Thursday May 23, 2024
Yale e360 —
Populations of salmon, trout, eel, sturgeon, and other migrating freshwater fish have shrunk by 81 percent on average since 1970, a new report finds.
“The catastrophic decline in migratory fish populations is a deafening wake-up call for the world,” said Herman Wanningen, founder of the World Fish Migration Foundation, one of the groups behind the report. “We cannot continue to let them slip silently away.”
The analysis, published by a coalition of conservation groups, finds that fish have been in decline for 30 years, and that their collapse is most severe in Latin America and in Europe. Humans are driving the losses by overfishing, polluting waterways, damming rivers, converting wetlands to farmland, and by fueling warming.