Melting glaciers may produce thousands of kilometers of new salmon habitat

https://www.science.org/content/article/melting-glaciers-may-produce-thousands-kilometers-new-salmon-habitat

by rbanffy • 5 years ago

117 64 5 years ago

soperj3• 5 years ago

So could opening up dammed rivers.

And how many more kilotons of fossil fuels would we need to burn per year to make up for the loss in hydroelectric power those dams give us?

melling• 5 years ago

We are using record amounts of coal globally.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/global-coal-power-expected-to-h...

Alex3917• 5 years ago

The vast majority of the dams being torn down are from old mills, not hydro dams. They serve no economic purpose and are highly dangerous, in addition to preventing millions of fish from living in the rivers.

tomrod• 5 years ago

0. But it would require giving up some creature comforts.

labster2• 5 years ago

Not as much energy as you think. The main obstacle to removing dams is getting funding. One dam locally is finally being removed 20 years after literally everyone local agreed it should be removed. 90% silted up as it is. But you have to pay for the unsafe bridge downstream before you cut open the dam. It sure would be nice to have had 20 years more sand on the beach to fight erosion.

Anyway, there are lots of little dams like this everywhere that have negative economic value, but no one wants to pay the cost to remove them.

GongOfFour• 5 years ago

There are 84,000 dams in the United States. More than one a day since we became a country. Most of them don't generate any meaningful electricity, but they do disrupt habitat for many native fish species.

I would like to see them all destroyed. We can find electricity elsewhere.

oh_sigh• 5 years ago

I think you're imagining Hoover dam getting torn down, when really it is a 6' dam built 150 years ago with no hydroelectric that is causing problems for certain habitats.

kajecounterhack4• 5 years ago

Aside from the point that most dams don't produce a ton of power, salmonid spawning in the ecosystem also adds nitrogen to banks that encourages vegetation growth, which is beneficial in many ways for both our water supply (e.g. shade helps prevent evaporative losses, trees provide beavers opportunity to build habitat to increase net groundwater storage) and for carbon sequestration via plant growth. The American west has a drought resilience problem and restoring salmon/trout/beaver habitat can be an effective way to attack the problem on several levels. Dams are particularly damaging to Salmonids, both by acting as spawning barriers AND by warming the water to a level that can make survival difficult (salmonids need cold water).

Look at dams like Oroville and Hoover now -- despite producing a lot of electricity, they are not resilient to drought, and river systems lose a lot of drought resistance when you add dams. When you dam a river, you slow and warm the water -- this threatens entire ecosystems adapted to survival where the river runs.

Particularly in salmonid / coldwater fish habitats, dams are pretty damaging. If you want to learn more about the subject, there are a lot of books & documentaries about the Eel river that are worth reading and watching -- the Eel is a good case study in what happens when you dam a river, and what happens when you un-dam it.

bmitc2• 5 years ago

Some hydroelectric power plants actually have greater emissions than even coal power plants, and that's ignoring that dams are much worse for the extended local ecosystems.

The dams in the Pacific Northwest have decimated the wild salmon population. Salmon are big, meat eating fish that sustain several other animals, such as the Southern Resident orcas. This population of orcas is literally being starved by us destroying the salmon population., amongst the other challenges they face due to humans, such as poisoning and toxicity.

mrfusion• 5 years ago

Why can’t we invent better fish ladders to get around dams?

habeebtc• 5 years ago

Most dams do not have a fish ladder from what I have seen.

I have fished every dam on the river I live on (in IL) for about a 60 mile stretch. There is 1 fish ladder I can think of. Every dam removal project gets fought tooth and nail by locals who like how they look, or fishermen who like how fish bunch up under them.

chmaynard• 5 years ago

I wonder if AAAS is in poor financial shape. Other once-respected science journals such as Scientific American have dumbed down their content considerably, but I thought Science would resist that trend.

loonster• 5 years ago

Cant access it (ddos protection from so much new traffic), so maybe my question would be answered.

I wonder what salmon would habitat the ne habitat and how long it would take. Presumably salmon return to where they were born to spawn. So only the lost salmon would be able to populate the new habitat.

Turing_Machine• 5 years ago

They return to the stream they grew up in before they went to sea, not necessarily the one where the eggs were hatched.

