Salmon return to lay eggs in historic habitat after Klamath River dam removal

Do you have neurons in your brain that are pre-wired for these things? Is that encoded in your DNA? Like physically how is it inherited and the selective pressures applied?

Heart cells in a Petri dish will happily beat away.

This is kinda like explaining how a car works with "you fire and replace engineers until it moves".

It’s hard to imagine it being possible to test but I think they’re wrong.

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

The problem is that you’re conflating “I don’t understand it” with “it must be magic”

A hallmark of charlatans and pseudoscience pushers has been to find something they can claim is the boundary of scientific knowledge (often incorrectly) and then assert that everything past that line therefore is magic.

It’s a tale as old as time. Yet every time we make new discoveries they just move the line a little further and claim the magic must be over there now.

Another classic move is to make extraordinary assertions (magical hidden forces) but then when anyone objects they try to push the burden of proving the opposite on to the other person. That’s something you’re doing throughout this thread perhaps with realizing how irrational it all is.

There may in fact be physical, measurable mechanisms that govern these types of animal behavior. Just like there was a physical, measurable explanation for Mercury’s orbit.

And I’m sure whatever we discover that “solves” for dark matter will eventually start showing cracks as well, prompting another deep inquiry into the nature of our universe.

Good times.

> > swim up the randomly "wrong" rivers

And the reason for that is discovering new habitats. But the other comment I referred to, mentions this already so I left that out.

Didn't know about this though:

> spawning all these years but below the dams.

I thought, however, that it'd been funny if such a non-event (the fish didn't ...) had been in the news.

The idea would be that a salmon could be genetically predisposed to follow a certain path, perhaps preferring the smell of a certain combination of chemicals, thus encoding the location. It means the „memory“ would be encoded via genetics as a result of genetic combination and mutations, and the „encoding“ would essentially just be selection. It’s just speculation on how this genetic memory idea could work without actually encoding memories on genes.

I also heard that people at Trinity Pines were shooting at CalFire when they were helping with the fires 8 years ago. Hence the reason why it burned so bad.

Well founded objections should be treated with respect, but I think there's a lot of resistance that's born of (a) reflexive opposition to the 'other side' (b) false generalization of dam-removal arguments applicable to specific dams to all dams, and (c) the incorrect assumption that existing dams must have some utility (equivalently, unawareness of just how many __useless__ dams cover the west, these Klamath dams among them).

Calling dam removal ‘activist’ implies the push to keep it isn’t. But keeping the dam is just as much about advocacy—it’s about prioritizing things like renewable energy or flood control. Neither side is more ‘scientific’ than the other; they’re both driven by values. Science helps us understand the stakes, but humans decide what matters most. That’s why this stuff gets so messy.

The environmental piece is a lovely bonus, but the truth is these dams are obsolete, end-of-life and will eventually fail. Leaving them in place is not an option, they either need to be replaced or removed.

Replacing a dam with no purpose is a waste of money, and the (ahem) downstream benefits of a healthier environment benefits both existing folk and improves land for future generations.

It really is a rare win-win situation.

Hatcheries, OTOH, are a poor simulacrum of a real fishery and a real lifecycle. They might churn out more juveniles than a natural river would, but that doesn't necessarily translate into a larger catch or higher quality catch.

Similarly, a lot of dam preservation pressure is reflexive reactionary thinking that if someone wants to remove the dams, it must be because they're a hippie environmentalist and the dam must be saved to show our commitment to Progress.

Dams have a finite lifespan. Rivers carry sediment. The dams slow the flow of water and the sediment is dropped. This fills up the reservoir behind the dam, eventually making the dam ineffective. In addition, ordinary mechanical stresses wear out dams and they're components, so there is a maintenance cost to just keeping them running.

Many failure modes for dams are catastrophic: a release of water and silt all at once into downstream areas.

Worse, many of the dams that were built in the dam-building boom in the US West from circa 1930 to 1965 or so were not particularly well-thought-out, especially smaller privately planned dams.

In the mid-century American Bureau of Reclamation, building dams was like building new chat services is at Google today. While dams, as a concept, are completely critical to making the western united states survivable with mid-20th century technology, many of the actual dams were not good designs, they are the result of a generation or two of engineers responding to promotion incentives within a large bureaucracy, and they should no more be given the benefit of the doubt as good engineering projects than the last abandoned open source project you saw from Google, Facebook, Uber, etc.

Consider Matilija Dam (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matilija_Dam):

* "In 1941 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers warned that the dam would not be economically effective, as the steep, erosive topography upstream would cause it to silt up quickly. However, the project moved forward and in 1945 the county issued $682,000 in revenue bonds to fund it. Construction began on 18 June 1946 and was completed on 14 March 1948 at a cost of nearly $4 million, six times the original estimate" * "Almost immediately after construction, the dam began silting up.[7] The dam traps about 30% of the total sediment in the Ventura River system, depriving ocean beaches of replenishing sediment.[6] Initially, engineers had estimated it would take 39 years for the reservoir to fill with silt,[1] but within a few years it was clear that the siltation rate was much faster than anticipated. In 1964 a safety study was commissioned from Bechtel Corporation, which determined the dam was unsafe and recommended removal." * The dam was notched twice, reducing its capacity and function, and the reservoir was useless by 2020. * Ventura county started trying to remove the dam in 1998 (who knows what happened between 1964 and then), but the dam is still there.

Even the good dams don't last forever, and there is no plan to deal with the sediment build up in the West's dams.

However, the Reclamation and Army Corps of Engineers dams are the good ones. The real corkers are the private dams. Consider Rindge Dam (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rindge_Dam) in Malibu, California, which was privately built by the Rindge family when they controlled the entire Mexican land grant rancho that is present-day Malibu:

* Built 1926 * Completely silted up by 1950, 24 years later. 24 years of "useful" life tops ("useful" is suspect because most Rindge family building projects were weird compliance dodges to preserve control of the ranch. They spent decades building and tearing down a railroad because the law on the books at the time prevented the state from using eminent domain to seize their land for road-building if there was a railroad under construction there) * Congress authorized removal study in 1992. * In 2014, dam considered so dangerous due to lack of repairs that the area, which is now in a state park, was closed to the public in 2014. * The dam can't just be knocked down, what would happen to the 600k cubic meters of sediment that are now trapped behind the dam, that should have flowed down the river for the last 100 years? The plan is to _truck the sediment out_. Some will be dumped in the ocean, the rest in _landfills_. * The currently scheduled goal to complete the removal project is _2033_. The dam was been functionally useless for its original purpose since 1950. It's 83 year "useless/dangerous" lifespan will surpass it's 24 year "useful" lifespan by 3.5x! Surely _some_ of that is government beauracracy but not all: it's very difficult to unbuild a silted up dam. It's harder to undo things than it is to do them.

I think there is much more significant "religious faith" in the sanctity of dams than there is "belief that dams are evil because they aren't natural" in the United States. Dams are a powerful symbol of America's mid-century confidence in it's ability to bend nature to its will. Hoover Dam is more than a tourist site, it's something closer to a civic-religious site, like the Lincoln Monument. So is Glen Canyon. Grand Coulee Dam is known to a lot of people as "The Dam That Won World War II" for it's role in powering the aluminum-smelting plants and nuclear material refinement sites in the Northwest. How many pieces of infrastructure are considered war heros in the US?

The sanctity of dams is way more obvious in the northeast. There's hundreds and hundreds of abandoned dams on every trickle of water in the mid-Atlantic and New England, all to power mills that stopped milling 100 years ago, but the dams are still there, and the fish are not.