Fish ladders and spillway weirs are fish killers that impose a decimation on the salmon population at each elevation change. Dams destroy the estuary and natural wetland environments that salmon need to reproduce. Dams reduce water flow and silt over gravel beds. Dam impoundments cause stream and river temperatures to rise, suffocating fish. Dam removal is not just obstacle removal, it is habitat restoration and rehabilitation.
This isn’t exactly true. Fish ladders and weirs shouldn’t be grouped together like this. Many hatcheries have a weir salmon cannot cross and a ladder as the alternative path the fish take by feeling the flow of water across the ladder and going upstream. The ladders lead to hatcheries where the fish reproduce. And new tiny fish are efficiently raised in protected tanks and later released to go back downstream. In other words, the weir and ladder are a combination to make the hatchery work, and not substitutes for each other. Also ladders can work very well. There are many badly designed ones but the good ones basically let every fish move upstream.
Salmon were not still breeding there, this is the first return in over 100 years.
October of this year:
> a fall-run Chinook salmon was identified by ODFW’s fish biologists in a tributary to the Klamath River above the former J.C. Boyle Dam, becoming the first anadromous fish to return to the Klamath Basin in Oregon since 1912 when the first of four hydroelectric dams was constructed, blocking migration.
>salmon were still breeding there. The "return" is an unwarranted claim, for they never stopped coming and spawning.
let's read
"Less than a month after four towering dams on the Klamath River were demolished, hundreds of salmon made it into waters they have been cut off from for decades"
what does that mean
"salmon are once more returning to spawn in cool creeks that have been cut off to them for generations."
"salmon, which were cut off from their historic habitat"
"salmon that have quickly made it into previously inaccessible tributaries"
so...you're saying that the salmon are able to access places they haven't been able to access? that's like you're trying to tell us that the damn dam was what was preventing it. it's like the dam being removed was the reason for these salmon to gain access to the spots. i'm still confused. /s
