Western

For the first time, scientists have made a definite link between the toxin produced by algae that causes paralytic shellfish poisoning and marine mammal deaths.

Fur seals found dead last August on Alaska’s St. Paul Island had significant levels of saxitoxin in their bodies, as did several of the dead fish around them.

It was the clearest evidence ever found for this type of toxin-caused death, scientists say.

“I would say this is the absolute strongest case for saxitoxin poisoning in marine mammals anywhere,” said Kathi Lefebvre, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research biologist and the lead author of a study detailing the findings, published in the journal Marine Mammals Science in May.

The discovery, a warning for local communities that rely on subsistence hunting, comes as long-term warming in the Bering and Chukchi seas is increasing the prevalence of a type of algae that produces saxitoxin is becoming more prevalent in these bodies of water.

Dangerous blooms of the Alexandrium have long been observed in more southern waters of Alaska, where paralytic shellfish poisoning is a well-recognized and sometimes deadly hazard. Clams are notorious for accumulating saxitoxin, and there are frequent safety advisories that warn people of specific sites’ shellfish poisoning dangers, and two labs in the state — one in Anchorage operated by the Department of Environmental Conservation and one in Sitka operated by the Sitka Tribe of Alaska — test harvested shellfish to determine whether it is safe for human consumption.

Farther north, the emergence of large Alexandrium blooms and potentially dangerous saxitoxin levels is new. But, as Lefebvre explains it, the conditions to create those toxin hazards have been set up over decades and possibly even centuries.

Over time, ocean currents have carried bits of Alexandrium algae north, and over time, that algae has dropped to the bottom of the ocean. That created massive beds of dormant cysts, the equivalent of algal seeds.

The Bering, Chukchi and even Beaufort seas hold some of the highest concentrations of Alexandrium cysts ever found in the world, according to Don Anderson, a harmful algal specialist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Anderson led research teams that mapped out Alaska cyst beds over several years, including a bed in the Chukchi that he said is the biggest ever discovered.

Those cyst beds were dormant until recently, said Lefebvre, who works closely with Anderson.

“They’ve just been building and building and building. And then in the last couple decades – actually, the last 10 years, maybe — the bottom temperature finally was warm enough for cyst germination,” Lefebvre said. That appears to be the cause of the large blooms now being found routinely in the Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort seas, she said.

Dead fur seals and fish

In the case of the St. Paul fur seals, local beachcombers found 10 dead animals at a site on the northeastern side of the island called Benson Beach. It is a catchment site where marine debris, kelp and other items are known to accumulate, said Lauren Divine, director of the island’s Tribal ecosystem conservation office.

Tribal representatives managed to retrieve some of the dead seals, as well as some of the dead fish with them, said Divine, who works for the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island. They photographed the scene and gathered whatever information they could, and they contacted the NOAA-coordinated Alaska Marine Mammal Stranding Network and Anchorage-based veterinarian pathologist Kathy Burek-Huntington to continue the investigation, she said.

It was clearly a startling discovery, Divine said.

“This was something that everyone was quite alarmed (at) and noticed as something that was wrong in the ecosystem and something that really hadn’t ever been noticed or detected before,” she said. “So we were pretty adamant about really trying to do the best job that we could to collect as much information as we could about the event, and also with quite little capacity that we have out in the remote community.”

In all five of the adult seals tested, saxitoxin was found in feces or urine, significant because they indicate higher exposure when tainted food was eaten. Two fish were sampled as well, and both turned up saxitoxin in their intestines.

At about the same time, samples being taken by researchers in the southeastern Bering Sea — the same area where the dead fur seals would have been foraging — revealed dense Alexandrium blooms, large cyst beds and extremely high prevalence of saxitoxin in fish, zooplankton, clams and worms.

Anderson, who noted that his team has already found a huge Alexandrium cyst bed near St. Paul, the seal discovery is significant for two reasons.

“The seal mortality demonstrates that dangerous levels of toxin can accumulate there and that local communities need to be careful about what they consume during certain times of the year,” he said by email.

Additionally, because scientists know that ocean currents run north from that region, “this might be yet another source of cells that can affect the Alaskan Arctic,” he said.

