Twenty-one scientists from Russia, Canada, the United States, Japan and South Korea have taken residence on the Russian research ship MV Professor Kaganovsky for an unprecedented international expedition.
The five-week voyage will probe the secret lives of five Pacific salmon species with a massive grid search and test fishery across the Gulf of Alaska.
LINK (via: Vancouver Sun)
2019 – The International Year of The Salmon.
Pacific and Atlantic, I very much hope.
In 2018, a very worthy project , The Missing Salmon Project, was launched to find just why Atlantic salmon, if a river is capable of hatching salmon ova, feeding the resulting fry and parr, then sending little silvery smolts out to sea, are not coming back in the fluctuating but still reasonably dependable numbers they once did.
https://www.facebook.com/TheMissingSalmonProject/?ref=py_c
The ancient Irish and Welsh pagan Celts (or probably pre-Celts), then later taken up by the Viking (or pre-Viking) Scandinavians, the first group mentioned well over a couple of or, more likely, perhaps to three to four thousand years ago, had a mythic creature in their highly holistic, appease the gods of winter to ensure the return of the spring and summer sun, respect and love the creatures that feed you etc, belief system – The Salmon of Knowledge, a creature that lived in sacred pools or wells and could fix things things for a tribe in trouble or a needy individual if treated very nicely.
It’s very likely that the ancient, West Coast Native North Americans had the same sort of thing going with their bounteous Pacific fish.
Said S. of K. would be telling us all not to abuse and cook the planet and its rivers and – particularly – OCEANS, by our playing fast and loose with the environment, these days, I reckon. We can “fix” our rivers and make them suitable for salmon (our human take on “suitable”, at least) as much as we like, but if the resulting progeny of their spawning efforts has no alternative but to swim out into an increasingly heating up and ever-acidic and toxic watery void, for both themselves and for the creatures they need to feed on to return “our” rivers and do it all again, and so please we “sports” in the process…
“Some huge human and economic behavioural changes are going to have to be made, you here today – gone tomorrow people.” – that’s not me, but the Salmon of Knowledge speaking. You heard it here first!