Tula Quarterly Q2, 2026

Welcome to the Q2 2026 issue of Tula Quarterly.

Much of what shapes Canada's western coast and inland watersheds happens out of view. Cold, oxygen-poor water moves along deep submarine troughs. Decades of river-flow records quietly track a changing climate. Genetic material survives, barely, inside a 37,000-year-old bone from a Vancouver Island cave. This issue is about the tools, and the people, making these hidden systems visible.

In this issue:

• The Invisible River. Hakai's oceanography team deploys autonomous ocean gliders off Calvert Island, tracking seasonal low-oxygen water across the continental shelf in conditions too rough for research vessels.

• What Canada's Rivers Are Telling Us. Free Flow Canada is linking decades of scattered hydrological records into a single picture, using open-source tools like hydrocan so scientists, decision-makers, and Indigenous Guardians can track long-term trends, including a documented decline in summer flows on the Fraser River.

• Beyond the Bear. Hakai's ancient DNA team reflects on a 37,000-year-old brown bear vertebra recovered from a Vancouver Island cave, and the adaptive lab methods it took to coax genetic material out of severely degraded bone.

Whether tracking a current below the surface, unifying river data, or refining how DNA is pulled from ancient bone, this issue is about patient observation, the kind that turns data into a fuller picture of a changing coast.

Every summer, hundreds of meters below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, a river begins to flow toward the British Columbia coast.

Nobody can see it. It carries no sediment, leaves no surface trace, appears on no weather map. It moves cold and oxygen-poor, pressed upward from the deep ocean by summer winds that draw warmer surface water seaward, and then it slides eastward across the continental shelf, filling a long submarine valley, inching toward one of the most productive coastlines on Earth.

For most of human history, this river ran largely unseen. Fishermen worked the waters above it; oceanographers, sampling from research vessels, caught occasional glimpses of it. But tracking it was hard—no one could follow where it went across a whole season, or watch how it changed from one year to the next.

What changed, in the last few years, was that scientists at the Hakai Institute found a way to follow it. As Wiley Evans, the Institute's lead oceanographer, puts it: “We're tracking ocean change with robots.”

Calvert Island sits in a geographic gap that is easy to overlook on a map. It lies roughly halfway between Vancouver and Alaska, in the open water between Haida Gwaii and the north end of Vancouver Island—neither fully sheltered inside the coastal channels nor fully exposed to the open Pacific. The Heiltsuk town of Bella Bella is 80 kilometers away by sea. The nearest road is much farther.

This position, which might seem like remoteness, is actually the point. The continental shelf off Calvert Island is the broadest in western Canada—roughly 120 kilometers wide, a feature unlike anything else along the coast, or anywhere else on the west coast of North America. The channels of the central coast converge here. If you want to understand what the Pacific is doing to the BC coast, this is where you would want to be.

And cutting across that broad shelf is a riverbed of sorts—a long, deep channel called Goose Trough, incised to about 300 meters in places, running from the open ocean almost to the doorstep of Hakai Pass. It works, Evans explains, something like the inverse of a river valley.

Instead of water flowing downhill to the sea, this is a channel along which dense ocean water can move inward and upward. “You could think of it as a river basin in reverse,” he says. “It's a conduit for deep, dense ocean water—because it's hard for water to go up and over things.” The trough is the path of least resistance. The invisible river follows it because water, like everything else, takes the easiest way through.

To follow the water—not just visit it, but track it as it moved—the scientists needed a different kind of tool.

The ocean glider looks less like a scientific instrument than like a large yellow torpedo. About two meters long, finned, sealed against pressure, it carries no propeller. It moves by changing its own buoyancy—pumping fluid between internal chambers to sink or rise, using small wings to translate that vertical motion into forward travel. The result is a slow, undulating path: down toward depth, back toward the surface, down again, tracing a zigzag through the water column as it goes. At each turn it surfaces briefly, transmits its position by satellite, takes new instructions, and dives again.

