Hundreds of thousands of sockeye salmon are dead or dying in the Columbia River this season. They return to the river every year to spawn.
Al Jazeera America reports:
Federal and state fisheries biologists say the warm water is lethal for the cold-water species and is wiping out at least half of this year's return of 500,000 fish and by the end of the season that death toll could grow to as high as 400,000.
"We had a really big migration of sockeye," Ritchie Graves of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration told The Associated Press. "The thing that really hurts is we're going to lose a majority of those fish."
[bold my emphasis]
That could wipe out 80 percent of Columbia river's sockeye salmon. Devastating.
“The larger problem is that the climate is changing faster than our ability to comprehend the magnitude of the problem,” he said. “Warmer rivers and salmon die-offs can be added to the many events that individually may be random, but which together reveal a rapidly changing world.”
Record low snow pack in the mountains has meant little of the chilling runoff that would normally cool the waters of the Pacific Northwest.
Warmer waters have led to the
trucking north of other fish populations in the hopes of saving them.
Federal officials in Oregon have been trucking hatchery salmon more than a hundred miles (160 km) north to another hatchery in Washington state throughout July to preserve fish that had been dying off by the thousands in an unseasonably warm river.
Columbia's sockeye might
not be as lucky however.
"Right now it's grim for adult sockeye," said Russ Kiefer of the Idaho Department of Fish and Game. He said sockeye will often pull into tributary rivers in search of cooler water, but aren't finding much relief.
"They're running out of energy reserves, and we're getting a lot of reports of fish dead and dying," he said.
Thirteen species of salmon and steelhead are listed as endangered or threatened in the Columbia River basin.