Multiple Blue Rings

John Doe

California salmon stocks are collapsing. Banning fishing seems to be the case.

This week, officials are expected to ban commercial and recreational salmon fisheries in California by 2023. Many will be eliminated in nearby Oregon.

Level 3

Blue Rings

Level 1

Blue Rings

Level 4

Blue Rings
Multiple Blue Rings

The reason: An alarming decline of fish stocks linked to the one-two punch of heavily engineered waterways and the supercharged heat and drought that come with climate change. 

Multiple Blue Rings
Multiple Blue Rings
Multiple Blue Rings

There are new threats in the ocean, too, that are less understood but may be tied to global warming, according to researchers.

Scientists and fishers had been braced for bad numbers. Conditions were terrible a couple of years earlier, when the salmon were young and tiny in low, overheated creeks and rivers in California.

Of all the salmon in California, fall-run Chinook were the last ones robust enough for commercial fishing.

But this year, fewer than 170,000 are expected to return to Central Valley rivers. That’s down from highs of over a million as recently as 1995. 

“California salmon are in dire straits,” said Nate Mantua, a climate scientist who leads a team of salmon ecologists and biologists at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association Fisheries in Santa Cruz, Calif. 

Blue Rings

The shutdown would mean higher prices and no fresh local salmon in California this year, though it probably would have little or no effect beyond the region. 

Blue Rings

Level 5

Salmon are hardy survivors that have lived on Earth far longer than humans. They migrate hundreds of miles from the freshwater creeks where they hatch to the salty ocean and back again, leaping up waterfalls on the return trip. 

Blue Rings

But what’s happening in California and Oregon, at the southern end of the range, scientists say, may be a harbinger of what’s to come in cooler waters farther north. 

Human monitored

1

Multiple Blue Rings

“Most of the salmon populations around the entire Pacific Rim have been doing very, very poorly,” Dr. Mantua said. 

Multiple Blue Rings