Hokkaido University Study - Japan's Salmon Population May Vanish By 2100 Thanks To Warming Seas

[hatrack]

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The Hokkaido University team made the projections for the lives of the dog salmon, a species common in Japanese rivers, based on a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a Nobel Prize-winning U.N. scientific panel. The fourth IPCC report, which was released in November, predicted that the Earth's average temperature could rise by as much as 6.4 C by the end of the century.

The parr, or young, of dog salmon that have hatched in Japanese rivers at first leave for the Sea of Okhotsk and follow a migration route around the Bering Sea and the Alaska Bay. Spending two to seven years in the ocean, the fish eventually return to their native rivers for spawning via the Kamchatka Peninsula and the Kurile Islands.

Suitable sea temperatures for dog salmon parr to mature are said to be between 8 C to 12 C, falling to about 5 C during the winter. If the planet's average temperature rises by 3.4 C as the IPCC projected in one scenario, the temperature in the Sea of Okhotsk would rise by 2-4 C by the end of the century.

If this happened, the salmon migration route in the Sea of Okhotsk along the Sea of Japan would no longer be viable by about 2050, meaning that the number of salmon returning to Japanese rivers would decline dramatically, according to the researchers.

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http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20080103TDY02309.htm