What makes the glider revolutionary is not any single measurement but its endurance. It can operate for months without human contact, crossing open water in conditions that would keep a research vessel in harbor. “The glider doesn't care about bad weather,” Evans says. “It's out there in conditions that would be really tough for us to work in, even from a large vessel.” A single six-week mission—running from Hakai Pass out across the shelf to the edge of the open Pacific and back, a round trip of some 300 to 400 kilometers—costs around $100,000. A research ship costs roughly that much every two days. And all along its path, the glider measures continuously: temperature, salinity, oxygen, chlorophyll, a profile of the entire water column from surface to seafloor, collected in weather no crew could work in and at a fraction of the price.

Before gliders, oceanographers relied largely on moorings—instruments anchored in one spot, recording continuously but only ever from that single location. A mooring watches one place; a glider watches a journey. And following an invisible river is nothing if not a journey.

The glider program isn't Hakai's alone. It runs as part of C-PROOF—the Canadian Pacific Robotic Ocean Observing Facility—a partnership with the University of Victoria, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and the University of British Columbia that puts autonomous instruments to work across Canada's Pacific waters.

Under certain conditions each summer, northwesterly winds pull surface water away from the coast, and cold, dense water from the depths rises to replace it. This process—upwelling—is fundamental to the productivity of eastern Pacific coastlines: it draws nutrients from the deep ocean into sunlit surface waters, fueling food webs that support everything from krill to salmon to humpback whales. Scientists expected to find upwelling along the BC coast. What the glider revealed, in far more detail than had been possible before, was what that upwelled water actually carries—and where it lingers.

The water is hypoxic: low in dissolved oxygen. In the deep ocean, far from sunlight, oxygen is consumed by microorganisms over long timescales, and the water that rises onto the shelf carries that deficit with it. Through the summer, glider data showed this water settling into Goose Trough—lying along the seafloor, persisting for months, growing steadily more oxygen-starved. And the scale of it was greater than anyone had anticipated. “The extent and intensity were more than we were expecting to see,” Evans says. Analysis by postdoctoral researcher Sam Stevens, who set the glider observations against decades of historical records, showed that these hypoxic events have been growing more frequent, more intense, and more widespread over time. They now appear essentially every summer.

Then came 2023, and a wrinkle. In earlier years, when autumn storms arrived and the dense upwelled water was pushed back offshore, oxygen levels on the inner shelf recovered along with it. In 2023 the recovery lagged. Oxygen stayed low even after the dense water was gone—this time held down not by upwelling but by something local. Phytoplankton had bloomed in the nearshore, their cells sinking to the seafloor and feeding a bloom of bacteria that consumed oxygen as they broke the organic matter down. The oxygen did come back, but on its own schedule, decoupled from the tides and winds that had always governed it before. The story was more complicated than a river arriving and departing on schedule.

For marine life, none of this is abstract.

When hypoxic water fills the depths and warm surface water—above about 19 °C—caps the shallows, mobile species like salmon and herring are squeezed into an ever-narrower band of livable water in between. Evans calls it habitat contraction. “Part of the water column is no longer favorable habitat,” he says. “That could be problematic for species trying to forage in a really confined area.”

For animals that cannot swim away—crab, and the slow-moving invertebrates of the seafloor—there is no in-between to retreat to. On the Oregon coast, comparable hypoxic events have produced mass die-offs, and crab have been seen migrating inshore en masse, fleeing the low-oxygen water until there is nowhere left to go.

But the glider revealed something else, too—something no one had fully expected.

At the same depths where Goose Trough holds its hypoxic water through the summer, the water on the other side of Hakai Pass, in the deep basin of Fitz Hugh Sound, stays comparatively rich in oxygen. The question, as Evans frames it, is simply: why?