Lefebvre said all the evidence about the seals’ bodies, the fish samples and the environmental conditions were needed to show that the algal toxins killed the seals.

Up to now, it has not been possible to prove such a strong link between saxitoxin and marine mammal deaths, she said.

Mammals poisoned by saxitoxin are likely to disappear while at sea, she said. “They become paralyzed. They’re going to basically suffocate, not even drown, not even taking a breath of air, of water,” she said. “They’re going to just stop breathing.”

That contrasts with effects of a different type of algal toxin that, since the 1990s, has caused mass strandings and deaths since 1990 of marine mammals in California. That toxin, domoic acid, is produced by the Pseudo-nitzschia algae. Rather than causing paralysis, it overstimulates the nervous system, causing seizures that can result in death.

Lefebvre and others have documented thousands of cases of domoic acid poisoning among marine mammals in California, including sea lions, dolphins, seals, and whales, with animals easily seen by people on the beach. Mass die-offs of seabirds have also been documented.

So far, there have been no domoic acid poisoning cases documented in Alaska, though Lefebvre and her colleagues have consistently found low levels of it in various marine mammal species.

But a new study suggests that continued warming may make domoic acid a future problem in Alaska. The study, also led by Lefebvre, found that bowhead whales hunted over a two-decade period carried higher levels of both saxitoxin and domoic acid in years when waters were warm and sea ice was low.

Saxitoxin risks in various wild foods?

For now, saxitoxin and the paralytic shellfish poisoning it causes remain the main algal toxin concern in Alaska.

Among people, there were 132 reports of paralytic shellfish poisoning between 1993 to 2021, with the highest prevalence in Southeast Alaska and the Kodiak Archipelago, according to a bulletin published in 2022 by the Department of Health’s epidemiology section. The last fatal case concerned a person who ate shellfish at Unalaska Island.

Information about saxitoxin poisoning in wildlife has been more difficult to pinpoint.

In past years, it was suspected in some marine mammal deaths in Alaska, but it was not proven.

In the fall of 2017, four dead walruses found in the Bering Strait region had saxitoxin in their stomachs or intestines. They were among 39 walruses that, though otherwise in good body condition, were found dead in the region that August and September.

Two years later, another piece of the puzzle came when scientists retrieved clams from the Bering Strait area and the Chukchi Sea that had levels of saxitoxin above the thresholds for safe consumption by humans. That added another piece to the puzzle. Clams are an important part of the Pacific walrus diet, though the saxitoxin threshold for walruses has yet to be determined.

There are other suspected cases. For example, saxitoxin poisoning was a suggested cause of a 1987 sea otter die-off in the Kodiak Archipelago, though test results were inconclusive.

Beyond mammals, Alaska seabirds are known to have been killed by saxitoxin. That toxin caused a 2019 die-off of Arctic terns in the Juneau area; the birds had been feeding on sand lance, a type of fish known to accumulate saxitoxin.

For people in St. Paul and elsewhere in Western Alaska, who live far away from the two Alaska labs that currently test shellfish for toxins, the new information is concerning, Divine said.

St. Paul residents and others in the Pribilof Islands harvest various types of animals beyond the clams and mussels that are routinely screened for consumption safety, she said. But there is not much known yet about saxitoxin levels in the full breadth of subsistence foods, she said. “We just don’t have robust information on how much is accumulating and how things are impacted across the food web,” she said.

A grant from a NOAA program called ECOHAB funded much of the work that supported the new study. The grant for that work, which is led by Lefebvre and Anderson, runs through this year.

Anderson said the team just learned that it has been awarded ECOHAB grant funding for another year of work, part of what had been planned as a five-year follow-up program to better understand the saxitoxin risk in wild foods gathered in Indigenous subsistence harvests.

News of the one-year award is encouraging, but the scientists are worried about future years, Anderson said

The Trump administration has targeted NOAA for deep cuts, he noted. The administration is proposing to entirely terminate NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Sciences, the agency arm that supports research into algal toxins.

Termination of the National Centers for Coastal Ocean Sciences would end funding for NOAA’s entire Integrated Ocean Observing System. Within the IOOS is the Alaska Ocean Observing System, which monitors algal blooms, among other work.

