The $68k Fish: The future of salmon in the Pacific Northwest
harpers.org
harpers.org
Bonneville is the 5th largest (by height) of the Columbia dams and 8th largest (by generating capacity). There are 2 taller dams in British Columbia and 2 others in Washington state. The Bonneville is the largest dam he would have passed driving but that's not what he wrote.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dams_in_the_Columbia_R...
Notaries are difficult to find at open sea, but is a believable suspicion
https://www.traffic.org/site/assets/files/3358/trading-tails...
That's a pretty good metaphor for the cost of coddling our children that Jonathan Haidt goes on about. By valuing our offsprings' safety so highly we're effectively raising hatchlings in tubs, as opposed to wild fish gifted with a hardy stream upbringing.
I’m not sure there’s really a way to translate that effect to human beings in any ethical way, regardless of how you feel about safety. It’d go well beyond “not coddling.” (In fact, I’m not even sure if it’s possible for an apex predator to be R-selected. We’d likely have to do it ourselves, Battle Royale style.)
We’d surely get some beastly hunter-gatherers out of the deal though :)
It's unclear to me what you would want to select for. Being physically fit? Being smart? Being motivated? Being ethical? Being friendly?
Fit is relative, and surviving well in the wild is just as arbitrary as surviving well in in s farmZ
I have volunteered at a large hatchery in BC, located near the headwaters of a small river. Every fall salmon are trapped next to the hatchery, their eggs & sperm are extracted for that year's batch, are mixed together, and the resulting fry are released in the spring.
So they aren't kept at the hatchery very long, and the genetic selection is limited to whatever made it back upstream.
Also, there's still the issue of genetic selection on the way out. The millions of fish that are spawned, raised in concrete pools and released back into the river have all been artificially selected to survive the extremely difficult first few months of life, which would naturally be the first genetic screening of the new generation.
Interestingly, by major, CS students are given the most financial assistance from their parents. I think there can be a naive suggestion that having parents willing to pay your SF rent and take care of details like who does your laundry allows for hyper focused work on complex, abstract problems. The idea of “not coddling” your children may be doing more harm than good in a economy which requires specialized work.
Either by permitting their children to be entirely focused on studies, careers or both. At this point however we're not talking about helicopter parents, we're talking about privilege.
By what metrics? An Ivy League student who requires their parents to intercede with their teachers versus a well adjusted state school student who takes care of themselves.
That is, does the presence of weaker fish hinder or help the survivability of their stronger peers? Do disease vector and habitat pressures outweigh predation pressure?
How do you show this? The number of parameters leading to success is ludicrously high. Is there even a frailty in need of explaining? How about all the other environmental factors, like lack of the opportunity to invest in careers and cheap subsidized housing like our grandparents got? This sounds suspiciously like pop psych crap.
So it seems that our reproductive strategy of caring for your young has paid off way more than the salmons' one, of "tough love" for their offspring.
You could say that mammals' reproductive strategy is exactly to coddle their young, in a sense. And it seems to work OK.
Maybe this time... normally is the opposite
Past certain level of efficiency, there's likely something of the trade-off triangle ("good, fast, cheap, pick two"), and two of its vertices are "smart" and "democratic".
People are allowed to fish and kill more than protect and reproduce, because the "kill" side has a lot of people with money, who don't give a damn about ecology or even long-term viability of their businesses, whereas the "protect" side that does the reproduction is also the same people who set up limits on what to do with the fish, so they kind of obey their own rules.
Can you rephrase this in the form of a sentence?
If you really want to increase genetic diversity there is a really cheap and simple solution. Reduce recreational fishing.
Okay, ... and is this management working? can counteract the increase of predator pressure (normal predators plus new pirate fishing at sea)?
Then all is fine and we shouldn't be talking here about extinction levels, and caring about the future of the salmon, should we?
"The Council estimates that the true cost of bringing a single spawner back to that uppermost region is as much as $68,031"
Why are even recreative fishers still allowed to catch a 68000 dollars fish (paid with money from taxes) for..., how many?, a fourty dollar license?, 500 dollars in permits and hotel and you can take two or tree fishes? Is a stupid deal. Why they are allowed to destroy all this hard work that aim to return the population to sustainable levels?
If you are bored go play baseball, make photos from nature, or read a book. If you want to see fishes, go to an aquarium or see Sponge Bob on tv.
Either somebody will fix it, or somebody will eventually have a good time fishing the last one. In both cases problem solved.
To raise “buff” salmon, you’d need something that looks less like a fishery, and more like a private river with the upstream pointed in the right direction for their migratory instincts. And, since they wouldn’t want to turn around at the end, you’d need to pick them all up and haul them back to the beginning so that they would swim it again.