The Phony Fish Discussion

Years ago fish stories were legendarily told by fishermen and women as exaggerations regarding the size of the fish they’d caught.

Must be a wild and natural fish... It's got all its fins

Today, fish stories are mostly told by wide eyed pop environmentalists about how “wild” and natural the salmon are in the rivers and streams those salmon return to when it is time to spawn.

Fish are profitable for pop-environmental groups because raising alarms about fish allows control of the waters the fish live in.  Control of the water allows control of the land surrounding the water meaning a successful campaign to “save the fish” can give even a small group intimate control over much of the population in an entire region.  To an activist group it doesn’t get much better; control and a great money raising opportunity.

Billions of dollars have been spent and untold restrictions have been placed on farmers, cities, residential land owners and others to achieve increases in “wild” salmon runs across North America and in other areas of the world.

The result is a fiction no one seems to want to address – there are no “pure” salmon genetically and, there never have been.

The fact of the matter is not all salmon go back to their river or stream of origin to spawn.  Known as “strays” a certain percentage of the fish enter waters other than their birth waters when they come “home.”  That’s fortunate because absent strays, many of the world’s great salmon rivers would have no fish at all.  It also means the genetics of the stray are introduced into the local population of fish.

An example is the Columbia River.  A few thousand years ago great floods scoured most of the entire Columbia system clean from Montana to the mouth of the river.  Today, fish live in much of the system, a tribute to the ability of a fish population to rebound.

Similarly, in the Skagit River system on Puget Sound volcanic eruptions destroyed some fish populations in the mid-1800s.  Today, fish flourish in the Skagit system.

On top of that, fish hatcheries have been used for a hundred years and more to help fish populations survive.

That brings up another fiction beloved of the pop-environmental movement, especially at fund raising time; “Wild fish,” the movements proclaim, “Are superior to hatchery grown fish which simply dilute the genetics of the population.”

The problem is, after more than a hundred years of hatchery production melding with “natural” populations, there cannot be genetically “pure” fish populations remaining anywhere hatchery fish have been introduced into. 

The lack of logic in the discussion is almost amusing.  When the little hatchery fish are released a fin is clipped to identify them.  Like the mark of Cain the fish instantly becomes an inferior species; but, when two of the inferior fish return to a river and spawn they, by a miracle considered by the pop-environmental movement to be druid’s equivalent to the virgin birth, produce wild and pure fish as offspring  because there is no one around to clip their little fins.

Aside from the fact that the discussion regarding “wild” and tame salmon is mostly fish story and not particularly about science, the whole approach to salmon, and other species, holds the potential to perpetuate a horrible problem that has plagued mankind from the beginning of time; the idea that one species or subspecies is superior to another simply because of genetic origin.

If we perpetuate the myth of the superiority of one species over another when it comes to fish or any other animal, don’t we perpetuate the myth that one species of humans might be superior to another?

Do we really want to do that?