Ted salmon and dams

US Fish and Wildlife biologist Ted Cook told me that baby salmon, due to a loss of body condition, become more buoyant as they are in freshwater streams and they are literally being washed without swimming downstream. And this is where they run into trouble. David Sparks Sportsman's Spotlight. Speaker2: The problem is when you have a series of impoundments behind dams, you don't have the current to wash them to the ocean and it takes weeks longer for a baby salmon to get through each dam. They're exposed to more predation and higher water temperatures. And then by the time they get to the ocean, it's too late and they've missed their window and they die. They just die in the open water. Yeah. Mean they die at many points. The other thing is we have Northern Pike Minnow. They're very audacious. And so when these baby salmon are swimming up in the water column in a lake environment behind one of the dams, instead of being flushed down the stream, they're far more vulnerable to predation. And then with the delay, the water temperatures increase. And of course, salmon are a cold water species. And so if they're still in the freshwater environment in, say, July, then they're likely to die from water temperatures. They have a window of time that they undergo a physiological change to allow them to go from living in freshwater to living in saltwater, which is hard to do. Pretty different environments there. Too late to the ocean. They miss their window to be able to infer from that ability to live in fresh to salt. It's fascinating. It's incredible. These are salmon that migrate farther than any other salmon in the continental United States, and they go from some of the highest elevations up at 9000 feet to the ocean, up to the Gulf of Alaska and back. It's a miraculous thing, a. Speaker1: Miracle of nature.