#salmon-collapse

#salmon-collapse

"They didn't even try to fly away. They just feebly made noise," a woman told the Santa Barbara Independent on Saturday after spotting over two dozen dead or dying cormorants near Goleta Beach. "A few were on their stomachs, wings spread [and] gasping for breath.... Heartbreaking."

During major floods, thousands of tiny fish convene at Luvilombo Falls in the upper Congo River Basin to undertake a peculiar vertical migration, described for the first time today in Scientific Reports.

Nobuyuki Miyaoka, attending the festival, notes that the local oysters used to be a lot bigger, expressing concern over their current small size and scarcity.

Wildfires have become an ever bigger problem in Canada. The 2018 wildfires were the biggest in British Columbia's history, but this record was broken in 2021, and then again in 2023, when fires consumed an area three times the size of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia and the smoke travelled as far as New York City.

These polymetallic nodules, as they're known, take millions of years to form, slowly accumulating metals like nickel, cobalt and manganese. That's made them a target for mining companies, looking to feed the world's growing hunger for materials that go into advanced batteries and other technologies.

The haul of lobsters, Maine's best known export and a key piece of the state's identity and culture, has declined every year since 2021, and some scientists have cited as a reason warming oceans that spur migration to Canadian waters.

If you're looking for a new way to enjoy salmon, you've got to try these easy salmon cakes! They're a cinch to make (just one bowl!) and you can cook them in a cast iron pan on the stove. These delightful mini salmon cakes are a great option, serve atop a bed of greens drizzled with a Vidalia onion citrus dressing for this light and tasty option.

'Orcas are psychos,' quipped a close friend recently. He wasn't joking, nor was he ill-informed. In fact, he is probably the world's leading historian of whales and people. He had just watched a BBC Earth clip, narrated by David Attenborough, in which three killer whales separate a male humpback calf from his mother in the waters of Western Australia. The video's closing footage, with two of the orcas escorting the naive youngster to his imminent death, resembles nothing so much as a kidnapping:

At the center of the dispute are eight dams and reservoirs on the Columbia and Snake Rivers in the Pacific north-west that have created devastating obstacles for salmon and steelhead unable to breach their deadly turbines or navigate through the large, warm, artificial pools.

Maximo Macanas, a McKinleyville resident, was discovered by a local sport vessel on Tuesday, according to a Facebook post by the Del Norte County Sheriff's Office. He was pronounced dead by the county coroner's office on Tuesday afternoon. Macanas was fishing with a friend and his children at the Klamath River near 4351 Klamath Beach Road when he was swept away Saturday afternoon by what the Del Norte County Sheriff's Office described as a sneaker wave,

A sweet, gingery glaze accents salmon fillets and their sidekick, skin-on sliced acorn squash. The quick-to-make glaze is made by combining light brown sugar, orange juice, honey, and ground ginger in a small saucepan and bringing it to a simmer for about 8 minutes. Then it is set aside for a few minutes to thicken. Easy. If the challenge of cutting up an acorn squash sounds too daunting. substitute 6 cups of peeled and diced butternut squash; most supermarkets stock it cut into peeled chunks.

Juha Kujala no longer knows how many reindeer will return to his farm from the forest each December. The 54-year-old herder releases his animals into the wilderness on the 830-mile Finnish-Russian border each spring to grow fat on lichens, grass and mushrooms, just as his ancestors have done for generations. But since 2022, grisly discoveries of reindeer skeletons on the forest floor have disrupted this ancient way of life.

Wildlife populations are in decline. Recreation sites are crowded and often underfunded. Wildfires are larger, more destructive and harder to control. Climate change is reshaping natural systems, from ocean fisheries to mountain snowpacks, faster than institutions can respond. At the same time, communities are being asked to host new energy projects, transmission lines and mineral development - often without clear processes, adequate resources or trust that decisions are being made in the public interest.

Consumers must be aware that seafood fraud, in which vendors label cheaper fish as products of higher quality and price, is common practice. According to Oceana, fish is mislabeled 25 to 70% of the time, especially when it comes to prized fish like wild salmon and Atlantic cod. Those of us who care about the environment are also concerned with traceability,

I'd been on the island for less than a week when I opened my glove box looking for sunglasses, only to find the wrapper of my emergency granola bar torn open and the corner nibbled, right next to a neat little pile of mouse droppings. As I inspected the rest of the car, I was mortified to realize it was likely more than a single mouse. I texted the friend I was housesitting for in disbelief. "Ugh, I'm sorry! That's so island," she wrote back.

The question of how to protect fish and the ecological health of rivers that feed California's largest estuary is generating heated debate in a series of hearings in Sacramento, as state officials try to gain support for a plan that has been years in the making. "I am passionate that this is the pathway to recover fish," said state Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot. "This is the paradigm we need: collaborative, adaptive management versus conflict and litigation."

The wolves arrived in May of last year, just days after Paul Roen had driven his cattle back up to their summer pasture in Northern California's Sierra Valley. He started finding the bleeding bodies of calves-some still alive, so badly paralyzed that they'd need to be shot. After weeks of this, Roen finally saw a kill himself. "One wolf grabbed a cow and spun her around, while another grabbed a calf," he told me. "He tore it into three pieces in 30 seconds."

Wildfires are no longer a once-a-year emergency in Canada. In 2025, fires burned more than 8.3 million hectares across multiple provinces (roughly the size of New Brunswick), making it the second-worst wildfire season in the country. Some experts warn this could become the new normal. At The Walrus Talks Wildfires, expert voices from the health, climate, policy, and technology sectors come together to explore the impact of the wildfire crisis.

"The numbers are really, really bad," Swain says. "If this were November, they might be less meaningful. We're not in November-we're heading toward mid-February. The normal numbers are pretty high. To be at half of them means that, in absolute terms, the deficit is large."