Yurok Vice Chairman Frankie Myers joined the Yurok Fisheries Department’s fish disease monitoring team this weekend while they documented the catastrophic juvenile salmon kill on the Klamath River, according to a statement from the Yurok Tribe.
“When we see our juvenile fish dying, it’s heartbreaking,” said Myers. “It’s heartbreaking because you know it’s not the end. In two, three and four years, when these fish are supposed to come back, we will relive it again. We’ll see low numbers of salmon returning again, It’s hard. You see fish dying today and you know what’s to come in the future.”
The Tribe said Ceratonova Shasta, a pathogenic parasite, is expected to kill nearly all of the baby salmon in the river. The deadly fish disease infected 97 percent of sampled fish, according to a recent assessment.
For more information on the underlying cause of the disease outbreak, please read the following press release: https://www.yuroktribe.org/.../catastrophic-juvenile-fish.