Atlantic Salmon

“Atlantic Ocean-based salmon, sturgeon, American shad and alewives will be able to find spawning grounds in northern Maine for the first time in more than a century with the culmination of a 16-year project next spring, officials said this week. Engineers have been testing the Howland fish bypass since water began flowing through it Sept. 28. They are confident it will be ready for spawning season, said Laura Rose Day, executive director of the Penobscot River Restoration Trust. “Fish will be swimming above Howland into waters this spring that they haven’t been able to reach since the dams were put” on the river in the 1800s, Day said.

“This year something is special. After the disaster of ultra-low numbers last year, the reports from across the salmon’s realm this year are that the fish are chunky and generally healthy. They will have the energy to complete that life cycle... As a guess, the overall good health of the fish in 2015 may also lead to a higher kelt survival through the winter months, but that will also depend on the particular river and ocean conditions encountered. Certainly there are better things happening in 2015 for the Atlantic salmon. The species needs all the help it can get.”

“That the ocean pays back, sustains us, is suggested by the Latin name Carl Linnaeus gave Atlantic Salmon: Salmo salar. Salmo derives from salire, to leap, the name introduced by Pliny the Elder; salar means ‘of salt.' Because salt once consti- tuted a form of currency, salar also means salt money, an allowance, payment.”

“Every spring, for thousands of years, the rivers that empty into the North Atlantic Ocean turned silver with migrating fish... Among the crowded schools swam the king of fish, the Atlantic Salmon. From New York to Labrador, from Russia to Por- tugal, sea-bright salmon defied current, tide, and gravity, driven inland by instinct and memory to th every streams where they themselves emerged from gravel nests years before.”

“Salmon occur naturally from the Koksoak River of Ungava Bay and the Kapisigdlit (the only Salmon river in Greenland) south to the Housatonic and Connecticut Rivers. Many North American rivers lost their spawning runs mainly through dam- ming and pollution.”

“In summer 2012 the prodigious effort made by individual states in conjunction with the US Fish and Wildlife Service to restore the silver fish to the Connecticut, started in 1967, was formally abandoned. Success remained elusive and too much money had been spent. In 2010 alone $2 million was expended stocking six million small fry and 90,000 larger smolts. Returns failed.”

Deconstruction of the dam began on July 22, 2013 as a part of an extensive project involving four dams to restore eleven species of sea-run fish to the PenobscotRiver.

“I have fished for salmon every year since the age of five, which has given me 33 years of salmon fishing. Through all the years I have only seen two fish on the bank weighing more than 20kg. I was lucky enough to catch one of these fish. It was a beautiful silver 20.5kg fish — silver right to the tail. A true predator in its natural environment. The fish was caught in the Baltic Sea.”

Salmon have gone extinct in 42 of the 50 Salmon Rivers in the U.S., with numbers dangerously low in the remaining 8.

For the19 countries still hosting populations of wild Atlantic salmon, the study finds that: “Wild Atlantic salmon populations in one third of the rivers of North America and Europe are endangered; Wild Atlantic salmon stocks have already disappeared completely from at least 309 river systems in Europe and North America; Wild Atlantic salmon are on the brink of extinction in Portugal, Estonia, Poland, the United States and adjoining parts of southern Canada; In the remainder of the range, 85 percent of wild Atlantic salmon populations are categorized as either Vulnerable, Endangered or Critical.”

“If salmon are not surviving, then our activities are part of the cause for their precipitous decline in population... Clearly this is a call to continue efforts to clean up watersheds. And if salmon are faring so poorly, what does that mean for other species—including ourselves?”

“The estimated abundance of North American Atlantic salmon declined by 85 percent, from 800,000 fish in the mid-1970s to fewer than 110,000 fish in 1998...In 1999, 1,452 salmon returned to New England rivers... a decline of 60 percent from 1979.”

“In 1999, the total farmed production of Atlantic salmon was 600,000 tonnes, or more than 300 times the wild salmon caught in all the rivers in the North Atlantic – one tonne of farmed salmon for each individual wild salmon caught.”

Seven countries with Atlantic salmon farming industries (the USA, Canada, Norway,Scotland, Ireland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands) ratified an agreement called the Oslo Resolution “Under the resolution the signatories agreed to address the ten categories of concern to the two programme instigators, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)and the Atlantic Salmon Federation. There were criteria such as fish containment(net security and policies on escapes), standards of fish husbandry, maintaining benthos quality beneath cages, and the extent to which fish farmings tried to protect wild salmon runs by keeping net-pens away from migratory routes and leaving some of them industry free.”