Mark Buckley, managing partner of Digital Observer LLC, found that salmon caught, processed and shipped from Alaska's remote markets can heat up to as much as 62 degrees Fahrenheit before being sold to customers in the Midwest. Buckley said his project, which involved tagging fish with computer-driven, waterproof temperature gauges, arose from a personal interest in the subject.

"It was always my observation that I never really knew what happened to my fish," he said. "I saw a discrepancy in the quality of the fish emerging from the nets and those that actually found their way onto the supermarket shelves; I saw the loss of markets to farmed fish; and I put two and two together."

Computerized sensors, or Smart Tags, were programmed with the names of the participating fishermen, processors, and distributors and attached to the fish with an electrician's zip tie. They were further programmed to take the fish's temperature every 30 minutes, Buckley said, and information was stored in a chip with 667 days of memory.

"What we found was that fish warm up at 36,000 feet," Buckley said.

He explained that the fish that left the processors, where they had been cleaned and gutted, were enclosed in bubble wrap and sealed in a wet-lock box with a handful of cold gel packs that act as coolant. The fish that came in direct contact with the packs stayed cool, but, Buckley noted, those that were at the bottom of the box warmed up.

Furthermore, the more time the fish spent sitting at airports, the more likely it was that they would heat up and become degraded.

One shipment of Copper River salmon sat on the tarmac at a Chicago, Ill. airport for 90 minutes in 80-degree heat and warmed to 62 degrees before cargo handlers placed the product in ice. By the time the distributor arrived to retrieve the salmon, it had cooled and the degradation went unnoticed.

Those increases can have a drastic effect on the quality, shelf life and overall marketability of the fish, said Bob Sullivan, the president of Chicago-based Plitt Fish Co. and a distributor of Alaska salmon who participated in the study.

"For every degree above 33 that a fish hits, the fish loses shelf life, so what you're essentially doing is taking away from the dining experience," Sullivan said.

He noted that Plitt sells its fish to gourmet restaurants and delis that demand a high-quality product. When an Alaska shipment is not up to standards, the fish is tossed out so it loses market share, he said.

"I've had purchasers take a look at some of my Alaska salmon and tell me that they are better off buying red snapper," Sullivan said.

Processing the problem

While packaging and shipping techniques have an effect on the quality of the fish, the degradation of the fish is also dependent on how those fish are managed, Sullivan said.

"I went out on these (Alaska) fishing boats and saw hundreds of salmon dumped from a net, thrashing around and beating themselves up," he said.

Fish caught in nets are captured and sent en masse through a multi-person processing phase, Buckley said. He discovered that, while only about 48 hours passes between the fish arriving in the net and their arrival at the distributor, a multitude of both people and machines handle each fish individually.

Fish caught in nets are sent through processing plants where they are handled by about 20 people and where they are processed with machines, Buckley's study found. Between each stage, the fish is cleaned and moved along with ground-temperature water.

"All that handling affects the fish," and warms them before they are packed for shipment Buckley said. "When you warm that fish up, it takes an awful lot of energy and an awful lot of time to cool it back down."

A different approach, however, is trolling. This technique allows the fisherman to gut the catch and pack it on ice while still on the boat, Buckley said. He added that trollers tend to be at sea for longer periods of time than their netting counterparts, but the fish are kept consistently chilled throughout the voyage.

When trolled fish are sold, they are sent to the plant where they are washed, weighed and graded according to quality before being packed away with insulation, Buckley said. Throughout the process, they are never allowed to warm beyond 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

"That fish remained in pristine condition because it was never allowed to heat up," he said. "Many things were conspiring to keep that fish in very good condition."

Some of the trolled fish had been out of the water for a week or more, Buckley said, but when he called the processors to see how the product arrived, "They (the fish) looked so good that the processors took them home and ate them," he said.

Whether or not the Smart Tag Project will affect the way in which salmon is handled has yet to be seen, but Buckley said he intends to continue with his study. He is currently looking for funding that would allow him to duplicate the project next season, and he has found a second type of temperature reader that is more economical then the $110 Smart Tag.

Efforts to track shipments may even go as far as developing a bar-code system, Buckley said. He noted that the tracking would increase accountability for an industry where the source of a problem is often hard to pinpoint.

"There's a lot of finger-pointing when things go wrong," Buckley said. "That was fine when Alaska was still the king of salmon, but we're no longer the only salmon in town.

"It really is a case of change our practices or die."