3 ms·
I was reading about a dam demolition in Washington a while back and the bit that really helped me wrap my head around it was this: Salmon are one of the primar
by munificent 4y ago
I was reading about a dam demolition in Washington a while back and the bit that really helped me wrap my head around it was this:
Salmon are one of the primary pipelines to transfer calories from the ocean inland.
Those calories—by that I mean a shorthand for "nutrition"—naturally get washed from land out to sea by stuff dying in rivers, rainfall, etc. Without some engine that cycles that material back into inland areas, you don't have a functioning cyclic sustainable ecosystem.
Salmon get eaten by bears whose poop feeds plants that are eaten by herbivores. An incredible amount of the natural world in salmon areas depends on this pipeline running. When you stop the salmon, you stop the entire circulatory system.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 4y agoThat’s an impressive fact. I would have guessed birds would do most of that work.
- MichaelCollins 4y agoThe birds probably help a lot too, particularly eating/spreading the salmon scraps the bears leave behind.
- EdwardDiego 4y agoIIRC there's entire forest ecosystems that evolved to be fertilized by hunted salmon. https://web.uvic.ca/~reimlab/salmonforest.html https://web.uvic.ca/~reimlab/salmonforest.html
- raintrees 4y agoSalmon are also the mainstay protein for the Yurok tribe. No salmon, no tribe, was their recent statement on the matter. Edit: Sorry, wrong tribal name, it's the Yurok here at the mouth of the Klamath.