Salmon Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Salmon , also known as salmonids, are anadromous fish renowned for their unique life cycle and precise migrations: They are born in fresh water, spend much of adulthood in the open ocean, and return to the same stream to spawn. Salmon found along the northern Pacific Rim of North America, Russian Siberia, and Japan belong to the genus Oncorhynchus (cherry, chinook, chum, coho, pink, sockeye, and cutthroat and steelhead trout species) and belong to the family Salmonidae. Those found in the Atlantic Ocean belong to the genus Salmo (Atlantic, brown trout, and land-locked species). Salmonids are found in discrete breeding populations known as spawning stocks.

Salmon are species of conservation concern with hundreds of spawning stocks at risk and several already extinct. Healthy populations of salmon require gravel for spawning, proper flow regimes, and unobstructed migration passages, all parameters that are degraded by the presence of dams. Several populations of chum, steelhead trout, and chinook salmon in the U.S. Pacific northwest have been proposed for federal listing under the Endangered Species Act by its implementing agency for marine species, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS).

Of concerns cited by NMFS is the extensive presence of large hydroelectric projects in the Pacific northwest, notably on the Snake and Columbia Rivers where “save the dammed salmon” campaigns (and bumper stickers) have attracted widespread public attention. Other considerations include overfishing and the introduction of disease through salmon aquaculture, and water pollution from nonpoint sources in urban centers and ranching.

Historian Richard White attributes salmon declines in the immediate postwar years to the early policies of the Washington Department of Fisheries, the Oregon Fish Commission, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Today over $1.4 billion is used on dam mitigation costs such as hatcheries, fish ways, and mitigating pollution from timber harvests and ranching.

Salmon are a food resource for local populations. Indigenous populations used weirs to direct the salmon to platforms manned by individuals with spears. Trollers, gill nets, and traps were widely used by the beginning of the 20th century. The salmon industry catch was soon depleting the stocks of spawning fish, leading to some population crashes in the 1900s. Ocean trollers became the most productive commercial fishers by the 1960s. However, new restrictions in the U.S. Fisheries Conservation and Management Act of 1976 redistributed the salmon catch back to the river. In the large salmon fisheries in Alaska, much salmon fishing is done by independent fishers who own and operate their equipment as a result of favorable terms set out by the Alaska licensing system and constitutional framework.

Salmon fisheries have historically been vulnerable to overfishing. Many rural commercial fishing jobs, dependent on healthy salmon fisheries and the fresh market for salmon, have been lost in recent years. Another factor in the decline of fishing jobs is the explosive growth of the salmon aquaculture industry producing farmed salmon.

Salmon aquaculture uses net pens that are suspended in the open seas. They have been controversial on several environmental grounds. First, because most salmon aquaculture off the Pacific Coast uses Atlantic salmon, they are considered a potential source of invasive species. This has been particularly noteworthy because of several escapes due to storms, tidal surges, and breaks in containment nets.

Pacific and Atlantic salmon are sexually compatible, raising long-term consequences to the fitness of future generations of salmon. Escaped Atlantic salmon have been documented to breed in Pacific streams and rivers. One salmon produced through genetic engineering has been controversial because it produces growth hormone throughout its growout phase, reaching maturity far sooner than its conventionally-bred counterparts.

Environmentalists argue that under the Clean Water Act, pollution discharge permits should be required for net pen aquaculture facilities, with non-native salmon as the effluent under regulation. Environmentalists assert that net pen aquaculture causes sea lice outbreaks and suggest these sea lice have spread to juvenile wild salmon. The application of antibiotics and pesticides directly into the water to treat sea lice, necessary because of the close confines of net pen aquaculture, is questioned for negative impacts on water quality and the potential for disease resistance.

Similarly the excrement from net pen and excess food has been shown to affect dissolved oxygen levels and cause algal blooms. Because the food used to feed the carnivorous Salmonids is taken from a higher point in the feed chain, farmed fish have been shown to contain higher levels of mercury and dioxin, ostensibly through processes known as bioaccumulation and biomagnification. Another concern is the culling of marine mammals like otters and sea lions that are known to harm aquaculture species, or the use of high frequency signals broadcast from net pens as a deterrent, which has been shown to disrupt whale communications and migration patterns.

The shift from fishing to aquaculture has been greatly affected by consumer expectations of fish quality. Aquaculture can deliver year-round, high quality fish at low prices shaped by economies of scale. Wild caught salmon production fluctuates with the seasons and is subject to variable fish and cosmetic blemishes from handling. Worldwide aquaculture production has doubled from 1995 to 2005, and grown twenty-fold in revenues since 1975.

First Nations and other indigenous peoples of the Pacific northwest have long influenced fisheries policies in the Pacific northwest. The Yakima have long asserted the significance of salmon as a cultural talisman in opposition to some of the Columbia’s water projects. The significance of salmon as food is captured by the names given to it by the Yurok (nepu, “that which is eaten”) and the Ainu (stripe, “the real thing we eat”).

Bibliography:

Richard A. Cooley, Politics and Conervation: The Decline of the Alaska Salmon (Harper & Row, 1963);
Rik Scarse, Fishy Business, Salmon, Biology, and the Social Construction of Nature (Temple University Press, 1999);
Joseph Taylor, Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis (University of Washington Press, 2001).