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kenai
Starting Member
USA
17 Posts |
 Posted - 08/28/2009 : 20:50:05
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Have you every tried to follow the chain of events regarding how our wild environment uses a salmon if humans do not interfere? Try following the life cycle of a salmon. When a baby salmon is first born, he immediately begins feeding on things found within his wild environment. That environment includes things like the flesh of previous salmon generations which lingers on the bottom of rivers and streams. Insects and fungi spring off that slimy nitrogen coating on the bottom
which is from rotting salmon. It is this river bottom slime, which many fungi and insects feed on thus providing forage for baby trout & salmon.
Once a salmon reaches a couple inches long he is then large enough to survive in our oceans so he then migrates out into the ocean to access even larger sized food. As he departs his home river or stream, he unconsciously records the smell of all the waters he travel through as he migrates out into the ocean. This "water aroma record" is then stored within his brain until he needs it when returning to spawning. Thousands of items in his ocean environment become prey for him as he chases candle fish, herring, sardines, hooligans and many other types of bait fish. Once he has matured to an adult size, a biological alarm clock then goes off in his head, which causes him to begin to instinctively think about and desire to swim back to where he was born.
Using magnetic and solar references, he then combines those inputs with the water aroma records stored within his brain as he begins the return back to his place of origin. Upon reaching his stream or river of birth, he then fights his way back up current and attempts to spawn and then die within a few hundred yards of where he was born. He does all of this with his nose as he literally smells the waters off the river bank from the area he came from. His body then dies through starvation or is taken in prey by a bear or eagle and dragged off into the near by forest. Either way his body begins a slow transition back into the environment by decomposing and therefore being utilized by the wild environment to help it reproduce and grow.
The rings of trees, which live near salmon streams, are substantially thicker during years when salmon runs are strongest. The best survival rates of our birds result when those birds are able to feed their young on the trillions of surplus maggots, which result from the rotting of all the millions of salmon carcasses spread around the forest. It doesn't matter if its a tree, bird or what ever, there are thousands of species surviving both directly and indirectly off the wild salmon cycle.
If someone or something, steps into this cycle of life and interrupts or removes it, something has to give as the downline survivors lose their food source. That loss basically results in other things dying. The cycle then goes from being a "wild salmon cycle", to some sort of "Frankenstein salmon cycle".
You may not see that baby bird die in the nest because he didn't get enough food to grow up as strong as his nest mate but it can be one of the end realities of someone interrupting a salmon cycle. You may not notice that the trees around you aren't growing as fast as others or that tree that didn't make it through the winter because it just didn't have that extra strength, a near by salmon run can provide.
There are some people out there who even believe that they can remove millions of salmon from a wild salmon life cycle and then still call it a wild salmon life cycle when it is not. We even have some people out there who really don't even notice the missing birds or trees, as they dump the millions of dollars in commercial fish sales, into their bank accounts. There are "no free lunches" within a real wild salmon life cycle. If our environment only allows a million baby salmon to survive and enter the ocean, then it's not good environmental science to double or triple that number. The reason for the natural limits may not be apparent at first but eventually those limits become clear with time. It may be "limited in river spawning area" or "limited food during the winter", what ever the reason, our wild environment figures out the correct number of survivors by using the trial and error method.
This is why we sometimes see "wild" fluctuations in some fish and game populations. Maybe this is why we have always called it "wild life or wild stock".
A true wild environment is constantly testing a species ablity to survive. Eventually it will settle in with a constant number of individuals to interact within that wild environment. People may not like the way a truly wild environment forces fish and game to suffer as they slowly starve to death
or are eaten alive but that is the way a wild environment works.
People who believe they are doing the wild environment a big favor by catching or killing off huge blocks of fish and game, are usually just deceiving themselves with delusions and greed. Left to herself our wild environment is fully capable of setting its own limited number of fish & game participants.
True "wild logic" can literally defy many of our modern fish and game management systems. Many of our modern resource managers enter their jobs with the pre-assumption that our wild environment is basically incompetent, therefore requiring humans to intervene.
That intervention usually comes in the form of a human decision to artificially manipulate a wild environment to keep it from falling apart or from not producing a maximum yield of fish or game.
In many cases it is completely unnecessary for human manipulation of wild fish & game populations. Many times these populations are artificially manipulated because the short-term effects paint rosy pictures. Viewed in the context of long-term effects, many of these policies are extremely difficult to implement and
totally bankrupt in providing long-term sustainability of a wild resource.
In conclusion, the desire for commercial fisheries within Cook Inlet to refer to themselves as selling "WILD SALMON", is a total sale promo lie. These same commercial fisheries constantly devotes large blocks of resources and finances to manipulate Cook Inlets pre-existing "wild salmon stocks", into enhanced, genially manipulated, inoculated and sterilization gillnetted salmon stocks. After manipulating these stocks they then desire to market the product as still being a "WILD SALMON". There is nothing wild about the process of sterilization gillnetting Cook Inlets waters. This gillnetting wipes out the majority of our giant Kenai king salmon, while they search for sockeye salmon. There is nothing wild about slaughtering thousands of sea mammals and birds in those same gillnets and then wondering why our beluga whale populations are dwindling.
Wild is a term that applies to a natural resource which is allowed to check its own levels of sustainability and as long as there is commercial sterilization gillnetting in Cook Inlet, man is checking those levels. THEREFORE THE "WILD" TERM CANNOT BE CORRECTLY APPLIED TO COMMERCIALLY CAUGHT SALMON IN COOK INLET WATERS.
Don
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WHY DO THEY CALL IT WILD?
