Science News Review

Where Have All the Salmon Gone?

May 5 at 4:04pm by Aileen

A declaration of commercial fishery failure by Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez has paved the way for Congress to allot funds for alleviating financial hardship among the West Coast’s commercial Chinook salmon fishing industry off California and Oregon. The crisis has been building steadily every year since 2000, culminating in this latest action – the commercial salmon fishing industry has essentially been shut down.

National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration [NOAA] researchers suggest that changes in ocean conditions – possibly due to global warming – are to blame, along with loss of freshwater habitat for salmon spawning, a chronic problem.

There will be some coho salmon fishing allowed off the coast of Washington and northern Oregon, but there will be financial hardship in that industry as well due to strict limits. This crisis has been building for years, attempts along the way to mitigate it have proven to exacerbate the situation, such as the introduction of farmed salmon. Fish stock collapses in traditionally abundant fisheries off both coasts and elsewhere in the world bode ill for the seafood component of the human food supply, just as the worldwide food crisis heats up around the world for staple crops like corn and wheat and rice.

We could be beyond a tipping point right now, and things could get a bit more than just ‘interesting’ over the next months. Will science be able to come to the rescue, or will it remain helpless to mitigate the collapse of world food supplies? Stay tuned…

Links:

“Fishery Failure” Declared for West Coast Salmon Fishery
Hatchery Controversy Takes on New Significance as Wild Chinook Populations Crash
Escaped Farmed Salmon Infiltrate Fitter Wild Populations
Dramatic Declines in Wild Salmon Populations Linked to Farmed Salmon