Am I missing something here? — I’ve seen the salmon runs in Alaska and they are incredible. Yet I’ve never seen any footage of anything like it concerning Atlantic Salmon.
In: Biology
There’s just not much salmon habitat left for the Atlantic Salmon, dams and pollution and road culverts and dredged streams destroyed the salmon runs.
There’s very little salmon habitat left for the five Pacific salmon south of British Columbia – there were huge runs into California a century ago. No longer.
Now the runs on the Yukon River have largely died out, and there’s dwindling returns of Chinook salmon everywhere. Almost no Chinook fishing allowed this year in Alaska since they’re just not returning in numbers any more.
Management policy here is to guarantee a certain number of fish return upstream to spawn – if the run is slow fishing stops until the quota is guaranteed. More and more often fishing closes because the returns are so poor.
The quota is set in theory to provide enough baby fish to use all the good resources of the stream, adding more fertilized eggs won’t result in more returning adults. Pacific salmon go far inland, and use all their body mass either to produce eggs and sperm or for swimming energy. A spawner is not very edible, they’re pretty much falling apart by the time they finish their job. Spending everything makes more offspring than holding back like the Atlantic Salmon do.
Mostly because almost all of the rivers that Atlantic salmon traditionally spawned in can no longer support them or their fry because of dams and pollution.
We also way overfished the population, and now it’s vanishingly small.
They were over fished and polluted out of their habitat. Most all runs in Atlantic North America are extinct, there might be a few in northern Maine. But humans killed most all of them. Some Pacific salmon were even moved there trying to re-establish runs.
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