KUCB - Unalaska

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Fletcher Bagley, a soon-to-be second grader, held a small glass vial in the air filled with a dark green liquid. It’s wormwood oil, which can be used to cure dogs who are sick with worms, he explained. Then he grabbed another small jar with an illegible but colorful label.

“We’re going to turn it into angelica salve,” Bagley said,  holding the jar in the air. “And I think that we get to eat it.”

Bagley’s right about almost everything he says — he did fill the small jar with a salve made from the local plant angelica. And wormwood is an herbal remedy for dogs with worms, though he didn’t eat any of those items.

But by the end of his time at Camp Adgayux̂, Bagley and about 15 kids will be whizzes at making salves from local plants, while they learn about Unangax̂ values, language and art.

Camp Adgayux̂, also known as Camp A, resumed in 2021 at Unalaska’s Community Center after it was canceled last year due to coronavirus concerns.

The kids learn about local flora — what they can use for medicine and what is dangerous to eat or touch. They learn to harvest local plants and use them as medicine for things like burns from pushki — known in other parts of Alaska as cow parsnip — or as soothing lip balms. They also make paper versions of Unangax̂ bentwood hats, or chagudax̂, and learn about the values and language of the local Unangax̂ who’ve lived on the island for thousands of years.

Sharon Svarny-Livingston helped start the class about 10 years ago with longtime Unalaska resident Harriet Berikoff.

The camp culminates in a play at the end of the week. This year, Svarny-Livingston said the kids acted out a story about the moon’s sister, who descends to the villages on the earth and has a son.

“She takes [her son] on a journey, and she takes him through the constellations — just as they are today. We have different names for them, of course,” Svarny-Livingston said. “And eventually, they get to the moon’s house, and [the moon’s sister] dies on the trip because she got very old. And of course, the moon was getting old too, and so his nephew took his place.”

Svarny-Livingston said this year was also unique because she had the help of local teen Rylee Lekanoff, who attended the camp when she was in elementary school.

“She stepped up quite a bit because I needed an Unangan helper who wasn’t just a volunteer,” Svarny-Livingston said. “I needed her to be able to take on certain aspects of the project and run with them.”

Lekanoff led the Unangam Tunuu language and Unangax̂ values sections.

“Ugigdada — that one means ‘share,'” Lekanoff said. “Tutada, is ‘listen.’ Chxadalgaax̂txin is ‘don’t steal,’ and txin ugutada is ‘be happy.'”

Svarny-Livingston said she’s excited to see Lekanoff returning to the camp as a mentor.

“That’s the whole purpose, you know, of trying to preserve culture and save culture, is making sure that you always pass on your knowledge to somebody else, so that they can continue to pass it on,” she said.

For the young ones, Svarny-Livingston said part of that preservation work involves breaking down some of the larger and more challenging concepts, values or practices, even in the artwork.

“They’re looking at the design posters and they’re going, ‘we can’t do that stuff,'” she said. “And I go, ‘you’ve just got to break them down into little pieces. Break it down — you know, it’s a line, it’s a circle, it’s a dot and it’s repetitive and it just goes on and on.'”

As the kids work on their paper bentwood hats, a few chant Svarny-Livingston’s mantra: “circle, line, dot, circle, line dot.”

Ravn Alaska announced a new agreement last week that will allow customers to use Alaska Airlines miles to purchase tickets for Ravn flights.

After prolonged negotiations, executives from both companies reached the agreement to bring a mileage sharing program to Unalaska. The Aleutian community had previously relied on codeshare agreements between regional airlines, like the former RavnAir Group and Alaska Airlines, but had been without any such arrangement since RavnAir’s fatal plane crash in October 2019.

Now, Ravn Alaska has new owners and management from the previous RavnAir Group, which filed for bankruptcy last year.

The company’s website has a new option that allows customers to earn Alaska Airlines miles from its flights. Customers should be able to redeem miles in about two or three weeks, according to an Anchorage Daily News report.