Divine said the same people who have been drawn together by their concerns about toxins in the food web are also worried about the potential loss of scientific research.

“We have just an incredible amount of interest in this, and the funding that has been secured to really tackle this in a coordinated way is all on hold in this administration. And I do think that that’s worth noting,” she said.

A cargo ship that caught fire off the Western Aleutians sank Monday morning amid salvage operations in the North Pacific Ocean.

The 600-foot Morning Midas was carrying thousands of vehicles when it began to burn around June 3, near Adak Island. The fire burned for about two weeks before officials reported it was out.

According to the ship’s manager, Zodiac Maritime, the damaged vessel went down Monday morning after taking on water in heavy weather.

Earlier this month, Zodiac said a tug with long-distance towing capabilities was on its way to the ship, but the company didn’t say when the tug was coming or where they planned to tow it.

The Liberia-flagged ship was on its way to Mexico when the fire broke out. A United States Coast Guard cutter and aircraft crews responded to the fire, and all of the cargo ship’s crew members were evacuated safely.

The vessel was carrying 3,000 vehicles, about 800 of which were either partly or fully electric.

The Morning Midas was 360 nautical miles from shore in international waters when it sank. Zodiac Maritime said in a Tuesday morning statement that Resolve Marine — an international salvage and response company with a facility in Dutch Harbor — has two salvage tugs on location.

Zodiac representatives said because the ship was so far from land, there was no realistic way to save anything on board.

The salvage company will remain on site with pollution control equipment to monitor the situation. Another specialized pollution response vessel is also on the way.

“We remain in close coordination with Resolve Marine and the United States Coast Guard, and we extend our sincere thanks for their professionalism, swift response, and continued collaboration,” Zodiac Maritime said in a Tuesday statement.

Alaska officials are seeking emergency authorization to keep killing bears and wolves in a region in the western part of the state even though a judge ruled a week ago that the state predator control program there was unconstitutional.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game on Friday petitioned the state Board of Game for an emergency regulation allowing the “intensive management” program to continue for a third year in the range of the ailing Mulchatna Caribou Herd.

The proposal came on the first day of an eight-day Board of Game meeting in Anchorage. The board sets hunting rules that are carried out by the department.

The Mulchatna herd, in Western Alaska, peaked at 200,000 animals in 1997, but it is now down to about 13,000 animals. Hunting has been closed for several years. Department officials argue that removal of bears and wolves is needed to help the herd population grow back. Residents of dozens of rural communities in the region have traditionally depended on the herd for food, and increased caribou numbers would allow their hunts to start again, department officials argue.

So far, the state program that started in 2023 has killed nearly 200 bears and 19 wolves through the program, according to the department.

That has already benefited the herd, as seen in the increase in the number of calves born, the department’s proposal said. Continuing the program is “critical” to the goal of getting the herd large enough to allow resumed hunting, it said.

“Not being able to conduct control efforts in the third year is detrimental to the program and will result in a loss of the improvements in calf recruitment and survival that have been realized since the department treatment began in 2023,” the department’s proposal said.

The Alaska Wildlife Alliance, the plaintiff in the case that resulted in last week’s ruling, said the Department of Fish and Game is attempting to circumvent the law.

“We’re just kind of stunned right now,” Nicole Schmitt, the alliance’s executive director, said during a break in the Board of Game’s meeting on Friday.

The late proposal, released just that morning, was also rushed without proper public notice or opportunity for public comment, just as the earlier predator-control authorization had been, Schmitt said.

“The state is trying to push through an emergency regulation, in the hopes that it is not stopped before they are done killing bears, lawfully or otherwise,” she said.

Superior Court Judge Andrew Guidi, in his March 14 ruling, found that the Board of Game’s action in 2022 that authorized the predator control program violated constitutional standards for public notice and public comment. The Alaska Wildlife Alliance and Michelle Bittner, an Anchorage attorney who filed a separate lawsuit challenging the predator-culling program, argued that the board rushed its approval through improper and secretive means.

Guidi also found that the board’s approval of bear kills in the Mulchatna caribou range failed to properly consider impacts to the bear population, in violation of constitutional mandates for sustainable management.

