Tuesday November 26, 2024
Oakland North —
It’s a sunny Tuesday morning on the shores of Lake Merritt, and a small group of researchers and curious onlookers is crowded around a dead fish.
The silvery, 13-inch-long Chinook salmon, pulled that morning from a small, enclosed arm of Lake Merritt that leads to Glen Echo Creek, is placed on a concrete slab, and a man with a sharp instrument gets to work. First he slices through the belly, and then separates the head from the body.
“We are going to remove the ear bones, which have a lot of information,” says Katherine Noonan, founder of Oakland’s Rotary Nature Center Friends, an environmental education group, as the passers-by crane their necks to observe. “They have rings in them like the rings of a tree.” By analyzing them, she explains, it might be possible to decipher how this Chinook salmon found its way from the ocean to downtown Oakland.