California Salmon Stocks Are Crashing. A Fishing Ban Looks Certain.
Catrin Einhorn New York Times
Juvenile fall-run Chinook salmon at the Coleman National Fish Hatchery in Anderson, Calif. (photo: NYT)
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. 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. But as the fish counts came in and the models spit out figures, the numbers were even more dismal than expected.
