In 1993 John Babaluk, a fisheries biologist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, was working on Banks Island when some local fishermen asked for help. While fishing in Sachs Harbour, they had hauled in some fish that they did not recognize.

Babaluk had the unexpected experience of informing these arctic fishermen that they had Pacific salmon tangled in their nets -- eight sockeye and one pink salmon to be exact.

"They had never caught them before," he said.

Pacific salmon have been showing up sporadically in Arctic Canada since the turn of the century. Babaluk had caught a pink salmon the previous summer while working in Aklavik, and small runs of chum salmon make their way up the Mackenzie River every year, spawning both around Fort Smith and in the upper Liard River.

But sockeye are much rarer visitors to arctic waters, and during the summer of 1993 these prized fish were also caught in the lower Mackenzie and Arctic Red Rivers. Now some people are wondering whether these incidents are more than a case of a few salmon getting off course.

Fisheries researchers are starting to look at whether salmon are starting to spawn in the North, not just make token appearances. And if they have started to spawn, the next big question is whether global warming has caused this change.

Air temperatures in 1993 were the warmest on record in 30 years, and surface temperatures on the water were also warmer than normal. That summer runs of sockeye throughout the North Pacific shifted north, as did other populations of fish.

In the spring of 2000, a workshop was held in Inuvik on the phenomenon of salmon in the arctic. Doug Chiperzak, one of the workshop coordinators, works with Fisheries and Oceans Canada in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region.

"There are always a small proportion of fish that will wander off and that is how river systems are populated. But sockeye have a higher degree of homing instinct than some other species. It's an unusual species to be catching in the arctic," he says.

When people started researched this issue, they were surprised to find that a report on sockeye in the arctic had been published decades ago. In 1965, 11 sockeye were caught in Bathurst Inlet, and the following year 30-40 sockeye were caught near Holman, NWT.

"The paper was not widely read so for most of us, myself included, we did not realize that there had been previous runs," said Chiperzak.

Salmon sightings continued to trickle in during the next few years. One man reported catching about 50 salmon at Shingle Point off of the Yukon's North Coast in 1997. Then in 1998, a biologist working on the Peel caught dozens of chum salmon 100 kilometres up that river. The chum were in spawning condition but it is not known whether they spawned successfully.

"Chum do occur but all of a sudden there was a big pulse of them, and that sparked some interest," says Chiperzak.

At this point there are more questions than answers on the topic of arctic salmon. For starters some scientists would like to figure out whether salmon are already reproducing in the arctic, and if not, whether it might be possible in the future.

Chiperzak says that there seems to be suitable spawning habitat in the region, as there are lakes and rivers with gravel bottoms that do not freeze solid in the winter. But the Arctic Ocean may be just too cold for the salmon, and no one knows how much it would have to change for these fish to survive there year-round.

For now Fisheries and Oceans Canada is distributing salmon identification posters to help northern residents recognize any salmon that they do catch. The department hopes that people will report these catches, and turn in tissue samples so that genetic tests can be run on the fish.

"Genetic work could help show where the fish are coming from, and whether salmon are successfully reproducing in the arctic," says Chiperzak.

Researchers would also like to figure out whether salmon lived in the Mackenzie River system in the past, and tree rings could hold the clue. The rings can be analyzed for Nitrogen 15, a form of nitrogen that comes from a marine environment. The theory is that any Nitrogen 15 found in a tree could be the end product of a rotting salmon.

This method, which has been used successfully on the West Coast, relies on the fact that bears will catch spawning salmon and leave the carcasses on the banks surrounding the river.

As most of the news on Pacific salmon in their home waters seems to be bad these days, the reports on salmon in the arctic have sparked a lot of interest. Chiperzak says it is a subject that does fire up people's imaginations, but it is much too early to tell whether salmon could one day be a more common sight in the nets of arctic fishermen.

John Babaluk can be contacted at Babalukj@dfo-mpo.gc.ca. Doug Chiperzak's e-mail address is chiperzakd@dfo-mpo.gc.ca.