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PRINCESS ROYAL ISLAND, BRITISH COLUMBIA — Paul Paquet is an expert on bears and wolves but says salmon are the most critical species in the Great Bear Rainforest.

"The real key to the temperate rainforest is salmon; virtually everything depends on them," said Paquet. He spoke quietly as we stood in the forest beside a spawning stream, hoping a rare white Kermode bear would show up for lunch.

"If you went to the tops of these trees, you'd find nitrogen from the salmon," he said. "They came 4,000 miles from Asian waters, took them two to four years, depending on species. Lot of people think the ancient forests were so large because of that pulse of nitrogen that it gets every year. The wolves and bears are sort of the fertilizer dispensers in the forest.

"But those fish also are bringing contaminants back, toxic chemicals, that they pick up in their migration. Now those are starting to show up in the animals — the bears and the birds."

The Great Bear Rainforest stretches from the northern tip of Vancouver Island to the Alaskan Panhandle along the west coast of British Columbia. The area is home to the largest remaining tract of temperate rain forest in the world.

The area has served as Paquet's laboratory for more than a decade because it has populations of wolves, grizzlies and black bears, including the genetic combination that produces the cream-colored Kermode, or Spirit Bear.

In his wolf studies, Paquet has found that "wolves, in particular, here are turning out to be genetically unique," he said. "They have retained their genetic diversity; they have a lot of genes that have not been lost over the years because of persecution."

His research found two other interesting behaviors: The wolves move between the islands, sometimes swimming as far as eight miles in the open ocean. And they eat salmon.

"They go into the streams, and a single pack will take 200 fish a night," he said.

Paquet pointed out that logging and commercial over-fishing are threats to the salmon populations, which he said are showing distressing signs of decreases.

"We don't know what the consequences are, but it's frightening," he said.