SOUND OFF: Feel good about eating more salmon
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ALL OF BRITISH COLUMBIA is touched by salmon. A vast network of river systems, lakes, streams and even the smallest creeks provide a vehicle for a foundational species to flourish; to feed, to regenerate and enrich. Salmon lives largely play out at sea; they don’t much care for borders or boundaries, and research on their day-to-day is relatively preliminary. Much has been theorized about their travels and hiding places, and even more mystery shrouds the cycle that sparks regeneration and renewal.
Generally around the fifth and final year of life, salmon are called back to their places of origin. They will make a harrowing journey back into the river systems and to the eventual stream or creek bed from which their life cycle began; with hope of completing a complex spawning ritual before they die. Death marks the beginning of an essential chapter of their journey — a rich decomposition process that feeds plants, animals and microbial life well beyond the river banks and deep into the forests and fields beyond. The northwest coast of North America hosts the largest and richest temperate rainforest system in the world, much in gratitude to the salmon — but that is only the beginning of their reach.
Salmon populations are present in many lake systems throughout British Columbia; many with unique genetic markers and ancestral lines completely specialized to each lake environment, having evolved over millennia. This contributes to critical biodiversity amongst subspecies populations and ensures the survivability of salmon as a whole.
For all creatures dependent on salmon as a food source, it is a meal that essentially delivers itself. The craftier and better outfitted fisherman is able to catch more of the fish and at a livelier state; like a resident pod of orcas at sea on a coordinated hunt, a skilled bear in a rushing river, or an eagle perched above with keen eyes and sharp appendages to seize and hold. Other organisms are willing to settle for scraps and bones, scuttled to the banks of estuaries and creeks and forest floors for extensive redistribution and nutrification.
