Lawrence Ruben uses an electric auger to punch a hole through roughly six inches of ice on the Hornaday River east of Paulatuk, N.W.T.
The machine does its job in four seconds.
Water and pulverized ice rush up to the surface as he pulls out the spiraled blade. He steps back, turns to his daughter, and says, “the best contraption since sliced bread.” They both laugh at the joke before he steps away to drill the next hole.
The Hornaday River is about a 25-minute ATV-ride from Paulatuk — a distance of eight kilometres, as the crow flies. Ruben and his wife, Dianne, have a built a 16-by-16 foot cabin not far from its bank. It’s a place where they spend a lot of time — to decompress and to fish for Arctic char.
On this particular trip with their daughter and son-in-law, they won’t have any luck.
Arctic char in the Paulatuk region have historically overwintered in the Hornaday and Brock rivers before returning to Darnley Bay and the Arctic Ocean. But Ruben said the char’s movements have become unpredictable.
“In the fall time, they should be up the river,” said Ruben, a member of the Paulatuk Hunters and Trappers Committee. “Based on our fishing effort lately, we haven’t caught very much.”
Changes like this are why the community has been collaborating with Fisheries and Oceans Canada on a research project: together, they caught and tagged char last July to better understand where and when the fish are spending their time.
38 Arctic char tagged with acoustic monitors
Federal scientists and Paulatuk harvesters spent four weeks catching 38 Arctic char at four locations around Darnley Bay and implanting acoustic transmitter tags inside them.
They also installed 33 receivers in the Arctic ocean.
The purpose of this system is to paint a picture of where the fish have — or haven’t — been spending their time. The tags emit a high frequency sound that’s inaudible to the human ear. When fish pass by the receivers, the receivers pick up the signal and store the data.
“We’ll open the fish, insert the tag — it’s about the size of a tube of lip balm — and stitch it up. And then the fish goes on about their daily lives and and sends out those signals from the acoustic tag that will then be collected on receivers that we’ve put underwater,” explained Tazi Rodrigues, an aquatic science biologist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada based in Winnipeg.
“Next summer, we’ll go out in boats and bring the receivers back to the surface and then we’ll download the files from them. And that will just be a list of every fish that swam by that was heard, and a time stamp.”
Paul Blanchfield, a federal research scientist also based in Winnipeg, said the plan was to install receivers in freshwater lakes connected to Darnley Bay as well. As of late November, they hadn’t been installed yet — but the hope was to deploy five during the winter.
Blanchfield said Fisheries and Oceans Canada has been involved in char monitoring in the region for more than 30 years. The intent of this project, he said, is to understand what areas of Darnley Bay are most important to the species and when they leave the bay for their overwintering areas.
If they gather enough data, Blanchfield said it might also offer answers to some other questions too, like what triggers their migration.
“The Arctic is changing quickly, with very noticeable losses of sea ice thickness occurring in this region,” he said. “The timing of ice breakup in the spring and freeze-up in the fall are also changing, both of which have the potential to influence how much time char spend in the marine environment — and rely on food resources in this area — compared to the freshwater residence of their annual life cycle.”
The acoustic tags have a lifespan of four years. But there’s also a chance the fish are caught before those batteries run out. The scientists expect that will happen to at least some of them — and each fish has also been tagged with an external tag by its dorsal fin.
If harvesters catch a char that’s part of the project, Blanchfield said they could choose to release the fish back into the water or return the transmitter from inside the fish to the local hunters and trappers committee for a reward.
Blanchfield said one fish was caught in a net while he and Rodrigues were in the community this past summer. “We haven’t heard how many others have been caught so far,” he said.
Warming climate and thawing permafrost
Ruben said he and his wife remember 2010 as a “significant year” when they noticed climate change was having an effect on the region.
Usually in the month of April people would have to bring out chisels and augers to make fishing holes in the ice, he said. That year, Ruben said, the Hornaday River was running on April 25 — a month earlier than normal.
Erosion and landslides are a factor too.
“If you look at the river system, it’s like somebody has taken a rake to the riverbanks and just scraped them down,” he said. He said silt being added to the water is making the rivers an “untenable” place for the char to spawn — he and his wife have caught many fish with unspent eggs in the last eight years.
Back on the ice of the Hornaday River, Ruben kneels next to one of the holes he’s drilled. He bobs his 1.5-foot-long fishing stick up and down — making the silver hook and bait at the end of the line dance in the water. It’s a type of fishing that is locally referred to as “jiggling.”
He looks down into the hole and the dark water below, waiting for a fleeting glimpse of the species his community relies on.
“The importance of our char as a subsistence resource is immense to the community of Paulatuk,” he says. “You can’t diminish it in any way, shape, or form.”
