BioCoder #12

Chapter 1. Citizen Salmon

Glen Martin

Seattle is rich in cultural icons. Think artisanal coffee, grunge rock, the Space Needle, Pike Place Market: they are all instantly recognizable symbols of the city.

But Seattle is more than a city. As the foremost urban center of the Pacific Northwest—or Cascadia, in the preferred regional parlance—its significance and influence are broad. Seattle’s symbols are thus Cascadia’s symbols. And nothing is more emblematic of Cascadia than salmon. The five species of Pacific salmon—chinook, coho, pink, sockeye, and chum—have both economic and emotional significance to the people of the Pacific Northwest. Residents enjoy catching them and eating them, but the fish also serve as indicators for the health of the regional biome. Moreover, they are totems. Cascadia people don’t just value salmon. They revere them.

So the whole issue of sustainable seafood—especially sustainably harvested salmon—has particular resonance in Seattle. Not only are farmed salmon spurned, but locals want to know the source of their wild salmon: who caught it, where it was caught, and how it was caught. But there’s no way to really confirm that. A salmon steak or fillet, after all, doesn’t come with a resume.

That might change if a Seattle-based group of salmonid-loving biohackers have their way. They’ve launched Citizen Salmon, a DIY initiative aimed at genotyping Pacific salmon. The object of the project is to identify a wide range of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPS) ...