Supporters and opponents of the Mulchatna predator control program disagree about the causes of the caribou herd’s decline.

While department officials point to bears and wolves as limiting recovery, opponents of the bear- and wolf-killing program say other factors caused the caribou decline. Those include some sweeping habitat changes, with a warming climate allowing woody bushes and trees to spread into tundra territory. Caribou from herds like the Mulchatna depend on tundra plants for food, but the proliferation of woody plants has made the area more favorable for moose.

Disease is another factor cited as a reason for the caribou population decline.

The Board of Game has identified a goal of getting the population back up to between 30,000 and 80,000 animals, enough to support hunts of 2,400 to 8,000 caribou a year, according to the Department of Fish and Game.

The tribal governments of Alaska’s St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea say they’re living with the toxic legacy of Cold War military installations on their land, and this week they took their complaint to the United Nations special rapporteur on toxics and human rights.

About 4,000 miles from home, at a press conference Wednesday in Washington, D.C., tribal leaders spoke about troubling health problems on the island.

Vi Waghiyi works with the Alaska Community Action on Toxics. She said her family lived at the most contaminated location on St. Lawrence, the Northeast Cape, for five years when she was growing up.

“I’m a cancer survivor. I’ve had three miscarriages. I’m 66,” she said. “My mother had a … stillborn child after me. Heart disease, strokes, diabetes and cancer. Her name was Della Waghiyi. I want to say their name.”

Sandra Gologergen from Savoonga said her father and his brother salvaged materials from the military buildings at the Northeast Cape, and, unaware of any contamination risk, built a cabin.

“We stayed there every summer, not knowing,” she said. “My father and his brother always worked and camped together. And then they both died of cancer, three months apart.”

The Yup’ik people of St. Lawrence Island have PCB levels in their blood 4.5 to 9 times higher than the average in Lower 48 communities, according to the Alaska Community Action on Toxics. ACAT recognizes that much of that is not attributed to the military but notes research showing that those who lived near the Northeast Cape have higher PCB levels than residents of other parts of the island.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spent more than $130 million to clean up the island and considered the work largely done a decade ago. The Army Corps says it continues to monitor and review the site and expects to do so indefinitely. A federal public health agency concluded in 2017 that the number and type of cancer cases on the island are similar to those in other Alaska Native communities in the region.

St. Lawrence leaders call the cleanup superficial.

Their 42-page complaint is now in the hands of the U.N. special rapporteur, an independent expert. He can’t order a cleanup, but his work could add pressure to the federal agencies.

It might seem like the Trump administration isn’t sensitive to that kind of pressure. News broke Wednesday that the administration intends to close all offices of environmental justice in the Environmental Protection Agency.

Attorney Claudia Polsky, who helped write the St. Lawrence complaint, said no matter what policies the administration rescinds or which offices it defunds, the law still applies.

“Whether we call it environmental justice, whether we call it hazardous waste cleanup, whether we call it something else, there is still a law domestically that is being violated and that is enforceable,” she said, “and this is the time to make it happen.”

Everyone around St. Paul knows Zinaida Melovidov as Grandma Zee. She grew up working in the community’s blubbering shop, back when the local economy revolved around the commercial fur seal harvest. Even then, she said, people worried about what would happen if the island’s seals, birds and other marine life disappeared.

“My mom and dad used to talk about this years ago,” she said. “I didn’t understand. Now I know. No more seals, no more food, no more birds.”

St. Paul Island, in the Bering Sea, is home to vast marine ecosystems that have supported the Unangax̂ community for generations. But the island’s most iconic species — the northern fur seal — has been in steep decline for decades.

“They’re all declining,” Melovidov said. “I remember rookeries used to be millions, thousands in every rookery around the island — all full of seals. Now it’s empty.”

About half of the world’s northern fur seals breed in the Pribilofs. The population fell sharply when Russian fur traders set up an outpost in the Pribilofs in the late 1700s. And numbers kept falling in the twentieth century — the Pribilof Island population dropped by about 50% between the 1950s and 1998, prompting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to classify them as “depleted” under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

But a recent push to protect St. Paul’s sea life met with strong resistance, especially from fishing interests. Now, St. Paul’s tribal government is moving forward with a new plan — one that prioritizes local and traditional knowledge in managing the island’s rich marine resources.

