ABOVE: Juvenile chinook salmon with a C. shasta infection
US FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE
As climate change warms the planet at unsustainable rates and causes lengthy droughts, species that thrive in colder waters, like salmon, face an onslaught of challenges. Between the high temperatures and the pathogens that thrive in them, endangered salmon on the West Coast of the United States are experiencing massive die-offs. This is already driving up the price of fillets, the Associated Press reports, and the ecological and economic effects of the losses will ripple into the future. The Sacramento River faces “near-complete loss” of young Chinook salmon because of the warming water.
“An extreme set of cascading climate events is pushing us into this crisis situation,” spokesperson Jordan Traverso of the California Department of Wildlife and Fish tells the AP.
Nowhere is the scope of the problem more visible than the Klamath river, an important route ...
