Across their native range, steelhead (and many salmon) populations are experiencing dramatic declines in ocean survival. Smolts are heading out to sea, but too many are starving to death before they reach adulthood. In a new blog post, the Wild Steelhead Coalition’s Science Advisor Guy Fleischer explains a number of the contributing factors, including the warm water “Blob” covering the North Pacific and food web impacts of extensive hatchery pink and chum salmon stocking from Alaska, Japan, and Russia.
Same in the north Atlantic: everything melting before our very eyes, seas warming less obviously but totally lethally. Returning Scots and English salmon numbers are currently, mostly, in freefall. Some here still quaintly believe that shooting up all offending in-river and estuarine avian and mammalian marine salmon-parr-‘n’-smolt predators will solve the problem (plus “improve” the living fark out of the rivers, by means of reforesting and spawning gravels restoration), then despair about the simply too-too terrrible / “ghastly”, seemingly insoluble problem and take the first flight out to “somewhere that still has some blasted fish”. Or did….
Big – make that HUGE – re-thinks with real, not merely multi-worthy committees’ fat-chewing, follow-up action required all-round, chaps, before it’s too late for even the last Come Fly With Me honey holes.