If Goose Trough is the riverbed, Hakai Pass is the gate—and it may be doing something remarkable. The pass is narrow and turbulent; tides rip through its constriction. The leading hypothesis is that this violent mixing works oxygen into the water as it crosses the threshold, and that the newly oxygenated water then sinks to fill the basin beyond. “In early spring, the oxygen content in the deep part of Fitz Hugh Sound is highest, and the water there is also freshest,” Evans explains. “You can't mix fresh, oxygenated water straight down from the surface to 300 meters—not here, anyway. So it has to be getting oxygenated somewhere else. And that somewhere is Hakai Pass.” Work by Martin Williamson, a University of Victoria graduate student working with C-PROOF co-lead Jody Klymak, is pointing in exactly this direction.

The inside waterways, in other words, may be protected—not by distance, not by policy, but by geography. By the shape of the seafloor and the turbulence of the water forced through it.

It is not a guarantee, and Evans is careful with the word. The same intensification building on the shelf—hypoxia more frequent, more severe, more widespread—could eventually overwhelm the mixing that Hakai Pass provides. So could ocean acidification, as human carbon continues to accumulate in the sea. “I'm not sure that protection will be lasting,” he says. “Eventually, the benefit of mixing in Hakai Pass might be swamped.”

To learn how long the gate holds, the scientists need to watch it continuously—and the glider, for all its range, cannot. It passes through Hakai Pass only twice per mission: once on the way out, once six weeks later on the way back. It catches glimpses, not the full story of what happens hour by hour, tide by tide.

So this coming spring, Hakai will put a different instrument into the pass. A C-PROOF Wirewalker is a profiling platform that rides up and down a moored cable using nothing but the energy of the waves, measuring oxygen, temperature, salinity, and current through the full depth of the water, around the clock, for months at a time. It will resolve the questions the glider can only raise: whether the strong spring tides drive more oxygenation than the weaker neaps, how storms modulate the renewal of oxygen in Fitz Hugh Sound, and how long the pass can go on protecting the waters behind it.

The glider mapped the approach. The Wirewalker will watch the gate.

The ocean keeps its workings hidden. For nearly all the time people have lived and fished along this coast, the water simply moved—upwelling, mixing, carrying its chemistry toward shore—with no way for anyone to watch it happen. Scientists could read the ocean's past in fossil shells and seafloor cores; what they had no way to do was follow the process live, across a whole season, as it unfolded. What has changed, in the last few years, is not the ocean. It is our ability to observe it.

Next summer the river will begin its journey again, as it always has. Now we can follow where it goes.

Scientific figures adapted from Evans et al. (2025), Global Biogeochemical Cycles. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025GB008608.

A few years ago, an epidemiologist studying the spread of West Nile virus in Ontario needed a reliable way to pull together years of water-level data. Mosquitoes, which carry the virus, breed in standing water. How much of that water is around depends on rainfall and the seasons. Making sense of that pattern meant digging up records reaching back further than any single summer. That search led to a small, decade-old software tool built for an entirely different purpose, written by a software developer named Sam Albers to make Water Survey of Canada data easier to access.

Nobody designed the tool with mosquitoes in mind.

That's largely the point.

In the summer of 2025, the Fraser River ran low, with flows below normal in June, July, August, and September. By itself, one dry summer isn't remarkable. Rivers fluctuate. But at Hope, British Columbia, home to the river's longest-running gauge, the picture goes back further: mean monthly discharge in July, August, and September has been on a statistically significant downward trend across 113 years of records, from 1912 through 2025.

That distinction is what ecosystem scientist Ian Giesbrecht has spent the past year thinking about. River flow affects more than many people realize. It impacts the salmon that move between fresh water and ocean over the course of their lives, decisions about water withdrawal and flood planning, and judgments about what restoration should look like. All of it depends on knowing whether conditions fall within a normal range or are shifting somewhere new. Answering that well requires more than a single measurement; it requires being able to place this year alongside the past decades.

"We're seeing change in the water cycle, change in the climate, change in rivers," Giesbrecht says. "Their averages and their extremes."

