Whether roaming wild or enclosed in floating feedlots on the ocean, Atlantic salmon are cold-water fishes.
Whether roaming wild or enclosed in floating feedlots on the ocean, Atlantic salmon are cold-water fishes. But as the climate crisis warms the world’s oceans and waterways, cold water is becoming harder to find, which means these long-endangered fish are facing perhaps their biggest challenge yet.
Atlantic salmon are anadromous, moving between freshwater and saltwater environments. For millennia, they spawned in the rivers of the northeastern United States, eastern Canada, and Northern Europe before migrating to the coasts of Greenland and Iceland. There, they grew to maturity before returning to their natal rivers to give birth to new generations.
The journey has long been perilous. Pollution, dams, overfishing, and habitat destruction have diminished the number of Atlantic salmon since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Salmon runs that once numbered in the tens of millions have disappeared, and wild salmon have nearly disappeared from all of their ancestral waters. Climate change poses a potent new threat to both wild salmon and those contained inside industrial pens.
Read more at: Yale Environment 360
Photo Credit: Cock-Robin via Pixabay
