The Great Bear Rainforest is world renowned for its grizzly bears and towering cedars, but in a secret little watershed near Bella Bella on the central coast it is also being distinguished as the place where salmon swim through mountains.
“It’s spectacular, something out of a Tolkien novel,” Ian McAllister of Pacific Wild says of subterranean passageways used by salmon to reach their spawning grounds. “The salmon make it into the cave and then the stream just disappears into the mountainside. I thought, ‘what’s going on in there?’”
McAllister and his colleagues donned scuba gear and unravelled rope this summer to follow the slow-moving stream close to 100 metres into the marble rock before turning back. “I thought we’d go through water then into a dry cave, but it’s all underwater, a labyrinth of marble tunnels and caverns,” he said in an interview.
Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/researchers+dive+underwater+caves+solve+salmon+mystery+with+video/10428288/story.html#ixzz3KgAxCAEG