Welcoming World Ocean Day 2022
Today we welcome World Ocean Day 2022.
The Missing Salmon Alliance are leading initiatives to better understand marine environments, and the connection of these environments with freshwater habitats, in order to slow the decline of wild Atlantic salmon.
The holistic research that the Missing Salmon Alliance is conducting across freshwater and marine environments is crucial in understanding this decline.
Image: Atlantic Salmon Federation
Atlantic salmon face a number of pressures throughout their lives in freshwater and in the marine environment. Recent studies are providing evidence that many fish are still being lost in freshwater and the coastal zone, and some point the finger at a changing marine environment, exacerbated by climate change.
The MSA is working to place these findings into a framework to allow action to be taken to reverse the decline in wild Atlantic salmon populations.
One of the initiatives at the heart of the MSA is the Likely Suspects Framework (LSF). The Alliance’s vision for the LSF project is to develop a new approach to identify where changes in salmon survival are occurring across their entire life-cycle, provide a forward look for stock prospects, and a framework which can guide salmon management decisions.
As a migratory species that traverses many regions and habitats including freshwater and marine, salmon are a key indicator species in helping to understand the pressures that many other species are facing. The Likely Suspects Framework invites a holistic approach and questions the pressures within both freshwater and marine environments.
Alongside this, MSA members, Fisheries Management Scotland (FMS) and the Atlantic Salmon Trust (AST) are leading on two unique, research-based tracking projects which are set to provide valuable information to help understand smolt migration routes, to identify the threats they face on their journey to sea, and comprehend marine migratory distribution of wild Atlantic salmon across the West Coast of Scotland. These two projects are the West Coast Tracking Project (led by AST and FMS together with Marine Scotland Science) and the Moray Firth Tracking Project (AST).
These projects are not happening in isolation. There are other major initiatives currently taking place across the UK, such as SeaMonitor and COMPASS, as well as others run by Marine Scotland, NatureScot and the Zoological Society of London. Crucially, the tags and receivers across these projects are all compatible with one another. This means salmon will be detected on all of the arrays, which will lead to a far greater understanding of how these fish are moving out to sea.
Discussing the significance of salmon with regards to the marine environment, Ken Whelan, Research Director at Atlantic Salmon Trust and President of NASCO 2004-2008, said “Salmon conservation means more than just conserving salmon. Salmon, not just Atlantic salmon but all species of salmon are a key indicator of change both in freshwater and in the marine environment. There is huge advantage in the fact that salmon wander both across the freshwater and the marine, alongside the scientific technology that is now available to us. We are now able to look at the biological logs that these fish store in their bodies as they move across the ocean. We can look at the chemistry of the flesh of the fish once they return to freshwater and interrogate it to determine where in the ocean the fish have been, what they have eaten, where they have encountered problems and where they have done well. All of this means that we have the ability to use salmon as indicative monitors of the key environments that we need to protect.”
As an Alliance of six organisations, we will build on the existing work of our partners and maximise our impact by taking a coordinated approach and vital action in order to halt and reverse the decline of wild Atlantic salmon.
The goal of the Missing Salmon Alliance is to build an evidence-base to influence national and international decision-makers to regulate activities that adversely impact wild Atlantic salmon.
The Missing Salmon Alliance
The MSA is comprised of the following members:
Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust, Atlantic Salmon Trust, the Angling Trust with Fish Legal, The Rivers Trust and Fisheries Management Scotland.
https://www.missingsalmonalliance.org