On a cool summer day somewhere in Southeast Alaska, a marten prowls the shore looking for an easy meal. Its efforts are soon rewarded with a spawned-out pink salmon. Dragging the salmon up the bank and into the woods, the marten finds shelter under an upturned tree and begins feasting on its catch. It would appear the migration of this salmon has come to an end. But as ecologist Merav Ben-David of the University of Alaska Fairbanks has learned, the migration has in one sense only just begun.
Plants pick that nitrogen up.
And that's what I found. I found evidence of marine-derived nitrogen in plants up to 1,000 meters away from the stream, in sites of carnivore activity. Nitrogen is an element essential to the growth of plants and animals. In research described recently in the journal Nature, Merav Ben-David traced the migration of nitrogen from decaying salmon into the ecosystem. She didn't have to look far to see how it got there.