Rocky II: What are we doing to our salmon?
“Everything we’re doing to replace vanishing salmon might be killing them off faster”
In this installment in his series of the challenge of restoring fish populations in the Columbia and Snake Rivers, Idaho Statesman reporter, Rocky Barker, explores the many ways in which the US Army Corps of Engineers has tried to bring salmon back.
“We’ve caught them at dams and trucked and barged them past obstacles. When the fish return home, we strip them of their eggs, fertilize them in buckets and grow new generations of baby salmon in hatchery raceways. But what if humans have it all wrong?”
The terrifying answer may be that, far from helping to restore or even preserve salmon populations, we are destroying them.