It's very common to stock streams with fry from a hatchery located somewhere else. Salmon generally spend a year or more (much more, in some species) in fresh water before migrating to the ocean. That's plenty of time for them to imprint on the "foster stream" -- they'll return to it, no problem.

bc_skier• 5 years ago

It generally happens pretty quickly. Salmon seem to all have a "stray rate", where some percent will stray from their natal river on their spawning run. It makes sense, as it allows for colonization of new habitat, or to revive extinct populations. A lot of the current salmon habitat from Washington north was under glaciers not too long ago. So they have been doing this exact thing for millennia.

Straying is partly why you can see salmon spawning above former dam sites, even shortly after removal. It's also why you will occasionally see salmon in a stream with no documented population (sockeye salmon on the oregon coast for example).

As for how long it takes for a population to take hold I'm not sure. But I have read about salmon populations getting completely wiped out by landslides and recovering in 50 years or so, including the same adaptations (for example larger bodies for navigating a steep gorge) that the extinct population held. So potentially pretty quickly in the grand scheme of things.

xwdv• 5 years ago

Maybe a dumb question but would these salmon be for eating?

dukeofdoom• 5 years ago

So some good news. I was very surprised how developed Alaska was. Seemed like Northern Ontario. Yukon seemed much desolate and wild. Highly recommend seeing both.

mistrial9• 5 years ago

if this were to be interpreted as good news, it assumes the stability of generations to live and grow; geological-scale change doesn't stop and stabilize just to look at the new vistas

OpieCunningham• 5 years ago

“They say the smog is the reason we have such beautiful sunsets.”

phendrenad2• 5 years ago

Maybe more salmon will set off a chain reaction that cools the planet?

noduerme• 5 years ago

They might, if McDonald's starts selling salmon burgers.

labster2• 5 years ago

Pirates eat salmon, and pirates prevent global warming, so yes: this just might work!

anshumankmr• 5 years ago

As a species, we eat almost any kind of meat, from chicken to beef so if there's more salmon, we sure as well will eat more of it.

There's a popular meme for this "This looks like free real estate"

DantesKite2• 5 years ago

I think when trying to predict the future of climate change, you’ll find every model imperfect (even if it can tell you important truths about what may happen).

If you try to make specific predictions, you’re going to turn people off.

It’s far better to frame it as a matter of, “Look we don’t know what’ll happen and since we only have 1 planet and pollution is bad, we’re going to try and minimize the impact we have, because we don’t get a second chance.”

And then just take it from there.

We don’t need to understand what’s inside the box when it arrives on our doorstep. We just have to avoid opening it.

hcurtiss• 5 years ago

But, if that were the right approach, you’d never change anything. We’d have never left the caves. The question is not whether we alter the natural environment. It’s whether we have reason to believe the benefits of those changes may outweigh the costs.

wallacoloo• 5 years ago

leaving the caves was an individual- or tribal-level decision. in fact, many groups did not leave the caves, only some did. it’s a poor metaphor for climate change because we don’t have the option of exploring both paths simultaneously as a species in the same way our ancestors did with those caves.

cost/benefit analysis, i do agree with though. or maybe a “risk-adjusted” cost/benefit. the biggest disagreement i have is with people who think climate change is inherently bad, rather than believing specific outcomes/effects of climate change are bad. when you unpack climate change often the bad things are common across catastrophes caused by other disruptions, e.g. food/water insecurity is something we could see both from climate change or large-scale war. certain ways of thinking about the situation might lead a person to believe that addressing these effects is the way to make humanity more bulletproof, rather than trying to prevent the several distinct causes (CO2 emissions being one of them) that lead to the real problems. though it’s never an all-or-nothing, more like “reduce the causes to the point that you’re not reducing our ability to respond to the effects”. cost/benefit analysis, like you say.

roenxi• 5 years ago

... and since we only have 1 planet and pollution is bad ...

There is a high correlation and probably causal relationship between increasing global pollution and improved living standards. It is extremely unclear that "pollution is bad". Someone taking a strictly data driven approach could reasonably conclude that pollution is good.

There is a reason that the pro-environment types are struggling to have an impact on actual policy. Their ideas have, up until very recently with the relative cheapness of solar and wind, been likely to doom us all.

onion2k• 5 years ago

This is why compartmentalizing things as "good" or "bad" is unhelpful. It's rarely so simple. Sure, there are aspects of polluting behaviours that ostensibly raise the quality of life for many people, but that doesn't mean you should ignore the long term impact of that behavior, especially if it has a provably negative impact on the planet. You have to look at the whole issue, not just the short term positives.

HPsquared• 5 years ago

While I agree there seems to be a positive correlation, the argument reminds me of this classic video from the Onion:

[0] https://youtu.be/nJ4K0hHin9s "China Celebrates Status as Number One Polluter"

"The labor of the people has made the sky black with the smoke of progress... We are overjoyed."

