mean, does anybody keep a record of the numbers of fish?
They do it down-river, right where the mouths meet.
Then they do it up here where the river's narrower.
So, there's somewhere...
There's somewhere that way and there's somewhere that way where they do it. Yeah.
This station where salmon data gets collected
is definitely worth a visit...
.. but before I leave, I'm offered a local delicacy.
The eggs of the white fish.
Welcome to the Yukon River...
.. where fish is abundant and it's the best.
Good? That tastes very fishy.
Tastes fishy? Yeah.
That just slipped down.
It's an acquired taste for a midnight snack,
up here where we are so far north that in the summer months,
the sun never truly sets.
Days merge into each other.
It's not just a figure of speech.
There's no... There's very little delineation
in the way of darkness.
It just gets a bit dimmer,
and then the dimmer switch is turned back up again.
'Morning.
It's a new day, and time to follow a new lead in this investigation.
I'm hoping the counting station could be the place
for my first encounter with a legendary king salmon.
Up, up, up!
I'm on the Yukon River in Alaska,
trying to discover what could be taking out the iconic king salmon.
Yeah, this must be the place.
So, it looks like we can't go any further.
There's a bit of a, sort of, barrage put across the river.
Erm, something's going on there. I wonder if it's all blocked off
apart from one channel and, er...
they somehow count them when they go through.
There's fish in there. There's fish in here.
You can see the back sticking out of the water.
So there are fish in here.
Somebody coming down. Hello.
Hello.
Good to see you. I'm Jeremy. Yeah.
I'm Gerald. Nice to meet you.
Fish biologist Gerald Maschmann and his crew
worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
Team leader Matt Larson is going to show me how the station works.
The floating dam or weir acts as a barrier
which funnels the fish through a single opening
leading to a trap where they are filmed and counted.
There, chum. You see quite a bit of them through the weir.
Matt tells me that chums and pinks are common,
but even down here, near the mouth of the river,
they're seeing very few kings.
We can go check the trap if you want.
Absolutely. Yeah? Yeah.
But the summer chum can still be of use to my investigation.
They're second in size to the king salmon,
and both chums and kings run the same rivers at the same time.
I'm hoping a closer look will offer up some clues
as to why the chums are here in numbers and the kings are not.
Do I pick out an individual fish
or just make a bit of a lunge and see what I get?
Let's do the lunge.
One there.
That's a complete miss.
So, there was me thinking this was gonna be easy.
Right. So I've got to move fairly quickly. Yeah.
So, underneath...
and then up. Up, up, up, up, up! There we go.
The crew take data samples from all species of salmon
to track changes over time. They're measured...
88540.
.. and a scale sample is taken to record their age.
And...
The data is sent off to be analysed, and the results so far
are showing no obvious signs of disease or environmental harm.
Yet in recent years, the numbers of king salmon running up the Yukon
have dropped to as low as 10% of what they used to be.
We assess the salmon runs, try and determine
how many fish are getting upriver to spawn and what we can do
to make sure that these fish come back year after year after year.
So, management is one factor, but there's also
other extraneous factors that might affect the numbers.
Absolutely. That's, you know... The fish go out to the Bering Sea
for three, four, five, you know, six, seven years.
We don't know what they're doing out there. It's a big black box.
And so all we can do as managers is manage what comes in the river.
So, they are not arriving in the river in significant numbers, simple as that.
And so maybe it's time to turn to the other part of the...
the king salmon's life cycle. That's the five, six, seven years
that they spend in the ocean.
Oceans are not my area of expertise,
so I contact Dr Jan Ohlberger, who's studying king salmon in Alaska.
He tells me about some brand-new research.
An interesting study at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
They used satellite tags on king salmon
to study their migration and dispersal patterns in the ocean.
Researchers found that half of the tags
recorded some strange numbers.
They jumped from an ocean temperature of 45 degrees
up to about 70 degrees in a matter of seconds.
This showed that the king salmon, along with its tag, had been eaten -
not by a warm blooded mammal, and not by a cold-blooded fish.
But a few fish can partially raise their body temperature,
including salmon sharks.
So, based on these data, they've identified salmon sharks
as a potentially important predator on king salmon.
I wouldn't want to guess how many kings
they actually eat each year as, sort of, a whole population.
The data is just not there to make an informed estimate.
Now, that's really interesting.
Salmon shark, as the name suggests, they eat salmon,
and they are definitely taking some king salmon.
But whether they are targeting the large king salmon
and whether they are consuming significant numbers of them,
I don't know.
