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Ends of the Earth Ruled by Bears—and Salmon
The ends of the Earth.
They're ruled by salmon and bears, or bears and salmon.
The line where one begins and the other ends on Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula have flowed together, says John Paczkowski, Kamchatka field coordinator for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and an ecologist at Alberta Parks in Canada...
No Rest for the Weary: Kamchatka's Salmon Also Threatened at Sea
Before they start their difficult journey up rivers and streams to spawn, Kamchatka's salmon must elude ships lined up off the peninsula's coast. The boats stand at the ready, poised to scoop up the salmon in thousands of kilometers of driftnets.
"Hauling in driftnets," says Konstantin Zgurovsky, Marine Programs Coordinator for WWF-Russia, "brings prized salmon. But less-valuable salmon species are discarded. The impact of this type of fishing, and net sizes that have continued to increase, is being felt throughout the marine ecosystem." That's especially true off Kamchatka. This open-water driftnet fishery, more than any other, results in large-scale seabird and marine mammal mortality...
Last of an Inland Salmon: "Coaster" Brook Trout Still Cruise Lake Superior Shores
The ancestors of today's salmon were lake-dwellers, paleontologists believe. Fossils of the earliest salmon are found in the fine-grained sediments of fresh waters.
By the late Miocene, some 10 to 15 million years ago, salmon fossils appear in coarse gravel, suggesting that the fish had expanded their range out of lakes and into rivers.
Somewhere in that eons-ago time, an ancient member of the salmon family—an anadromous, lake-dwelling form of brook trout known as the coaster—began its reign in Lake Superior...
Salmon Strongholds: Protecting the Piscine Wealth of the North Pacific
North America's John Day, Rogue, and Elk. Russia's Zhupanova, Opala, Kol, and Kekhta. Japan's Shiretoko and Sarufutsu.
These and other rivers are home to the last, best North Pacific salmon populations, according to scientists at the Wild Salmon Center, a nonprofit organization headquartered in Portland, Oregon.
The Wild Salmon Center's mission is to conserve salmon-laden rivers while they still fare well, says Mark Trenholm, the center's director of North American programs. "Salmon conservation efforts have focused on recovery of degraded watersheds and threatened species. But recovery efforts, while critical, are not enough, and often come too late."...