3 ms·
It seems like a poor HN title for a very interesting article (which has a perfectly serviceable actual title btw). The saddest thing is that there are apparent
by jacksonkmarley 5y ago
It seems like a poor HN title for a very interesting article (which has a perfectly serviceable actual title btw).
The saddest thing is that there are apparently technical solutions to this that could have potentially saved the species. The article mentions fish ladders and bypasses for dams. I'm not sure if the ladders are suitable for a huge fish like this, or whether it has the necessary jumping ability, but some sort of fish bypass seems like a good idea. Hopefully this can be implemented in the future for other similarly endangered species.
- msrenee 5y agoThey could even have been saved by a captive breeding program. Their American cousins are the subject of a lot of breeding programs. There's a number of state and federal hatcheries that capture breeding adults, strip the roe and milt, and return the adults to the wild. The fertilized eggs hatch into tiny paddle fish and they're raised in ponds until they're big enough to be released in the wild. The same is done with the pallid sturgeon, whose breeding habitat in the US is more or less destroyed due to the channelization of rivers for use by boats. It wasn't inevitable, but now it's impossible to bring them back.
- jacksonkmarley 5y agoThey did mention in the article some captive breeding attempts, but not sure if that was a case of 'too little, too late'.