Pink, chum and sockeye salmon have been doing really well over the past few decades.
A new study published in Marine and Coastal Fisheries finds in the North Pacific, those species’ abundance levels have been peaking over the past 25 years. But more salmon can be a bad thing. Evidence suggests that more pinks, chums, and sockeye are contributing to declining king salmon stocks.
Where do most of those pinks come from?
Roughly 66 million hatchery-origin pink salmon return from the North Pacific each year.
While there are other factors to blame for the overall decline of king salmon, researchers hypothesize that pink salmon are the primary culprit. Pinks outcompete older kings with their sheer numbers and hatchery pinks are adding to the problem and with declining king populations.
LINK (via: KBBI)
