One of my favourite times out fishing was down on the beach during the salmon run. I wasn't even fishing for salmon, but there was about 20 bald eagles on the beach with me all fishing. One by one while I was there they'd catch a salmon and fly off with it until there was just me and one lonely eagle who just couldn't get one left. When I left it was still going at it.
"Bonneville, actually two different dams linked by an island, is the lowest and largest of the Columbia dams,"
Bonneville is the 5th largest (by height) of the Columbia dams and 8th largest (by generating capacity). There are 2 taller dams in British Columbia and 2 others in Washington state. The Bonneville is the largest dam he would have passed driving but that's not what he wrote.
If you're interested in exploring further, check out Salmon Explorer (http://salmonexplorer.ca), an interactive website I worked on at my previous company to help people understand the status of salmon in British Columbia.
They go quite a ways up river. I think all the way to Willamette Falls near Oregon City. I live in Downtown Portland and see them in the river regularly. Sometimes they climb up onto the floating docks just north of Downtown to sun themselves.
> Biologists determined that not one of them was hatchery-born—they were all wild fish, whose robust natural paternity and hardy stream upbringing had given them a distinct advantage in surviving the return trip to Idaho. The hatchery fish were weaker, raised in tubs and selected from a narrow genetic slice that lowered their adaptability to a changing climate. Even though they outnumbered the natural-born salmon by millions, the failure rate in this case was so high that the vast sums of money spent in upper Idaho had not purchased a single hatchery success.
That's a pretty good metaphor for the cost of coddling our children that Jonathan Haidt goes on about. By valuing our offsprings' safety so highly we're effectively raising hatchlings in tubs, as opposed to wild fish gifted with a hardy stream upbringing.
The success of the wild salmon isn’t just down to a “hardy upbringing”, though; it mostly comes down to the fact that, for every one wild adult salmon we see, there are thousands that died (probably by being eaten) as eggs or fry. That’s a huge selection pressure toward inclusive genetic fitness, such that genetic fitness in the wild population as a whole is maintained at a high level over generations.
I’m not sure there’s really a way to translate that effect to human beings in any ethical way, regardless of how you feel about safety. It’d go well beyond “not coddling.” (In fact, I’m not even sure if it’s possible for an apex predator to be R-selected. We’d likely have to do it ourselves, Battle Royale style.)
Unfortunately though, whatever natural selection that occurs in a post-civilization world is might be sort of orthogonal to improving human civilization when civilization returns.
We’d surely get some beastly hunter-gatherers out of the deal though :)
It’s not clear at all. I think we’d instead select against undesirable traits. If intelligence and fitness are too varied to select for we could select against lack of intelligence or lack of physical fitness. Say I’ve had cancer at a young age I’m out but we can’t decide on body type. I can’t even imagine how to avoid antisocial behavior, which is fine since any attempt at this Is dystopian.
Except you know humans aren't fish. It sounds obvious but the challenges and dynamics of being human are so different than those of being salmon that any similarities between the two can only be true in the most abstract sense. It's like reading a story about tasmanian devils and thinking: "That's a pretty good metaphor for how we're engaging in sex, we humans should start biting our partner's faces off before intercourse too". Even going by your analogy we would all be "hatchlings raised in tubs" by virtue of being social animals, there is no real equivalent to wild salmon because a human child left to their own in the wild would just die.
> raised in tubs and selected from a narrow genetic slice
I have volunteered at a large hatchery in BC, located near the headwaters of a small river. Every fall salmon are trapped next to the hatchery, their eggs & sperm are extracted for that year's batch, are mixed together, and the resulting fry are released in the spring.
So they aren't kept at the hatchery very long, and the genetic selection is limited to whatever made it back upstream.
At least down here in the PNW, hatcheries typically mark the fish they spawn by clipping their adipose fin when they are babies. When they return as adults and return to hatchery fish traps, they are sorted. The unmarked, unclipped native/wild-spawning fish are let back into the river to continue upstream. The hatchery fish are used for spawning the following years run. This creates a diminishing genetic pool and with time produces really measly, smaller and weaker fish with who knows what kind of genetic deficiencies. On some rivers, hatchery fish are trucked in from hatcheries located elsewhere and planted but never sorted on the way back in, assuming the bulk of the returning fish will be harvested by anglers.
