Comment on 100,000 Live Salmon Spilled Off a Truck. Most Landed in a Creek and Lived.
kautau@lemmy.world 5 months agoThe article states it’s a little over 75,000. It also states that those salmon will then follow the river to the ocean since they are freshly hatched salmon they will be migrating to the ocean, which is what the tanker was transporting them to do anyway
aeronmelon@lemmy.world 5 months ago
If it were that easy, the hatchery would just do that and save money on trucking.
Don’t salmon swim upstream to spawn? I assume the reason they don’t release them right there is the risk some would stick around and mess up an existing ecosystem.
eyes@lemmy.world 5 months ago
They were being transported to a specific river for release, so they’d return to that river to spawn. As juviniles they swim downstream and spend 3 years at sea, where food is much more plentiful - any that stick around in the river would die of starvation.
aeronmelon@lemmy.world 5 months ago
That means these rogue salmon and their descendants are going to keep coming back to the wrong stream.
That’s why I was curious about potential problems with the salmon being released somewhere unintended.
eyes@lemmy.world 5 months ago
They’re an indigonious species so the effects will be beneficial to native biodiversity in the long run as they form an important part of the food web for inland animals during their breeding season. The whole purpose of the project is to reinforce their numbers which have been reduced by fishing.