Ravn representatives did not immediately respond to requests for additional information.

Eastern Aleutian Tribes reported seven new COVID-19 infections in Sand Point on August 5. That brings the total to 17 new cases reported in the Eastern Aleutians city since July 16.

Paul Mueller, the CEO of Eastern Aleutian Tribes — which operates the city’s principal health clinic — said the recent uptick in cases is “not just affecting Sand Point, it’s affecting all the other parts of the region as people travel,” during a discussion on KDSP, the public radio station in Sand Point.

Mueller attributed the increase in cases to an event that took place in Sand Point last week. “And from that gathering, the cases have increased, and we’re seeing them on a daily basis go up and up,” he said. He didn’t specify which event caused the outbreak.

​Several people who attended Sand Point’s culture camp, a large gathering held last week, are currently in Unalaska. Officials from Iliuliuk Family and Health Services in Unalaska said people who travelled from Sand Point to Unalaska have all been tested for the virus.

Many organizations in Sand Point have closed to in-person business due to the outbreak, but municipal officials have not yet mandated any city-wide closures.

Mueller would not respond to questions about whether neighboring communities have been notified about the rise in infections or what caused this uptick in cases.

Dr. Lisa Rabinowitz, a staff physician with the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services, and a member of the state’s COVID-19 task force, reinforced the importance of wearing masks, social distancing and getting tested.

But Rabinowitz also offered some hope.

“Although this seems daunting and scary when there’s a surge in cases in such a small community, you guys know how to work together and communicate well, because you are a small community,” she said. “That’s how you make it through every winter — helping each other out, helping find resources for individuals that have a harder time navigating the system. That’s what’s going to get everyone through this.”

Healthcare professionals advise anyone who may have been in contact with someone infected with COVID-19 to isolate and get tested.

A new airline startup says it will soon be offering daily flights between Unalaska and Anchorage.

The new carrier, branded Aleutian Airways, is a partnership between Juneau-based Alaska Seaplanes, Florida-based Sterling Airways and two venture capital firms.

The group announced the new service Tuesday.

Kent Craford, co-owner of Alaska Seaplanes, is a senior executive at the new outfit. Starting this fall, he said, the company will begin flying Saab 2000 turboprops daily between the Aleutian hub and Alaska’s largest city.

“It’s such a tough nut to crack — Unalaska — because of the short runway, because of how remote it is, (its) distance to alternate airfields,” Craford said. “There’s a very, very unique key that unlocks this airport, and we’ve got it — the Saab 2000 is it.”

The PenAir Saab 2000 planes haven’t flown in Unalaska since RavnAir Group’s fatal plane crash in October 2019. The island has since been without regularly-scheduled, consistent nonstop commercial flights to Anchorage. The DeHavilland Dash 8-100 turboprops, which RavnAir flew on the route following the crash, often require a refueling stop.

A reboot of Ravn Alaska airline with different ownership began flying the Dash 8-100 series on the Unalaska-Anchorage route last November, after the former airline went bankrupt and Ravn Alaska acquired the company’s operating certificates.

The new Aleutian Airways partnership will add competition to the 800-mile route.

Alaska Seaplanes has been working for more than a year to enter the Aleutian market. Last spring, it lost a bid to acquire PenAir certificates and operations from the bankrupt RavnAir. But since then, Craford said, they’ve been able to dial in on the island’s needs for reliable and safe air service.

“We did our own analysis on our various aircraft options for Unalaska, and that independent, objective analysis determined that the Saab 2000 was simply the best platform to serve Unalaska,” he said.

Craford said he understands there’s baggage surrounding the Swedish Saab 2000 because of the crash that killed one person and left more than a dozen injured. But, he said, they’ll be sticking with former operator PenAir’s relatively strong safety record by enforcing high operational standards and employing former PenAir pilots.