Also, there's still the issue of genetic selection on the way out. The millions of fish that are spawned, raised in concrete pools and released back into the river have all been artificially selected to survive the extremely difficult first few months of life, which would naturally be the first genetic screening of the new generation.
NYtimes ran an article about “helicopter parents” and how much those type of parents did to coddle their children. Unfortunately, the conclusion was extremely clear, children raised with hyper focused protective parents succeeded far beyond their peers. It works.
Interestingly, by major, CS students are given the most financial assistance from their parents. I think there can be a naive suggestion that having parents willing to pay your SF rent and take care of details like who does your laundry allows for hyper focused work on complex, abstract problems. The idea of “not coddling” your children may be doing more harm than good in a economy which requires specialized work.
Alternatively, parents that can helicopter (let's make it a verb and an adjective, as well as a noun?) are likely parents from affluent backgrounds. Perhaps they have the resources in time, money, connections and location to be able to allow their children to be hyper focused.
Either by permitting their children to be entirely focused on studies, careers or both. At this point however we're not talking about helicopter parents, we're talking about privilege.
> the conclusion was extremely clear, children raised with hyper focused protective parents succeeded
By what metrics? An Ivy League student who requires their parents to intercede with their teachers versus a well adjusted state school student who takes care of themselves.
Depends on the definition of success. Yeah, by most measures I guess more money, prestige, and recognition is success. But I can’t take that hot house flower on a weekend backpacking trip. I mean, you’re right; I guess maybe I’m justifying my own lack of “success”. :-)
'selected from a narrow genetic slice' does not apply for the case you are talking about, so the metaphor doesn't fare well enough. As do all metaphors anyway.
It's an interesting analogy, but I don't know if it points to anything actually truthful. Salmon are a very heavily r-selected species and humans are possibly one of the most k-selected species on Earth, made even more so with the invention of birth control. Of course we have different strategies in how we raise our children.
How would we know if all of these fish weren’t working as canon fodder?
That is, does the presence of weaker fish hinder or help the survivability of their stronger peers? Do disease vector and habitat pressures outweigh predation pressure?
> By valuing our offsprings' safety so highly we're effectively raising hatchlings in tubs, as opposed to wild fish gifted with a hardy stream upbringing.
How do you show this? The number of parameters leading to success is ludicrously high. Is there even a frailty in need of explaining? How about all the other environmental factors, like lack of the opportunity to invest in careers and cheap subsidized housing like our grandparents got? This sounds suspiciously like pop psych crap.
Well, it's kinda too late for that, as our species' winning survival strategy has been "have fewer offsprings, but value their lives so highly that they are well fed and trained to make further offsprings." It starts with giving birth to an underdeveloped infant that can't even hold its own head up, so that it will grow into a superior predator with a bigger brain.
Yes, and it's worth remembering that humans are the apex predator, planet-wide. There is nothing we can't hunt down and kill and eat and we don't even have natural predators anymore, not as such.
So it seems that our reproductive strategy of caring for your young has paid off way more than the salmons' one, of "tough love" for their offspring.
Humans are mammals. We evolved to take care of our young, unlike fish. All mammals do that, that's the whole point of carrying your young inside you and producing milk to feed them rather than making millions of them and letting them fend on their own.
You could say that mammals' reproductive strategy is exactly to coddle their young, in a sense. And it seems to work OK.
You're characterizing an appeal for wild, natural child raising -- as opposed to mono cultures raised in vats -- as eugenics? How isn't that backwards?
“natural child raising”—what, baiting your child with hyenas on the bayou? This is just a lame excuse to explain your kid when you could just accept responsibility.
I don't understand why they don't introduce more generic diversity and why they don't have things like water keys in the water. It doesn't like it's too difficult to have assumed this would be the outcome. It's like having somebody that has stayed indoors watching tv until they were 10 to complete against a kid that has been outside running around and playing in the streets.
I used to work at a hatchery raising steelhead and coho salmon. The number of adults we could take from the river for spawning were limited both by how many we could find and by the department of fish and game. Importing genetics from other rivers would introduce those genes into the wild fish population, and should really be avoided. Most fish return to their home stream, and are specially adapted to those conditions. “Adding more genetic diversity” is something everyone wants but is not necessarily easy.
