Wild Atlantic Salmon are 99% Gone, Yes Gone

So, just how bad are things for Atlantic salmon?

Read this: https://www.ecowatch.com/amp/atlantic-salmon-is-all-but-extinct-as-a-genetically-eroded-version-of--1882190049?fbclid=IwAR1a9CvefO5BYqOwcILjWQsAC4UHfKvwxp-UYLSGF6yDQXC1LjhrQnL_XuY.

The paper puts it bluntly: 

"Today, 99.5 percent of all native Atlantic salmon has disappeared from the wild. In Europe, Scandinavia and around the Baltic Sea, native indigenous salmon has vanished from the Russian rivers Neva and Narva, the Luleälven and Umeälven of Sweden, from the Odra and Wisla in Poland and the Vilia of Belarus. In fact, only 10 of the many rivers which empty into the Baltic arm of the northern Atlantic Ocean sustain wild salmon populations any longer and the wild Baltic salmon genome is the only one with natural resistance to the destructive Gyrodactulus salaris parasite. 

Around the British Isles, in Ireland and across the pond to North America, wild salmon populations are extinct or endangered or threatened. The Kola Peninsula of Russia is known to be a current refuge for wild type Atlantic salmon, yet is also known to harbor military and radioactive waste at ecologically harmful levels. The grand Torneälven of Sweden, called Tornionjoki where it traverses Finland, is one of the last rivers to host wild Atlantic salmon in the world. (For more on the status of Atlantic salmon, see the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List map. Researchers at the Swedish Agency for Marine and Water Management have produced a report on the Baltic extinctions. Anna Tonteri, a conservation geneticist at the University of Turku in Finland has written an excellent doctoral thesis about the population genetics of north European Atlantic salmon)"

So, what lives on?

"More than 99 percent of Atlantic salmon, Salmo salar L., live only as genetically eroded, hatchery stock fish today. That is a most sobering statistic considering the engineering of the Pacific Chinook salmon growth hormone into the Atlantic salmon genome (see my earlier article here). Whatever remnants still exist of our wild salmon populations must be protected without exception, especially given the potential introduction of a new, genetically engineered salmon to our frankly fragile food web" 

And the outcome is?

"Salmon has been swimming upstream against the depleting force of “genetic erosion" for at least a century, a force that has claimed its wild genome, its clans and its tribes, its genetic diversity and which has nearly eliminated a once self-sustaining, powerful ocean species. Now, salmon cannot live without us. 

Atlantic salmon is essentially extinct because we have demanded too much of this natural resource through over-consumption and environmental exploitation. The wild gene forest that once lived, the old trees, the towering antiquarians of genetic variation, are gone, lost in the fire of a rapid, wholesale, industrial Homo sapiens taking, consumed in an anthropocentric fire we could even see burning, when one looks at the timeline of scientific data."

According to this article, fish farming needs to stop in oceans to prevent the final nip of genetic diversity out there from being eliminated.