Cynthia Koehler

Sunday, July 5, 2009

 

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/05/INUL18HM0G.DTL

This article appeared on page E - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Why should anyone care if California salmon, or local fishermen, go the way of the dodo?

Can't we just buy fish from Alaska? And what's wrong with the farmed stuff, anyway? Because of economic suffering in the Central Valley, some are calling for an end to environmental protections for California's once-mighty salmon runs.

At the center of the salmon debate is the fate of the Bay-Delta Estuary, the West Coast's largest and most important estuary. Estuaries are the interconnection between land, rivers and ocean, providing spawning and nursery habitat for commercial and recreational fisheries as well as birds, waterfowl and wildlife. Losing that diversity, turning rivers into canals that no longer support life, risks turning our estuary into a degraded system with more invasive and pest species while local fish, birds, invertebrates and wildlife die off.

Wild salmon is valuable as a harvestable, healthy and tasty food commodity loaded with omega-3 fatty acids.

But the health and viability of local salmon has everything to do with the health and viability of the aquatic ecosystem that surrounds us. As biologists will attest, if you want to measure the health of aquatic ecosystems, you need to measure fish.