Some inland rivers do import fish from other rivers to seed their hatcheries, but as an attempt to separate the hatchery and native runs based on run timing. E.g. steelhead from smaller coastal systems are used in lower Columbia tributaries in Oregon and SW Washington because they are genetically programmed to return and spawn in Nov/Jan and are generally gone before the native show up later in Feb/March. But this still creates artificial competition for resources once the fry from both runs have hatched.
So people are allowed to fish and kill a lot of them and you guys are more limited on fire many you can fish to reproduce? Wow, I never cease to be surprised by how stupid government can be.
> Wow, I never cease to be surprised by how stupid government can be.
Past certain level of efficiency, there's likely something of the trade-off triangle ("good, fast, cheap, pick two"), and two of its vertices are "smart" and "democratic".
People are allowed to fish and kill more than protect and reproduce, because the "kill" side has a lot of people with money, who don't give a damn about ecology or even long-term viability of their businesses, whereas the "protect" side that does the reproduction is also the same people who set up limits on what to do with the fish, so they kind of obey their own rules.
There's also the fact that sport fishermen (e.g. Trout Unlimited) and hunters (e.g. Ducks Unlimited) are responsible for motivating and driving a lot of conservation efforts both directly and through policy work (presumably including lobbying).
The coho are federally listed and protected in my watershed, so we’re not competing with fishermen. That program was run in conjunction with local scientists trying to support and study the coho run in the area. The steelhead part of the hatchery is primarily aimed at supporting local populations FOR fisherman, so it’s less of a competition and more of a balance. As the article talks about, hatcheries are largely funded for and by recreational fishing. It would be nice if we saw wild animals as worthy of support for their own sakes, and the role they fill in our environment, but the money isn’t there.
>So people are allowed to fish and kill a lot of them and you guys are more limited on fire many you can fish to reproduce? Wow, I never cease to be surprised by how stupid government can be.
Fishermen are allowed to kill the best genetically gifted specimens just before they are about to reproduce; thus talking about low genetic diversity is just an excuse.
If you really want to increase genetic diversity there is a really cheap and simple solution. Reduce recreational fishing.
They determine dynamically each year and for each fish species if there are enough of them to allow for fishing in the rivers and streams the fish migrate through.
> They determine dynamically each year and for each fish species if there are enough of them to allow for fishing
Okay, ... and is this management working? can counteract the increase of predator pressure (normal predators plus new pirate fishing at sea)?
Then all is fine and we shouldn't be talking here about extinction levels, and caring about the future of the salmon, should we?
"The Council estimates that the true cost of bringing a single spawner back to that uppermost region is as much as $68,031"
Why are even recreative fishers still allowed to catch a 68000 dollars fish (paid with money from taxes) for..., how many?, a fourty dollar license?, 500 dollars in permits and hotel and you can take two or tree fishes? Is a stupid deal. Why they are allowed to destroy all this hard work that aim to return the population to sustainable levels?
If you are bored go play baseball, make photos from nature, or read a book. If you want to see fishes, go to an aquarium or see Sponge Bob on tv.
Either somebody will fix it, or somebody will eventually have a good time fishing the last one. In both cases problem solved.
I think the counting of each year's relative number of different fish species works pretty well and is not controversial. Clearly the overall strategy with its huge number of working parts is not working well. When there are very few of certain species coming back, there is no fishing allowed by recreational fisherman, it's 0.
every year they look at how many of each fish species are migrating back and determine if any or how many of each fish are allowed to be fished for. often in the Seattle area there will not be enough of most or all species to allow for fishing that year.
Salmon don’t climb water jumps just because they feel like it, like hamsters using wheels. They migrate; and sometimes rivers are how they migrate.
To raise “buff” salmon, you’d need something that looks less like a fishery, and more like a private river with the upstream pointed in the right direction for their migratory instincts. And, since they wouldn’t want to turn around at the end, you’d need to pick them all up and haul them back to the beginning so that they would swim it again.
Would it not be possible to create a closed loop for them to endlessly swim up? Sort of like a lazy river at a water park, but with a stronger current.
I’m not sure how salmon specifically would react, but migratory animals generally don’t get fooled by these sorts of things. (I don’t think anyone knows the mechanism, as not all migratory species have internal compasses like migratory birds do. But they do it anyway. Maybe it’s just really good dead reckoning?)
Salmon spawn in a river and head out to sea for a while to mature before returning to their river and reproducing and dieing. So... probably not and what purpose would that serve?