But I do know a place that I can go to
to try and find out.
I head to the one area of Alaska where salmon sharks
have been reported to congregate for a mass feeding frenzy.
But do the numbers stack up?
Do there seem to be enough of them in the water
to significantly make an impact on the king salmon populations?
With a top speed of 50mph, the salmon shark is a faster
and more agile relative of the great white.
I investigated salmon sharks a few years ago
and I've caught up with Boone Hodgin,
a salmon shark expert in Prince William Sound.
The sharks congregate in this area, waiting to ambush
the migrating salmon as they travel from the ocean into the rivers.
And since it's salmon running season, the sharks should be here right now.
I'm going to drop a line in the water to see what's down there.
I prepare myself for battle.
Anticipation tinged almost with a bit of dread.
There are certain fish... They are just so powerful
that you almost don't want to be in contact with them.
If it's a prolonged fight, then this will just take
some of the strain off my back and my arms.
I almost want to be looking back on today,
as long as today is a successful day.
But I have to actually go through the process of living today first.
It will be fun as well, if, when it happens.
But it is gonna be mixed in with some pain, I think.
I'm gonna slap this around your waist... Yep.
..as the secondary line. Just in case you slip out,
we can reel you back in. OK. With shark and all.
Down it goes.
Ten... 20...
At this time of year, the salmon sharks
could be anywhere from 20ft to 200ft deep.
What I've been told to expect is either this will just
get slammed down with no warning
or there will be a slow, steady increase in tension.
And either one of those two things could happen at any moment,
or several hours could pass without anything happening at all.
This is the... the interesting...
.. frozen moment that you get stuck in, in this kind of, er...
This type of situation.
I keep the bait moving to attract attention.
Lift it up...
.. drop it down. Lift it up...
drop it down.
I thought I felt a bump.
But the bait hasn't been touched.
80... 90...
Lift it up, drop it down.
I try different depths...
A little bit shallow, about 100ft down.
.. and multiple locations.
I'm starting to wonder if the sharks are here at all.
Then just as my patience is running out...
Yeah. There is something, I think.
This is an interesting one.
Good-looking? It's a sculpin.
So, that's sitting on the bottom perfectly camouflaged,
blending in with the bottom and then something swims by,
opens the mouth...
It's just about to move, I think. Pop it back.
Not the beast I was hoping to catch here.
So, two days on the water - full days, long days -
and not a single sign of salmon shark.
Not a fin on the surface and nothing on the sonar either...
.. which leaves me very surprised, puzzled.
In my investigation so far, the salmon shark seems to be
the most plausible explanation for the disappearing king salmon.
But if I can't find any sharks, that theory is blown.
Maybe I've missed the salmon runs and the sharks have already gone.
The next day, I decide to switch strategy and equipment
to check the salmon are still here.
Yes.
I don't think this is a salmon.
Wait a minute. Wait a minute.
Coho. Coho. It is a coho.
He's off.
A long-enough glimpse of it to see what it was.
That was a nice coho salmon.
Here we go.
Coming up to the surface. There it is. There it is.
This feels... Maybe a better size.
Look at that.
And jumping again. God, this one's lively.
This one's lively.
Coho, also known as silvers, are smaller than the kings.
Look at this.
Has this one suffered a shark attack?
It's a thin tooth, so it's not a shark. Yeah.
More like a sea lion tried and grabbed it.
There we go.
Yes.
Gosh, it's a nice one. It is, yeah.
Right, I'm gonna let this, er, tire out.
There we go.
The colouration on the gill flap is beautiful.
Such a beautiful fish. Of course, they change so dramatically,
don't they, once they're in...? Once they hit the fresh water.
The coho are running, but no kings
and no evidence of salmon sharks hunting them down.
So while it's known that salmon sharks do feed on kings,
I don't believe the sharks can be the cause
of the king salmon's sudden disappearance.
Then Boone shows me something interesting.
That's an orca. Is that off the back of your boat?
It is. When was this?
This was, a few weeks ago. Are they still around?
Boone says he's seen the number of resident fish-eating orca,
or killer whales, rapidly increasing lately.
Bigger and smarter than sharks, these apex predators
could do serious damage to any fish population
if they got a taste for it.
But are there enough orca here?
And have they developed a preference for king salmon above all other fish?
Let's go find some orcas? Yes, absolutely.
I scan the horizon for the distinctive
six-foot-high, black dorsal fin...
.. and the telltale plume of air
as the orca breaks the surface to breathe.
