A Coho Salmon's Journey - NYTimes.com Aliette Frank, a postdoctoral scholar at Royal Roads University, explores sustainable community development on the coast of British Columbia. Friday, March 23 The head, body and tail of a coho salmon smolt are about to be thrust from the incubating waters of the Fraser River into the wide, wild world of the Pacific Ocean. At the mouth of the Fraser, the largest river in British Columbia, where the current changes from a slow, steady riparian flow to the swift quaking waves of open ocean, I watch the smolt (a young salmon migrating from freshwater to saltwater) prepare for its big saltwater entry. Coho salmon are an important food source for Steller sea lions and a cultural icon of Canada's West Coast. What apples are to pie, salmon are to B.C. With a lateral undulation here and a pectoral wiggle there, she made it and has moved little since the saltwater rush. She's probably tired from her noble battle down the river. She's probably been living for a year after hatching from the gravel, only recently migrating to the mouth of the mighty Fraser. If this smolt is a member of the interior Fraser River coho salmon population (Oncorhynchus kisutch Walbaum) she is a B.C. at-risk species. Stressful marine conditions as a result of climate change, overfishing and habitat perturbations have contributed to the decline in the interior Fraser River salmon population. The coho has an extra challenging journey before she'll head back up to spawn, when she'll be about two feet long. Interior Fraser coho spend 18 months at sea before returning to the Fraser, which means they have a three-year life cycle. During the 18 months from the Johnstone Strait south to Juan de Fuca, the fish eat, swim and, among other activities, navigate around the ships. A lot of ocean vessels, especially oil tankers, travel this passage. Canada is one of the top two exporters of oil to the United States and has one of the largest oil reserves, estimated at about 178.8 billion barrels. Canada's well-being is significantly tied to the export of fuel. The well-being of the smolt and the interior Fraser River coho population as a whole is likewise coupled to oil, but in a different way. The more oil Canada consumes, the more greenhouse gases we emit and the bigger the potential effect on salmon habitat. Similarly, the more oil Canada exports, the more oil tankers run these waters. This is why, starting Monday, I will be exploring the concept of "degrowth," and with my team, learning from elders in the T'Sou-ke First Nation what they as a community have been doing to reduce patterns of production and consumption in the face of climate change. Ziiiip - she's off. The water is all bubbles underneath, and now all I see is her disappearing tail. The smolt was a hatchery release; I could see the healed scar instead of what would have been an adipose fin. She's headed out in the strait, toward the south tip of Vancouver Island, more than 150 miles south of where I started in Campbell River.