From The Onion: After repeatedly gorging itself on marine sea life for more than seven years, a severely obese chinook salmon told reporters Wednesday he had grown too overweight to swim upstream and reproduce.
“I used to be able to swim hundreds of miles to my natal stream,” the male salmon said as he recovered in a brackish estuary after swimming several feet against the current and growing fatigued. “But now I’m so fat I can’t even leap out of the water to overcome a natural obstacle. And when I try, my fins are super sore for a couple days.”
From Moldy Chum: A Wild Olympics Video highlighting the local effort to safeguard new Wilderness and Wild & Scenic Rivers on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula.
Wild Olympics for Our Future from Wild Olympics on Vimeo.
From the Washington Fly Fishing Forum, a biopic on the Skagit River Bull Trout’s winter lifecycle: In the salt bull trout are more like sea-run cutthroat than salmon or steelhead and stay relatively close to their natal rivers. Like the cutthroat they seem to spend the majority of their time in the shallow near shore areas taking advantage of the diverse forage found in that habitat.
New USGS Study on the impact of urban development on watersheds, including Portland: The loss of sensitive species in streams begins to occur at the initial stages of urban development, according to a new study by the USGS. The study found that streams are more sensitive to development than previously understood.
