Annual salmon count shows lowest number of juveniles for more than 20 years - Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust
The annual counting and tagging of juvenile wild Atlantic salmon on the River Frome in Dorset have yielded the lowest number of fish in more than 20 years of monitoring, which is hugely concerning for the scientists running the project.
It follows the recording of the lowest ever number of adults returning from sea to spawn last year – further confirming the continued steep decline of salmon in our rivers. A report published by the Environment Agency and Cefas on Monday shows that salmon numbers across England Wales were the lowest since records began in 1997.
Numbers of wild Atlantic salmon in our rivers have crashed by some 80% over the past 40 years. Rivers which had tens of thousands of salmon in the 1980s now only have a few hundred in them. They are now classified as endangered in the UK and on the IUCN Red list along with other threatened species like elephants, pandas and polar bears.
In a bid to try to identify what is causing this and what can be done to reverse it, the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust’s (GWCT) Fish Research team spend four weeks in late summer in the river catching, weighing, measuring and micro-chipping the juvenile salmon, known as parr, that have hatched in the spring.
Based at the River Lab near Wareham, they head out every morning to a different section of the river Frome, trying to cover as much of the juvenile salmon habitat within the 35-mile-long river as possible.
The aim every year is to tag 10,000 salmon parr, but this year the team did not even manage to catch half of that – only 3,813 salmon were caught and tagged.
Posted On: 11/10/2024
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