It's been a stressful few years for...well, the whole planet. So let's take a moment on this Thanksgiving Day to celebrate a happy event that happens to involve our favorite fish, the wild Pacific salmon.
Net-pen salmon farms are huge, stationary circular nets in open water, used to raise fish for sale. But they have been banned off the coast of British Columbia amid charges that they interrupt the natural salmon runs in the area.
Now the wild pink salmon have rebounded rapidly and, one might say, miraculously.
Alexandra Morton, an independent researcher who is also perhaps the world's most impassioned wild-salmon advocate, brings us the good news in the video below.
The video focuses on that rebound in one of the region's major spawning rivers, the Ahta, also known as the Hada.
This happy turnaround does not directly affect Vital Choice's salmon offerings, as we source those from Alaska, where wild salmon runs remain strong and fish farming has always been outlawed.
But it's good news for environmentalists everywhere who hope it's not too late to help migratory fish populations return by removing impediments such as net-pen farms.
It should be noted that salmon-farming operations claim numbers of returning salmon typically fluctuate in BC rivers, and anti-farming advocates tend to "cherry-pick" data. Ruth Salmon, Interim Executive Director at the BC Salmon Farmers Association, told Sea West News, a fish-farming publication, that there is "no causative link, let alone a correlation, related to salmon farm activity and salmon returns."
Morton responds that ...
AUTHOR
Brad Lemley was the editorial director of Vital Choice. He is a former Contributing Editor at Discover Magazine and writer for the Washington Post. His website is bradlemley.com.