I'm looking for orca in the waters off Alaska
to try to see if they're connected
to the disappearance of the king salmon.
I think that must have come out of...
And again! Look at that. Look at that, look at that.
It's like they're putting on a show for us. It really is.
These astounding creatures are the true rulers of the ocean.
To power their huge bulk takes a lot of energy.
But are the kings, the biggest of the salmon species,
their fuel?
This doesn't look like predatory behaviour.
At the moment they just appear to be having fun with us.
They are approaching the boat.
We're sitting here with the motor idling
and they're coming very slowly towards us.
It's almost like they are curious.
This is wonderful.
You can see it through the water. Through the water.
Diving down, coming right across our stern.
They may not be hunting right now,
but they certainly are here in surprising numbers.
Suddenly, there is the impression that this water is full of them.
And so the numbers here...
.. are starting to make sense.
There we go. That was a selfie with an orca. How often do you get that?
If these orca really do feed on kings,
there's a chance the salmon could be here right now.
Once I'm sure the orca have long gone,
I try my luck...
but catch nothing.
I'm certain I'm on to something with the orca,
but I still need definitive proof,
something that links them to the king salmon.
I track down John Maniscalco,
who has apparently witnessed orca actively hunting.
One time, just right off the corner of my boat,
this king salmon leaps out of the water
right towards the boat, dives down,
and this killer whale just does the same arcing leap
right after it, dives right under the boat
right after this king salmon. Huge salmon.
I don't know if it eventually got that salmon, but I bet it did.
So it was right behind? It was hot on its trail, yeah.
Have you any way of saying what particular fish
they might be going for?
Sure, the studies that some of the guys have been doing around here,
they'll pick up some of the scales
and some of the other tissue from the fish
that the killer whales kill
and determined that they feed mainly on the king salmon around here.
Right. It's a big, warm-blooded animal.
Probably has to get through a lot of king salmon
just to keep itself going. Yeah, a lot of calories there.
Yeah. So, you know, that's why they think
they target the bigger fish. Then the king salmon,
they're the biggest of the salmon that we have around here,
and they'll target the big ones.
So orca are going after king salmon in these waters.
But are they behind the kings' disappearance?
It's possible. That's really hard to say.
A lot of things feed on king salmon, including humans, out here.
Yeah. So, you know, with the increased population
of killer whales around here, they think that...
Some of the researchers think that they are making
more of a significant dent in the king salmon population.
It definitely sounds like they're targeting king salmon,
because, well, why wouldn't they?
They're tasty, but also very rich food.
However, they're not all of the picture.
There's lots of other factors.
The fact that resident orca numbers off Alaska have been on the increase
when other orca populations are declining
is a critical element in this mystery.
Has this orca boom been at the expense of the kings?
Given the dynamic nature of predator-prey relationships,
perhaps it's not possible for king salmon
and orca to flourish at the same time.
The question is - does this spell the end for Alaskan king salmon?
I need to find out if enough kings are escaping the orca
to return to the rivers and spawn.
So far I've seen the other four species of salmon,
but not a single king. But I'm convinced I'm getting close.
I team up with the Alaskan Department of Fish and Game,
who are also searching for kings at the mouths of the rivers...
Anything happening today so far? Um, we've been picking up a couple of sockeye,
but we haven't picked up any kings yet. Right.
And we're about to pull it right now. OK.
This one's a sockeye.
You're just letting those go? Yep.
So you're only interested in the kings. Exactly.
Feels like that might be something. There we go.
Is that a sockeye? Yes. Right.
.. but it's just sockeye after sockeye.
So, still no kings today..
With each net pull, it's looking less and less hopeful.
Look at that. Look at that. Look at that.
Finally, a king salmon.
Its survival is so important
that I dare not even remove it from the water.
So, here we have it. This is an Alaskan king salmon.
This will be about a 28-pounder. Very nice-sized fish,
but these things potentially grow a lot bigger than that.
And this is fresh from the sea, it's bright silver.
As it progresses upriver, it will gradually change.
I was starting to think that I might never see a king salmon.
My investigation has made me realise that throughout their life cycle
the kings are constantly hunted -
in the early days by pike, then by humans,
salmon sharks and orca, each one taking their fill.
Perhaps there's no single cause for their decline,
but instead a perfect storm of factors
that has brought this iconic species to the brink of collapse.
But this shimmering, full-bodied fish
is evidence that the kings are not lost.
And as long as there are still some left
to journey upriver and breed...
Off it goes. Fantastic. It's going the right way. Upriver.
.. the kings will one day rule again.
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