A two-year international project that aims to track scores of wild Atlantic salmon has been launched in the highlands of Scotland as part of the largest effort in Europe to date to halt the decline of the species.
The Missing Salmon Project hopes to discover why the wild salmon population has decreased by 70 percent in the last 25 years, with the organization behind the project, the Atlantic Salmon Trust (AST), saying the analysis is “essential” if effective measures are to be found to reverse its fortunes.
Working with partners across the Moray Firth, Scotland, scientists are to tag juvenile fish as they begin their journey from their home river towards the sea in order to determine the most likely causes of the decline.
Fish are recorded as they pass through strategic points, which will help determine how many salmon make it to the ocean and where mortality occurs.
Twenty percent of all salmon that leave the United Kingdom originate in the Moray Firth. The lessons learned from the study will be transferable to other populations of salmon around the country, AST said.
AST is aiming to raise GBP 1 million (USD 1.4 million, EUR 1.1 million) through crowdfunding to support the tracking project. Funds will pay for the tags and the acoustic receivers that track the salmon’s journey.
“Salmon have been around for more than 60 million years, but their future looks very bleak indeed. If the decline we’ve seen across the Atlantic and in Scotland continues, the wild Atlantic salmon could be an endangered species in our lifetime,” AST Executive Director Sarah Bayley Slater said. “In launching the Missing Salmon Project, we are making our stand now and giving our generation a chance to save the species before it’s too late.”
The project will supplement the work the AST is carrying out with international partners in preparing a Suspects Framework, which identifies and aims to quantify the causes for salmon mortality on their journey from river to sea and back again.
“If we’re going to have a meaningful impact on reversing the Atlantic salmon’s decline, we need to tag and track fish on a scale never seen before in Europe,” said Matthew Newton, the tracking coordinator for AST. “By tagging the fish and tracking their progress from their spawning ground and back again, we’ll be able to pinpoint where fish are being lost – and help identify the causes for their increasingly worrying mortality rates.”
With global populations of wild Atlantic salmon declining from eight to 10 million in the 1970s to three to four million fish today, AST believes the project will have an international impact.
“Too many times, humanity has acted too late when a species is in decline," Newton said. "We have an opportunity to act now and make a lasting, positive impact so we’d ask everyone with an interest in preserving not only Scotland’s wild identity, but one of the world’s most famous species’ futures, to support this groundbreaking project."