It's also, Giesbrecht thinks, a moment when a few things are converging. The change itself has become harder to miss: the same Hope gauge record that shows summer flows declining also shows a statistically significant rise in winter flows, from January through April. Giesbrecht says the pattern matches what climate studies across western North America have been documenting: warmer winters pushing snowmelt earlier and shifting rivers toward higher winter flows and lower summer ones. At the same time, software for combining data from many different sources has improved enough that a national-scale analysis, once a multi-year undertaking, can now be assembled far more efficiently. Funding and policy have caught up, too: the Canada Water Agency, which helped fund this work, released a national freshwater data strategy and a freshwater science agenda earlier this year identifying water data sharing as a national priority.

By the time Albers joined the Hakai Institute, he'd already spent close to a decade building and maintaining tidyhydat, the package the West Nile epidemiologists later used. It gave hydrologists a direct route to Water Survey of Canada data through R, the statistical programming language many of them already used for analysis.

At a recent conference, Albers was surprised by how widely the package had been adopted across the Canadian hydrology community.

Free Flow Canada, where he leads the technical development at Hakai, asks a related but distinct question: how can we access all the freshwater data that is available outside the Water Survey of Canada network?

In many cases, the information people need already exists. It's collected by provincial governments, hydroelectric utilities, conservation groups, Indigenous water programs, and other groups across the country, each publishing in its own format, on its own systems. Accessing that data from those sources often meant writing a unique piece of code for each source.

hydrocan, the package Albers built in 2026 through Free Flow Canada, aims to reduce some of that friction. It reaches into the open data services that organizations already maintain and hands back a single, usable dataset with code that is consistent across data sources.

"Through hydrocan and tidyhydat, we connect R users to hydrometric data," Albers says.

The agencies that collect the information remain responsible for it: hydrocan doesn't store or alter anything, just provides a consistent way to access it. That was a deliberate choice.

Albers is blunt about the alternative: persuading every province, utility, and monitoring organization in the country to defragment the data landscape is "certainly probably a worthy goal," he says, but not one he's interested in chasing. Free Flow Canada works with the fragmentation as it exists. Today the package connects four data providers, including the governments of British Columbia and Quebec, Hydro-Québec, and Hakai's own river-gauging network on the central coast. Because hydrocan is open source, other agencies and developers can add their own data sources over time. New contributors are already in conversation about doing exactly that.

Albers sees hydrocan's narrow scope as one of its strengths: a small, working tool, deliberately not trying to be everything to everyone, that other people are now free to build on if they choose to.

The wider Free Flow Canada project, meanwhile, is also being developed with partners across the country. On the central coast, the Central Coast Indigenous Resource Alliance is helping shape the project so its tools better support First Nations water stewardship and decision-making. That work ultimately reaches the Guardians and technicians out on the water taking measurements, and the decision-makers relying on what they find.

On the opposite side of the country, scientists at Memorial University in Newfoundland and Labrador and their collaborators are applying the same approach in Nunatsiavut, Labrador, a vast stretch of coastline where many individual watersheds have little or no flow monitoring of their own. Communities there are building datasets for the specific rivers they rely on, but in the meantime, tidyhydat and hydrocan offer an easier way to draw on data collected across that larger surrounding region. Once local records exist, the same tools make it easier to share that information back out, for others to draw on in turn.

Hakai's interest in any of this, Giesbrecht points out, didn't begin with rivers. It began with the ocean. Watersheds deliver fresh water, nutrients, sediment, and carbon to the coast, making rivers an essential part of understanding what happens in the coastal ocean. That coastal perspective, paired with Albers's decade of hydrology software development, gave Hakai both a reason to take on the work and the technical capacity to do it: techniques developed to understand one stretch of the British Columbia coast turn out to be just as useful for watersheds draining into the Arctic, the Great Lakes, or the Atlantic.

