Nome students fish for science

Last Friday, a group of Nome-Beltz high school students decked out in their winter gear stood in two rows, fishing for tomcod in the Nome Inner Harbor.
The kids weren’t playing hooky. The fishing was part of a larger unit that science teacher Sarah Liben is running on harmful algal blooms in Nome. Liben has partnered with Alaska Sea Grant’s Marine Advisory Program Agent Gay Sheffield and Norton Sound Health Corporation’s Office of Environmental Health to teach high schoolers how harmful algal blooms affect the subsistence foods in the area.
For the past few years, high schoolers have been helping test for harmful algal bloom effects in the waters around Nome.
Harmful algal blooms, or HABs for short, are blooms of toxic algae. In 2019 and 2022, high numbers of Alexandrium catenella were detected in the Bering Strait and Chukchi Sea. Alexandrium produces algal biotoxins. When the algae is eaten by fish, shellfish, and other creatures, the toxins enter the food chain. High levels of it can render subsistence foods unsafe to eat.
In 2023, the first time Sheffield did this activity with students, they didn’t expect to find any detectable levels of toxin in the tomcod. “Everyone told us, ‘You're gonna see nothing. It'll be a big fat zero,’” she said. “And we said, ‘Well, we should try anyway.’ Just try it. It'll be good. We'll confirm that there's no toxin.”
When they found detectable levels, they were shocked. The levels detected were safe for human consumption, but seeing some when they didn’t expect to see any was surprising. Sheffield told the students that when they reached out to the experts on HABs at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, the scientists there were shocked as well.  “They had to say, no one's ever caught fish and had them tested in the fall,” she said. “So, what you guys are a part of now is sort of really groundbreaking, because nobody in the outside science world of harmful algal blooms has: One, the conditions we have with sea ice; and two has started to catch tomcod in the fall and take a look.”
Starting last week Wednesday, classes of high schoolers trooped out to the inner harbor to go ice fishing. Using jigs, they dropped fishing lines festooned with colorful beads and a formidable hook down to the bottom of the harbor, and then quickly pulled the lines back up. When they hit resistance, they yanked, hoping to snag a tomcod. Over three separate classes of fishing, students gathered enough fish to not only test for saxitoxin levels, but also to fry up and eat themselves and to donate to the Quyana Care Center at NSHC.
On Friday morning, in the UAF Northwest Campus laboratory, the students measured the tomcod caught on Wednesday and then learned how to process the fish for consumption. Part of the aim of the unit is to tie the science the kids are doing to their regular lives. Humans in the Bering Strait are a part of the ecosystem here. “What affects the ecosystem directly affects us,” Sheffield said.
The biggest fish will be sent off to Anchorage to be tested for toxin levels, adding to the three years of data already collected by Liben’s classes.
Back down in the inner harbor, the bitter windchill didn’t keep ninth-grader Marcus Simeonoff from pulling up 35 fish. He said tomcod fishing isn’t hard. “It’s pretty simple. Just put your line in and catch.”