2008 isn't exactly turning out to be the Year of the Salmon.
Populations up and down the West Coast are under siege from water diversions, dams, predators and habitat loss. And scientists keep citing mysterious "ocean conditions" (possibly related to climate change) as imperiling salmon food supplies in the ocean.
It's not even
safe to be a hatchery salmon:
About 75,000 of 180,000 young fall-run Chinook salmon being hauled in tanker trucks from the Coleman National Fish Hatchery in Anderson to San Pablo Bay near Vallejo Monday died. "We are kind of in the stages of trying to figure out what went wrong," Scott Hamelberg, the hatchery's manager, said early Monday afternoon. "It's part of the risk of trucking fish."
About 41 percent of the smolts being trucked Monday died. Scientists plan to perform necropsies "” animal autopsies "” on some of the dead smolts to determine their cause of death, said Alexandra Pitts, spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Sacramento. "They are going to see what they can see in them, which can tell them a lot more of what happened," she said.
See you at the piles of dead salmon smolts, Tom Chandler.
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