wildlife – The Secret Angler

Here is a quote from the Second ICES/NASCO Workshop on Salmon Mortality at Sea held in 2022: “No agreement on the development of a set of priority marine mortality hypotheses was reached.” Translated this means the fisheries bods can’t make up their minds on the most likely cause of salmon vanishing at sea. The document goes on to expound, in the usual opaque language, about ‘complexities’, lack of data, particularly data from commercial fisheries; looking forward, the workshop agreed on the need for ‘cooperative initiatives’, ‘standardised approaches’, blah blah blah — i.e. the bullshit approach I’ve written about before.

The one encouragement is the recognition that information on commercial fishing is lacking, although this refers to bycatch data and makes no mention of possible illegal fishing, certainly an obvious contender for the salmon’s steep decline. The whole report is a waffle-fest of generalisations, wishlists and boilerplating. Even if any of the contents can be converted into something concrete, it will take years, and salmon stocks don’t have years. Looking through the list of authors, I am surprised to see some whom I believe to be competent scientists. Not sure I’d want to put my name to such a flimsy bit of work but then getting your name on as many papers as possible is the name of the game these days. Sophie Elliott has emphasised the importance of commercial capture data but there is no such emphasis in the ICES doc. Colin Bull, on the other hand, has proved himself a principal waffle merchant already.

So is there anything going on in the fisheries research community besides fretting over priority mortality hypotheses. Well, looking through the Atlantic Salmon Trust’s 2025 review, most of it looks to be examining fingernails. Yes, some is interesting and of potential long term benefit, if there is to be a long term for salmon, but only the section on Elliott’s bycatch work addresses the immediate concern. The Save the Spring project, which artificially rears smolts to adulthood, has reached a ‘major milestone’ — 75 fish released into the River Muick, a tributary of the Dee. Will it boost the spring fish population? Too early to tell.

Lest you think fisheries scientists are only hard-nosed seekers of knowledge, the AST report has a heartwarming tale about a tagged fish called Lax (ahh, cute) on its journey from parr to spawner. Apparently Lax was one of thousands tagged but we’re not told how many came back. Other data suggest a few dozen at best.

The Game and Wildlife Conservancy Trust publishes its latest work here . The results of work on the River Frome in Dorset apparently mirrors declines all over the country, although the estimates show wide variation, for which there is no explanation. Clearly the means of estimation is not entirely trustworthy and it’s worth noting that the pattern of decline for the past 15 years is not overwhelming; only in the last couple of years is there a more obvious fall.

What of the Moray Tracking Project I mentioned two years ago? Still analysing data according to the AST website . Whatever the outcome of this, I don’t expect the work will do much for salmon numbers. My bet is still on commercial fishing, illegal or accidental, being the main culprit. As I’ve said before, marine species worldwide are dwindling due to fishing pressure; no priority hypotheses needed to know that. It’s eminently logical that salmon populations are collapsing for the same reason. Just because legal fisheries have ended doesn’t mean such a commercially valuable fish is left alone. If this is indeed true, then in a sense it is good news because something can conceivably be done about it. Pacific salmon fisheries are policed and these are in good health, or at least better health than Atlantic populations. But if the problem is more complex, the effect of global warming on the marine ecosystem perhaps, I see little prospect of solving that in time to save the salmon. I’m not sure we will even save ourselves.

Where Atlantic salmon stocks are concerned, the scientists are right to resist the general clamour to use hatcheries to boost declining wild stocks because that only hastens their destruction. Specialised intervention like Save the Spring may help but I’m not expecting much. Most of present research seems to me to be navel-gazing with any benefits always a long way down the river. The scientists are neither heroes nor zeroes, but they may just be Neroes fiddling away while the bonfire of greed consumes the last of our wild salmon.

Follow @secretangler

Just over ten years ago, David Graeber, an anthropologist, wrote an article about ‘bullshit jobs’, which he defines as those which are engaged in unproductive work — clerical, administrative, advertising and the like. My favourite candidate for a bullshit job is PR or, as it’s more often called these days, communication. Just about every organisation seems to have someone in a job of this kind, including those to do with fishing, the Atlantic Salmon Trust for example, whose Head of Communications is Jonathon Muir. This is part of how he describes his job

Key to restoring the species [salmon] at scale and pace is by delivering landscape-scale solutions to land managers and policymakers, in addition to harnessing nature-positive finance and philanthropic funding within the corporate sector, using wild salmon as a keystone focus species within efforts to tackle the wider twin crisis of climate change and biodiversity loss.

Heads of communication clearly have a different way of communicating than the rest of us. ‘Landscape-scale solutions’? ‘Nature-positive finance’? Muir must spend much of his time weaving meaningless phrases from a dictionary of corporate gobbledygook. But he’s also written a piece for the Soapbox section in the September issue of Trout & Salmon, a rather Pollyannaish plea for ‘positivity’. Of course the words positive and negative are much bandied about these days, especially by lovers of obtuse language: negative is frequently used to describe someone who holds a different point of view, positive for those who have the same. According to Muir ‘We owe it to future generations of wild salmon lovers . . . to be relentlessly positive . . .’. When you consider that the Atlantic salmon population has crashed in most rivers either side of the Ocean, never mind the rapid disappearance of numerous other animal and plant species worldwide, the sixth mass extinction, it is hard to know what he means. Certainly lapsing into despair will not get us out of the environmental mess of our own making, but frittering away time on fruitless projects, as I believe the Atlantic Salmon Trust is doing, is not cause for optimism. Jonathon Muir seems to personify that foot-dragging.

To give him his due, he does refer to illegal exploitation in the T&S article, which is the first mention I’ve seen from anyone in the AST. The trouble is he is part of the ‘slow pace of action’ and telling us all to cheer up will do nothing to help. Indeed it may even give anglers an excuse to carry on with their own polluting ways — driving high-emission 4 by 4s (does JM own one?), flying around the world for fishing jollies, as encouraged by the magazines Trout & Salmon and Fly Culture among others. Anglers have a nasty habit of laying the blame anywhere but their own doorstep.

In the interests of giving the AST impetus, perhaps I can help Jonny redraft his job description, and that of all the AST employees:

Find out what’s killing the salmon. Take action to prevent it. And be quick about it.

Follow @secretangler

Tag: wildlife

Heroes or Neroes?

The AST’s Head of Waffle