Times Colonist
Two articles in the Victoria Times Colonist yesterday:
““
Entire ecosystems on the Pacific coast rely on salmon and humans are taking more than their share, a new scientific study concludes.
The paper calls for a shift in fishing plans to protect other species, from insects and seagulls to grizzly bears and killer whales.
Some salmon would be worth more alive than dead — especially when runs are headed for rivers and streams in parks and protected areas…
Lots folks been pointing this out for a long time.
_ _ _ _ _
A volcano blows and Fraser sockeye come back in record numbers. Is there a connection? There could well be. Roberta Hamme, at University of Victoria, and colleagues have just had a new paper published in the Geophysical Research Letters that studies the issue. In 2008, volcano, Kasatochi, in the Alaskan Aleutian Islands, blew its top and ash drifted out over a large area of the North Pacific Ocean.
Within a few days, the largest bloom of phytoplankton ever observed spread across more than 1,000 kilometres of surface water. The connection with sockeye is that they eat plankton. Their food is stimulated by the addition of iron, in this case from the volcanic ash, and plankton begin fixing carbon dioxide from the air and growing and doubling in rapid order.