I just learned about zombie salmon today. I also learned about how this mass die off of salmon after spawning provides nutrients that the whole river ecosystem can benefit from.
I also know that man made fertilizers in our waterways is considered harmful to these same ecosystems.
What’s the difference? Deteriorating fish and man made fertilizers both release nutrients, how come one is considered bad but the other positive?
In: Biology
Salmon don’t decompose into pure nitrogen.
Agricultural fertilizers are great for *some* things in waterways and oceans, like algae. But that algae explodes with the new nutrient supply, choking out other life. Other life just gets directly harmed by tons and tons of nitrogen in the water.
Salmon are made of a lot of different elements. So all sorts of microbes eat them, all sorts of things eat those, and the benefits rise up the whole food chain. I’m sure things that eat algae are thriving when the algae explodes too, but that’s much more limited. It knocks things out of balance.
Also, that particular ecosystem has adapted to this yearly event over millions of years. We’re dumping fertilizer in nearly every river in the world, and have only been doing so for like 75 years at most.
I’d also, also *guess* that a ton of salmon dying off every year is still much less *stuff* added to their waterways than the amount of fertilizer added to a river that has hundreds of miles of farmland on either side.
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