“They required their pilots to have so many hours of flying into Dutch Harbor before they were allowed to be pilot in command,” Craford said. “They had very stringent risk assessments that were required for flying out to Dutch. And we’re going to be instituting a lot of the same policies with the same pilots who flew under those policies, so they know it firsthand. They know it well.”

He said the combination of Alaska Seaplanes’ experience serving rural Alaska, along with Sterling Airways’ experience operating larger equipment, will hopefully fill the gap in Aleutian air service.

Aleutian Airways plans to announce its schedule later this month. It has not yet announced fares.

The new airline will be a partnership between Alaska Seaplanes, Connecticut-based Wexford Capital, which wholly owns Sterling Airways, and Anchorage-based McKinley Private Investment.

Paralytic shellfish poisoning, caused by eating seafood contaminated with toxins from harmful algal blooms, can be deadly to humans. Now, using marine samples from Unalaska, scientists are trying to understand if those harmful algal blooms could also be responsible for seabird die-offs.

There’s not much data on how saxitoxin — a harmful compound produced by algal blooms that cause PSP — spreads through the larger food web. But in July, a group of biologists with the United States Geological Survey visited Unalaska to collect samples of plants and animals in hopes of learning more about how saxitoxin levels magnify and diminish as they move through the food chain, from phytoplankton to mussels and up to seabirds.

“We don’t really know how this toxin moves through the food web,” said Sarah Schoen, a USGS wildlife biologist that recently collected marine samples in Unalaska. “There’s still a lot of unknowns, but the more information we can collect about it, the more we’ll understand it.”

Schoen said the project started about five years ago when a major heat wave, known as “the blob,” hit the ocean. Around the same time, there was a die-off of an estimated million common murres — a northern seabird — from Alaska down to California.

“When we picked up some of the carcasses, the birds were all starving; they were emaciated,” she said. “But we weren’t sure if there was another factor that was contributing to their deaths. So we became interested in knowing if something like toxins — biotoxins — could have contributed to their deaths.”

Schoen and other researchers collected tissue from the dead birds to test for saxitoxin and found some lower levels of toxins in about a third of the birds, but she said they weren’t sure what that meant for their overall health.

“It was still unclear if algal blooms  — toxins — could have played a part in their death,” Schoen said. “The project has kind of expanded from there.”

Since then, she said they’ve also looked at tissues from live murres in breeding colonies and found that a similar proportion of birds had toxins, but the levels were lower.

Very little work has actually been done to look at the saxitoxin levels in seabirds, according to Schoen. Most people focus on intertidal invertebrates like mussels or clams and how those affect humans.

The extremely high toxin levels recently found in Unalaska make the island a good place for studying how the toxins travel up the food chain, specifically for learning when the levels may become deadly for animals that are further up that chain, like seabirds, Schoen said.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration says it is safe for humans to consume meat with up to 80 micrograms of toxin per 100 grams of tissue. Around the beginning of July last year, some samples of blue mussels collected in Unalaska showed toxin levels that were more than 100 times higher than that. And in June of this year, some sampling showed toxin levels of more than 6,000 micrograms per 100 grams of tissue.

“Those are levels that make us interested in what’s going on with the whole food web,” Schoen said.

Schoen and her team want to discover if these toxins play a role in the recent record-breaking bird deaths and to see whether they transfer to seabirds in higher levels or not.

Sometimes it can be tricky to trace samples back to a singular, specific algal bloom, but she said it was easy to make those connections in this recent sampling in Unalaska.

“In this case, everything looks to be super connected,” Schoen said. “The mussels are filtering in the plankton that we’re collecting right offshore. Fish are eating the plankton. The birds are eating the fish, and they’re all in the same system.”

Schoen and her colleague Daniel Donnelly — another biologist on the team — collected samples of various fish including sand lance, Pacific sandfish, cod and halibut, as well as species of seabirds like horned puffins and black-legged kittiwakes.

They only had about a day to collect the samples, and Donnelly said finding all of the animals, coordinating and setting the different gear and properly recording everything made for a hectic day.