The next phase aims to bring the results of that work to a much broader audience. hydrocan was built for analysts working in R; it handles the data acquisition. The next step is a web application that takes what Giesbrecht's analysis produces and makes it accessible to a broader audience: watershed managers, decision-makers, and members of the public who want to understand what their local rivers are doing, no programming required.

"I think that'll be the hardest part," Albers says. Building software for hydrologists is relatively straightforward, because they already understand the data. Building something useful for watershed managers, Indigenous Guardians, and the broader public means answering a much harder question about what information people need in order to make decisions. For now, the scope is deliberately narrowing rather than expanding: the first web application will focus on British Columbia, while Giesbrecht develops its vision and user experience.

It's a problem Albers doesn't think AI will solve out from under them. He's watched an AI model write hundreds of lines of working code to pull data from an open API on the first attempt. What that code can't supply is judgment about what the result should look like, or whether it's asking the right question. That, in his view, is still Giesbrecht's job: knowing what a watershed manager, an ocean scientist, or an Indigenous Guardian needs to see in order to act on it. If anything, Albers thinks tools like hydrocan matter more as AI use grows, not less. A stable, human-maintained interface gives people and AI systems alike a consistent, trustworthy place to get the same answer, rather than each one generating a slightly different script and getting a slightly different result.

Giesbrecht sees that need building from a few directions at once. Stream drought, barely part of the conversation on this coast a couple decades ago, now comes up regularly, even in places that get some of the heaviest rainfall in the country. There's more data available to catch long-term trends, and more confidence that what shows up in it reflects something real rather than noise. Water management carries economic and policy pressure that didn't exist a generation ago. And government data, increasingly, is published openly by default rather than released on request. Taken together, these changes are why people here now care as much about what a river is becoming as what it's doing today.

In some cases, the data has existed all along. It was scattered across systems that weren't always built with integration in mind. Free Flow Canada is an attempt to make it easier to find, so that communities, decision-makers, and scientists across the country can better understand what Canada's rivers are telling us.

When members of the RCMP dive team arrived at the Hakai Institute's Calvert Coastal Observatory, they found more than a convenient base. They found a working environment much like the ones they may encounter on the job: remote, changeable, and rarely predictable.

“You're not going to be able to choose ideal conditions,” says Hakai Institute cofounder Eric Peterson. Poor visibility and rough weather may complicate a training day, but they also make the experience more realistic.

RCMP vessels traveling the coast were already familiar with Hakai when the dive team's inquiry arrived. Asked whether the institute would host a training program, Eric's answer came easily.

“Without a blink of an eye, we said that's a good idea,” he recalls.

The facility offered an unusual combination of infrastructure and access. Its bunkhouses and main lodge allowed participants to live and train together, while its dock, communications systems, and dive compressor supported their daily operations. From Hakai, the team could also reach a wide range of coastal environments, from nearby waters to Rivers Inlet and locations farther north.

That combination closely mirrors what visiting scientific teams find at Hakai. “We built it to match scientific needs, and there's a perfect overlap between the two,” Eric says. “When they're here, they're just like another scientific team in-house.”

For the divers, training together in a remote setting also helped build the trust and familiarity needed when working under pressure. The program included participants with different levels of experience and from different parts of Canada, giving them time to learn from one another, test equipment, and develop as a team.

“Allowing us to train at the facility gives the team a chance to have a different experience and great training opportunity,” says Chris of the RCMP dive team.

Hosting the program also reflects Hakai's broader role on the coast. Although science remains central to its work, Eric does not want Hakai to become an isolated academic enterprise. He sees value in bringing together the many groups involved in understanding, managing, and safeguarding coastal environments—from scientists and Guardian Watchmen to resource managers, parks staff, the coast guard, and RCMP.

“We can offer quite a bit to all of them, and we can gain an awful lot by working with them,” he says.

