Each year, juvenile coho salmon embark on a hero's journey. But their adventure doesn't require just one map—instead, coho rear in two environments. Grab an oxygen meter and turbidity gauge from your backback and follow those fish! In this episode, we're helicoptering in a co-investigator to help out. Sponsored by Seafood Producers Cooperative, home of Alaska Gold Seafood.

A coho's journey involves more than a bubble bath of groundwater in a side channel and munching on mini-crustaceans in estuaries. They also face deadly threats posed by old-growth logging. When forest shade disppears and erosion clouds river mouths, coho struggle to survive. After collecting data on oxygen depletion and sediments loads, you'll learn how you can help coho make it to the sea.

The SeaBank Chronicles is a natural sound theater transporting you through the living science of Southeast Alaska. Combining facts and mystery, each 7-minute episode delivers listeners to Alaska’s coastal rainforest to groundtruth terrestrial and marine ecosystems. Immerse yourself in rich audio effects woven with lush voice narration for an experience that is educational and spellbinding. A project of the Alaska Sustainable Fisheries Trust, The SeaBank Chronicles is written, hosted, and produced by Beth Short-Rhoads.

When in doubt, just keep listening.

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There’s a submersible in the SeaBank supply closet. Locate that—and some thick socks. We’re off to find some hooligan, and they like it cold.

Hooligan are a forage fish that spawn in glacial-fed SeaBank rivers where ideal temperature and salinity conditions support the survival of this rich species. Made of 20% oil, hooligan are a link between essential fatty acids found in plankton and the rest of the food web. Each spring, they return to the SeaBank’s icy waters where embryos tumble-incubate to estuaries before hatching. Hooligan have been a key spring food for Indigenous people for millennia, providing nutrients, medicine, and cultural connection in addition to feeding sea mammals, eagles, and other fish after a long, lean winter.

As hooligan runs falter elsewhere on the west coast of North America, it’s more important than ever to protect SeaBank waterways where this key forage fish still thrives.

When in doubt, just keep listening.

Sources and credits

Sensors in your smart shirt indicate you're overheating. Follow the voice of your radio operator to the shelter of a forest canopy. This adventure in the cooling power of trees is sponsored by Earthjustice.

You’ve worked up a sweat groundtruthing the SeaBank ecosystem. Lucky for you, there’s a forest in your future—a place where temperatures dip to human-friendly levels beneath feathery western hemlocks and prickly Sitka spruce. But it’s not just shade that makes this old growth forest a cool place. Amid a soundtrack of rustling treetops, flowing water, and spellbinding musical interludes, you’ll learn three ways that forests help cool our planet, beyond the shade factor and the major benefit of climate sequestration. It’s all about those piney smells wafting around you, branches sighing overhead, and the voracious appetite of hydrogen bonds. Think forests are passive players in climate-proofing our world? Think again. More information about the connection between people and forests at www.earthjustice.org.

The SeaBank Chronicles is a natural sound theater transporting you through the living science of Southeast Alaska. Combining facts and mystery, each 7-minute episode delivers listeners to Alaska’s coastal rainforest to groundtruth terrestrial and marine ecosystems. Immerse yourself in rich audio effects woven with lush voice narration for an experience that is educational and spellbinding. A project of the Alaska Sustainable Fisheries Trust, The SeaBank Chronicles is written, hosted, and produced by Beth Short-Rhoads.

When in doubt, just keep listening.

Sources and credits.