Yesterday morning I received a completely unexpected phone call from a VERY excited Michael Pollock of NOAA. He had read the good salmon news in Bloomberg and was thinking this could be a major change to California’s dwindling salmon population. He wanted to know who was tracking these sudden salmon and all the places they were showing up. He thought DNA samples would be helpful in figuring out what was triggering them to come back to rivers they hadn’t spawned in for a century.
It’s an interesting question. I mean, okay sure we are restoring creeks and repairing waterways and that’s very good. but how does a salmon way out at sea learn that and think “Hey this sounds like a great place to spawn. I know it was a hundred years ago that I visited that creek but it might just be time to go back to the old neighborhood.” (more…)
Endangered Coho salmon are returning to Marin County, California, creeks this winter where they’ve long been absent, thanks to intense rains that scientists say will become more frequent as the state swings between climate-driven drought and deluge.
Every year, salmon journey from the open waters of the North Pacific, pass through estuaries along the coast, and swim upriver to spawn in the freshwater streams and creeks in which they were born. Yet across the western coast of North America, coho salmon are dying in large numbers as they return to urban watersheds. In West Seattle, a team of citizen scientists are surveying salmon to understand how many are affected. 
It’s late fall, and coho salmon are seesawing their strong bodies upstream — their flashy silver sides stained a dark maroon as the fish prepare to spawn.