“We got samples from different trophic levels, meaning all the way from zooplankton to small plankton, foraging fish to predator fish, to birds — so a whole bunch of different levels in the ecosystem,” he said.

Donnelly is an avid hunter and shot some of the live birds to bring back to the lab to study. Others were collected from local fishermen who found and froze a dead puffin, for example, after a recent die-off.

Schoen said collecting and tracking data in a place like the Aleutians where there are few scientists can be tricky. But getting help from locals is a useful way to keep track of marine behavior and things like strange die-offs.

She said people can call the Alaska Marine Mammal Stranding Network or contact the Alaska Harmful Algal Bloom Network if they notice something strange.

She added that they’re hoping to have some of the samples from this trip analyzed by the end of this year.

Representatives from the Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation visited Unalaska last week as part of its push to expand the state’s mariculture industry.

Gov. Bill Walker created the Alaska Mariculture Task Force in 2016. Since then, the organization has been focused on developing the state’s mariculture industry to meet its long-term goal of $100 million by 2038.

Mariculture refers specifically to farming and enhancing shellfish and seaweeds. The state’s mariculture industry was valued at approximately $1 million in 2018.

Julie Decker, executive director of the Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation, sees opportunities in the shorelines and beaches of the Aleutian coast.

“You have lots of water, so you have lots of space. Relatively little population, which means relatively little conflict,” Decker said. “The people that do live here are used to working on the water. There’s North America’s largest processing port. These are some pretty significant assets.”

Oyster and kelp farms have been springing up in Alaska’s coastal communities from Southeast Alaska to the Kenai Peninsula and Kodiak Island, but there’s only been one permit so far in the Aleutians.

Decker says that a lot of the infrastructure from the fishing industry could be used to expand mariculture in the Aleutians and that people could reconfigure much of their fishing equipment. And while shellfish could do well in the Aleutians, Decker says seaweed offers an easier point-of-entry.

Seaweed provides a quicker return than most shellfish because it is an annual crop, unlike oysters, for example, which can take about three years to harvest. That’s not to say mussels, oysters or sea cucumbers wouldn’t thrive here, but kelp happens to time well with the fisheries already in place.

Industry experts say the timing for kelp farming fits well between pollock or salmon seasons.

“You want to have your kelp out of the water by the beginning of June,” said Tamsen Peeples, a commercial seaweed mariculture specialist whose job is to counsel businesses and investors interested in mariculture. “And guess what else happens at the beginning of June: the salmon come back.”

Peeples says growing kelp also offers environmental benefits.

“Seaweeds are carbon negative because they do draw carbon out of the ecosystem. And if you’re familiar with ocean acidification, that can have huge ramifications and benefits for the ocean, as well as just the entire global environment,” she said.

It also provides economic opportunities for kelp farmers to sell carbon credits.

Peeples says countries like Norway, France and Chile are competing with Asian nations for the seaweed market while the United States largely sits on the sidelines.

“We’re one of the only large countries in the world that’s not producing or harvesting wild seaweeds,” she said, “so we’re a little bit behind the curve.”

A United Nations report valued the global seaweed industry at over $6 billion in 2018. And while Alaska may be a global leader in fishing, the state falls behind in mariculture.

By comparison, aquaculture in New Zealand — which does include finfish farms — generated over $450 million in 2020.

Decker says growing Alaska’s mariculture into an operation on a competitive scale won’t be easy.

“I want to be clear with people that when you’re developing something new, there’s always challenges,” she said.

For new farmers, those difficulties may include picking farm sites and navigating the application process. But Peeples says that she is available specifically for those purposes.

“I would be assisting with site selection, as well as business planning and the permit process and then application assistance,” she said.

Decker and Peeples also say there are various funding opportunities available, including the Mariculture Revolving Loan Fund.

Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation’s website has more information about mariculture training and funding opportunities. There are also pamphlets and other materials available at the Unalaska Visitors Bureau.