"Cancer is a very modern disease"

"If pollution ruins a river, we will build a new river"

agarsev• 5 years ago

There is a high correlation and probably causal relationship between increasing global pollution and improved living standards.

That would be if pollution was a global phenomenon. Climate is global and chaotic, and we only have one planet so we can't compare, but pollution levels are local are different between heavily industrialised places and times and less so places and times. I'm sure there is extensive and conclusive research that pollution is bad for your health, which is an important part of living standards.

YetAnotherNick• 5 years ago

There are two kind of things that are often lumped together:

Visible local pollution: This includes things like particulate matter in air, river pollution, dirty streets, toxic water etc. This is clearly inversely correlated with development and health and developed countries generally sorted it out better.

Global level: This mostly includes greenhouse gases etc. This is very correlated with development and health among countries. The countries with highest emission has best quality of life and they are sharing the burden with undeveloped countries.

Tiktaalik2• 5 years ago

Environmentalist solutions that would lower carbon would have no negative impact on our standards of living, and would in fact raise it.

For example we know from studies that long car commutes are terrible for your health and even dramatically rise divorce rates. With that in mind, jurisdictions with good public rapid transportation networks have higher quality of life than SF, and at the same time have less CO2 emissions due to the more efficient transportation system.

The reason for friction against environmentalism is because the low carbon solutions have been politicized into being part of the left/right culture war.

The result is inexplicable push back against dull public works that benefit everyone on top of also lowering CO2.

lm28469• 5 years ago

There is a high correlation and probably causal relationship between increasing global pollution and improved living standards.

There is a high correlation and probably causal relationship between consuming heroin and pleasure yet you don't want to do that every day because short term positive effects don't cancel long term negative ones.

Everyone knows pollution is a long term catastrophe, us being addicted to it doesn't make it a good thing....

DantesKite2• 5 years ago

I don't think car smog is good for you and I don't think you need a study to prove that.

kajecounterhack4• 5 years ago

If you try to make specific predictions, you’re going to turn people off.

I think it's fuzzier than that. Like, I think it's extremely useful to say out loud that climate change will cause large tidal events in the relative short term (sea level rise in the long term). And that an immediate action is for cities like Venice, New Orleans, and Miami to ready themselves for that. It's specific and should be motivating for a large group of people to do something (or risk losing their homes and possibly lives). You have to hope they connect it to the larger picture of things happening too.

We don’t need to understand what’s inside the box when it arrives on our doorstep. We just have to avoid opening it.

The problem with this is that a lot of folks will do nothing if you don't unpack the box for them and explain how it will affect them.

otabdeveloper4• 5 years ago

And that an immediate action is for cities like Venice, New Orleans, and Miami to ready themselves for that.

If you really believe in what you say, now is the time to go short on housing in these (mega-expensive) cities and re-invest your incredible profits into clean energy.

Alas, nobody is actually serious about what they say, on both sides of the so-called "debate".

rmbyrro2• 5 years ago

Isn't this line of thought very similar to how the Roman Church guided people in the past? Results were not astonishingly good...

Tiktaalik2• 5 years ago

They'll die first due to the warmer water.

entropicgravity• 5 years ago

Sure but the Chinese 20km drag nets in the North Pacific will gobble up those salmon in short order.

rembicilious2• 5 years ago

Well they won’t gobble the Atlantic salmon..

What can be done about overfishing of international waters?

It seems that the fish is destined to become another farm animal.

Manuel_D• 5 years ago

They already are - at least fish for consumption. About 50 percent of seafood is harvested through aquaculture: https://ourworldindata.org/rise-of-aquaculture

LatteLazy2• 5 years ago

Now that massive climate change is basically inevitable, I'd invest in a fund that specialized in finding opportunities (like this). Does anyone know if one?

freemint• 5 years ago

Invest for the sake of return or a different meaning of invest?

LatteLazy2• 5 years ago

For the sake of a return.

aritmo• 5 years ago

This looks like sugar-coating the effects of climate change. It is still a 'may' and likely will never materialize.

radu_floricica• 5 years ago

Isn't that the same with every prediction of climate change?

trompetenaccoun• 5 years ago

You mean those glaciers might not actually melt? Do you not believe in climate change?

brightstep• 5 years ago

I think you're getting voted down for confusing wording but you're right. This article says "well, we accept that we're not gonna do anything about climate change, but here's why actually that might not be so bad!"

Melting glaciers may produce thousands of kilometers of new salmon habitat

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