A push for a national marine sanctuary

St. Paul Island is 30 miles from the Eastern Bering Sea shelf. The surrounding waters are among the most productive marine environments globally, supporting dense populations of pollock, crab, and other marine species. In 2022, the community’s tribal government — the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island — announced plans to seek a federal designation as a national marine sanctuary to protect those resources. It would have been the first marine sanctuary in Alaska, giving the tribal government a seat at the table with state and federal resource managers.

But the proposal faced significant pushback, prompting the tribe to change its approach. Commercial fishing groups were among the most vocal critics. Regional communities like Unalaska, whose economies rely heavily on fishing, also opposed the sanctuary. Even within St. Paul, some residents worried that the federal designation could jeopardize local fishing practices.

“People think, ‘Oh, federal and state governments would have the power, and they can regulate my fishing,’” said Destiny Bristol Kushin, who works with the tribe’s conservation office. “It’s more of, I call it a fear — a fear because fishing is a big part of our history, and you don’t really want to lose that.”

Tribal leaders repeatedly stated that the sanctuary would not curtail commercial fishing. Under the National Marine Sanctuary Act, fisheries management councils still would have had final authority over fishing regulations. But the assurances weren’t enough to calm critics.

Tribal Council President John Wayne Melovidov said the tribe ultimately decided in October to pause efforts to pursue the federal designation.

“We didn’t want to move forward with something that would be so controversial and potentially tear people apart instead of bring them together,” he said.

The proposed sanctuary will remain on NOAA’s nomination list, though tribal leaders said it is unlikely to go through without community support. NOAA expects to make a final decision within the next five years.

A new approach

Last fall, the tribe began holding listening events to hear from residents about how to protect the island’s ecosystems from threats such as climate change and overfishing. The eventual goal behind that work is designating the waters around St. Paul Island as an Indigenous marine stewardship area.

Kushin said the designation would allow the community to take control of its waters.

“It essentially gives the power to the people in the community,” she said. “And it gives us the opportunity to incorporate traditional knowledge into the decision making within this protected area.”

Indigenous marine stewardship areas are less common than government-declared protection areas, but their numbers are growing, following a global trend. California tribes created the first one in the U.S. in 2023. The designation lacks the legal framework and enforcement power of a national marine sanctuary, but it does emphasize local leadership while bringing in less federal and state oversight.

Tribal leaders have not firmed up details like what the boundaries and regulations would be. Melovidov said the tribe is still working with community members to develop a cohesive plan. And he said local participation will be key to its success.

“Nobody else is going to come in and save the day,” he said. “So, we feel the need to take it upon ourselves to do something about the downturn of the ecosystem in our backyard.”

A western Alaska tribal consortium has appealed a key permit for a proposed gold dredging project in waters near Nome.

Kawerak, a nonprofit that serves some 20 Iñupiaq and Yup’ik tribes in the Bering Strait region, last month asked state regulators for a hearing on a wastewater discharge permit for the project.

The permit, a federal Clean Water Act authorization that’s administered by the state, would allow the Las Vegas-based company behind the project, IPOP, to discharge a limited amount of pollutants into an estuary about 30 miles from Nome, in the scenic Safety Sound area.

In its appeal, Kawerak says the Department of Environmental Conservation, the state agency that issued the permit, “failed to consider the project’s effect on the surrounding Native communities” in its analysis.

The appeal says that IPOP’s development would come “at the direct expense of the Native economy” and that “local Native subsistence and cultural practices will be directly and adversely affected — if not outright destroyed.”

IPOP’s project is opposed by several regional and local groups, including Bering Straits Native Corporation and the City of Nome.

Last spring, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers approved a different permit for the project, reversing an earlier decision to deny it.

Northern Journal contributor Max Graham can be reached at max@northernjournal.com. He’s interested in any and all mining related stories, as well as introductory meetings with people in and around the industry.

This article was originally published in Northern Journal, a newsletter from Nathaniel Herz. Subscribe at this link.