Photo credit for all images: Courtesy RCMP

Roughly 37,000 years ago, a brown bear wandered a cooler, forested Vancouver Island, before the last great ice sheets reached their maximum extent. When the animal died, one of its bones came to rest deep inside a limestone cave, where the sheltered environment preserved it while countless others were lost. Thousands of years later, cavers found it, and scientists at the Hakai Institute sent it for radiocarbon dating. The result startled everyone: roughly 37,000 years old, the oldest animal bone yet recovered from the region.

Ask paleoecologist Chris Hebda what the world looked like when that bear was alive, and the honest answer is that no one really knows. The period is, as he puts it, “a bit of an unknown lost world”—old enough that the glaciers which came afterward scraped away most of the evidence. “We actually don't know very much” about what lived on northern Vancouver Island then, he says. A bone this old is a rare witness from a time that is mostly blank.

Which is why, at Hakai, the bear became important less for what it revealed about the past than for what it taught scientists about recovering the past at all.

Ancient DNA is changing which questions scientists can realistically answer about the distant past. Fragments of genetic material preserved in bones and sediments can trace how species are related, reconstruct vanished ecosystems, reach back tens of thousands of years—but only when they survive, and they rarely survive well. Time shatters the DNA; chemistry alters it; modern contamination floods it. When the team extracts DNA from an ancient bone, paleogenomics technician Mac Barrera notes, more than 99 percent of it usually belongs to something else—bacteria, fungi, the microbes that colonized the specimen over millennia. The DNA they actually want can be little more than a whisper. “You're working with the worst possible starting point,” says molecular DNA technologist Danielle Grant.

Recovering something useful from that is not a matter of dropping a sample into a sequencing machine. It is a matter of the hundreds of small decisions made before sequencing begins. Every improvement the team has made serves one modest, stubborn goal: to recover a little more from samples that might otherwise be written off as failures. 

That ambition shaped the lab from the start. When Hakai set out to build it several years ago, the point was never to buy equipment; it was to build capability. The early days, Hebda recalls, were “a bit of a leap of faith”—an attempt to make a dream meet reality. What began as little more than a “garden shed on Quadra” was designed, unusually, clean from the ground up rather than retrofitted from an older building, and staffed by people drawn from different disciplines—archaeology, molecular biology, genomics, bioinformatics, environmental DNA—each arriving with a different set of tools.

ancient DNA scientist Tyler Murchie has spent his energy less on chasing discoveries than on building the methods that make future discoveries possible. Every specimen, he points out, has its own problem: lake sediment behaves unlike cave sediment, a bone unlike permafrost, and even two bones from the same cave can hold their DNA in completely different ways. So instead of running every sample down one identical line, the team asked what would happen if the process adapted to the sample.

The clearest expression of that idea is a system Danielle Grant has helped build. Rather than treat the work as a single pipeline, the lab stops repeatedly to ask what each sample needs next. Is there enough DNA? Are naturally occurring compounds interfering? Would another method do better? Press on, or go back? She pictures it not as an assembly line but as a flower: every sample starts with the same stem—whatever preservation has left behind—and from there each takes its own path, some needing extra coaxing, others moving quickly, until a whole project becomes a bouquet, flowers from one garden, each a little different.

Even what counts as normal is still being worked out. “Ancient DNA normal is not like modern DNA normal,” she says. Much of the craft is learning to tell the difference—and, just as often, refusing to quit. “It takes a lot for us to give up on a sample.”

It is worth remembering what all this careful method is for. When the glaciers advanced across coastal British Columbia, Hebda says, they scoured away most of the physical record of the ecosystems that came before—the sediments, the bones, the ordinary evidence a paleoecologist would normally read. Ancient DNA offers another way back to what the ice erased. And unlike a single fossil, it can begin to return a whole living world: not one animal, but the plants and animals and microbes that shared a landscape, and how they fit together. The bear is one bone. The methods being built around it are aimed at recovering the rest of the picture.

