By Dr. Robert Thorson
I have an unusual type of seasonal affective disorder, known as SAD. During these darkening days, I don’t get sad at all. In fact, I find it progressively easier to extract hope from failure.
Feeding my SAD this year was a recent story by Steve Grant about New England’s collective failure to re-establish a breeding population of Atlantic salmon in the Connecticut River and its tributaries. Published Oct. 22 in The Courant, it gave me hope that mass culture will wake up to see the demise of this charismatic game fish as an example of the more invisible and insidious biological impoverishment taking place all around us.
More important, I have renewed hope that mass culture will wake up to realize that environmental conservation here on Earth is a far greater technical challenge than putting progressively more expensive robots on lifeless Mars.
As with space exploration, conservationists win some and lose some. Eagles and ospreys are back. And we know why. Public funding, hard work and the best wildlife science available. Congratulations to everyone involved. Spawning Atlantic salmon are not back, despite more than $200 million in taxpayer dollars; a network of federal, state, and local agencies and nonprofits; and 45 years of active management, monitoring and data analysis.
This salmon project failed for two important reasons. First, ecology is far more complex than engineering. The natural life cycle of salmon, for example, involves dozens of important variables. After hatching from eggs in some freshwater headwater tributary, the juvenile fish (called fry) spend two years getting accustomed to their local habitat before leaving for the sea. There they range widely, feed and mature. At age 4 or 5, they return to where they were born using chemical clues within the water, then the females lay eggs fertilized by male milt. Anything physical, chemical or biological that might change the inland freshwater habitat, the marine habitat or the river corridor between them is, by definition, involved.
By comparison, rocket science is simple because the constraints involve only the physics of flight, the chemistry of propulsion and one species: “Homo engineeringus.”
The second reason the salmon project failed is becoming increasingly familiar. Chief among the possible reasons for the salmon’s failure to thrive are two aspect of global climate change: warmer waters off southern New England due to rising sea surface temperatures in the north Atlantic, and colder waters in the Davis Strait between Newfoundland and Labrador due to enhanced melting of the Arctic ice. Related factors beyond state jurisdiction involve the higher abundance of other fish preying upon and competing with the salmon, and things we’re not yet aware of.
Homo engineeringus created the problem, which began two centuries ago with construction of dams to power the Industrial Revolution. They blocked the salmon spawning runs throughout the watershed, forcing local extinction. Re-establishing that population, beginning in the mid-1960s, required the construction of fish ladders for migrating fish and cleaning up chemical pollution, two side benefits that remain in force. This was the easy part.
The hard part was re-establishing a local population that might return. Salmon fry of the same species from the Penobscot River in Maine were trapped, hauled to Connecticut, and raised in local hatcheries before being released to swim downstream to the sea. Each year, and with great hope, returning fish were counted and monitored, and their eggs and milt stripped to create a new generation of fish with chemical memories of their proper sense of place.
Things were looking good until 1981, when more than 500 locally raised salmon returned by instinct. But then the numbers began falling, not only in Connecticut, but also in Europe and maritime Canada, indicating a problem beyond regional control. After three decades of decline, only 58 fish returned in 2011. Given the challenging fiscal constraints facing our nation, the lead federal agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, pulled out. The states followed suit. The game was up. We failed.
Hallelujah! Hubris! Wake up! Hear the good news! Nature is in charge!
I have great hope that someday, mass culture will wake up and realize that we are but passengers on spaceship Earth, and must learn to behave accordingly.