Salmon, The Masters of Adaptation

Century-old fish scales reveal how salmon populations are responding to climate change.

Scientists using 100-year-old salmon and climate data report that a variety of lake habitats in the Skeena watershed is fostering a diversity of responses by salmon to climate change. The research, published in Global Change Biology, further reveals that the annual freshwater growth of juvenile salmon is substantially higher over recent decades than a century ago.

The research team consisting of SkeenaWild Conservation Trust’s Director of Science, Dr.Michael Price, and colleagues at Simon Fraser University and Fisheries and Oceans Canada, applied modern genetic tools to fish scales collected from fisheries since 1913 to reconstruct the growth of juvenile sockeye salmon rearing in unique lake habitats for comparison with recent information.

The analyses reveal that several nursery lakes once considered poor producers of salmon now appear to be increasing in their importance under climate change. While the annual growth of juvenile sockeye has increased for nearly all populations over the last century, fish from some nursery lake habitats are growing much more than others.