This is where the bear earns its keep. Laboratories usually test new methods on synthetic DNA—molecules built to order. The bear offers something far more valuable: authentic ancient DNA, complete with all the damage, contamination, and unpredictability the team ultimately has to overcome. Because the bone is large enough to sample repeatedly, every improvement can be measured against the same specimen. That consistency has made it an ideal benchmark for refining the lab's methods.

But the bear isn't simply a test specimen. Each time the team sequences another portion of its genome, they also learn a little more about the animal itself. The same work that is improving the laboratory is gradually revealing the bear's own evolutionary history. Every advance serves two purposes at once.

Barrera's work meets the 99-percent problem head-on. Rather than sequence everything and hope, he is helping develop ways to use baits—probes that fish out just the fragments the team is after and leave most of the rest behind—recovering, from the same sample, on the order of 1,000 times more useful information. The bait panels, designed by Murchie, can already target plants and animals across vast spans of geography and time—but that reach has a price: the commercial baits run thousands of dollars apiece, are good for a single use, and only cost more as the targets multiply. So rather than keep buying them, the team is learning to make many of the tools themselves. What has been a fixed and costly supply becomes something they can adjust, expand, and eventually pass to other labs. Owning the synthesis opens a further door, too: with the process in their hands, they can start refining the wet-lab steps around it. The instinct, here as everywhere, is to turn a one-time solution into a reusable one.

That all of it actually works is easiest to see in an unlikely place: fossilized ground-squirrel dung. For years, attempts to pull DNA from those coprolites came back empty, defeated by too little sequenceable DNA and too many interfering compounds. Once the lab's methods were brought to bear, the samples gave up not only the squirrel but its entire diet—plants and animals no one expected to find preserved in feces, including DNA from a mammoth. The team published it with a methods supplement running to some 150 pages: an unusually complete showing of the work, in a field where the effort behind a discovery is usually condensed to a paragraph or two.

For all that, no one on the team talks like they have mastered anything. What comes through instead is a kind of restless humility. Even now, Murchie estimates, most of the signal is lost at every stage—perhaps 99 percent in the lab, and another 90 percent in the computation that follows. “This cookie that we're not getting,” he says, “is actually most of the cookie.” And yet they have been amazed, more than once, by a crumb. From a handful of dirt, or a single old bone, the lab can now reconstruct the genomes of several species at once—and that, Murchie points out, is what's left after almost everything has been lost. Grant describes her favorite part of the work as the constant questioning—not accepting that a result means what it appears to, but asking, again, whether it really does. These are not the words of people claiming certainty. They are the words of people building better questions.

The pieces reinforce one another in the hands of the people using them: the checkpoints decide what is worth pursuing, the bait enrichment recovers more of it, in-house software designs the tools and wrangles the data, and because Hakai runs its own sequencing rather than shipping samples to an outside facility and waiting on a black box, even that last step is something the team can question and improve. That kind of end-to-end control is rare, and it is beginning to draw notice. Grant recently presented the lab's quality-control work at the first International Conference on Palaeogenomics in Stockholm, where other scientists wanted to know how Hakai coaxes results from samples that ought to be hopeless; several of its methods are being readied for publication so other labs can use them too. Discoveries matter—but methods that let everyone make better discoveries may matter more.

Hebda has been chasing one question for as long as he has done this work: what actually lived here, in the deep past, on a coast whose record the ice mostly destroyed. For years it stayed out of reach. “We're finally reaching the point,” he says, “where I think we're going to be able to answer those questions.” The tools that will answer them are being sharpened now, quietly, on a bear.

The bear remains a story in its own right. But its greatest contribution may prove to be the quietest of all—not what it revealed about one ancient animal, but the growing ability to recover the thousands of stories that, until now, science simply had no way to hear.

Asked about the first Guardian gathering at Hakai, Eric Peterson recalls:

“It was late in 2009, just months after we bought the Hakai Beach Resort, and before we'd settled on our plans for the place. We'd supported projects on the central coast for about five years, working mainly at Rivers Inlet and the Koeye River, but now we were shifting gears dramatically. Hakai was a big opportunity, a big responsibility. Christina and I talked about somehow doing ‘science in a social context’—integrating science and community—but we were fishing for ideas.

“I was driving up the Island highway listening to CBC radio. Claire Hutton, then with the Sierra Club, came on and spoke about Indigenous Guardian programs on the central and north coast and Haida Gwaii.

“It immediately clicked that was exactly what we'd been talking about for Hakai.

“I tracked Claire down, and in December she brought me into a conference call with several Guardians from across the coast. They were planning a gathering in the spring, and they needed a venue. I insisted they come to Hakai. We're all set up for that sort of thing, I said.

“It turned out that the former resort needed a great deal of work.

“As we closed in on the planned meeting, it was a construction site. The extra beds we needed had arrived just days before—Claire and other volunteers were assembling beds rather than preparing agendas.

“At least the kitchen was working.

“On the first day of the conference, boats streamed in from across the coast carrying community leaders as well as Guardians, plus a number of BC Parks rangers, there to show support. A lot was at stake. It wasn't obvious that all would go smoothly. There was common ground but potential areas of division. At the kickoff ceremony after supper, there was excitement but also tension.

“All went well, however, thanks in no small part to the wisdom and charm of Ross Wilson, then the elected chief of the Heiltsuk Nation. Ross knew how to work the room. Welcome messages from First Nations leaders struck just the right tone.

“In the days that followed, there was much work to do to bring the Guardian program to the next level, mixed with seriously competitive soccer on the beach after supper.

“By the time the boats left on the last day, friendships were made, and the foundation for the Guardian program was established.

“There will never be a Guardian meeting like that first one.

“This May, the Guardians returned to Hakai for the first gathering held there in six years. The boats converged on Calvert Island again—but much had changed.

“I'd sum it up as: Professionalism. Capable vessels and equipment, seasoned staff, and an agenda the First Nations now build and run themselves.”

There are few sights on the BC coast quite like a sea otter raft in full swing.

This summer, Luba Reshitnyk and Keith Holmes found one while conducting a drone survey near the Hakai Passage area—a dark, loosely shifting mass of animals rafted together on the water, rolling and grooming and cracking open urchins with the unhurried confidence of a species that knows it owns the place. Looking through the aerial footage, they counted 172 in a single group. Across the wider survey, the regional tally reached 212.

It's the largest raft either of them has seen on this stretch of coast in years.

Sea otters are, by almost any measure, one of the most charismatic animals on the Pacific coast. They're also one of the most ecologically important. Without them, sea urchins can multiply without check, grazing kelp forests down to bare rock. With otters in the picture, urchins decline, kelp recovers, and the fish, invertebrates, and countless other species that depend on those forests come back with it. Ecologists call this a trophic cascade—one predator, reshaping an entire food web from the top down. Sea otters are the classic example.

For more than a decade, the Hakai Institute has been monitoring kelp around northwest Calvert Island. The early years found that same pattern: when otters were abundant locally, kelp was too.

Then the otters moved on. Kelp declined. The urchins came back. The team kept watching.

Now comes the question: will history repeat itself?

There are already signs that it might. In 2023, a small advance group settled around the Breaker Group, and kelp responded within the same season. At West Beach and Second Beach, bull kelp has been climbing back toward levels not seen in years. The system is responding, the way it has before, the way the textbook says it should.

What comes next is the part that keeps the team watching closely. The rafts present right now are male groups—transient by nature, prone to moving on once they reach a certain size. The milestone that would signal something more permanent is a mom-and-pup raft settling in and staying: a breeding population that anchors itself to a place and begins the slower work of long-term ecosystem change. That hasn't happened yet south of Triquet Island.

“Where are the ladies?” Keith jokes. It's the question everyone will be watching over the next few years.

The story of sea otters on the central coast isn't new. It isn't finished either. But this season has given us another remarkable glimpse of it—and the footage to prove it.