While healthy rivers and estuaries are essential to salmon survival when they return, scientists are agreed that the problem for inner Bay of Fundy salmon is that adults aren't returning to their rivers of birth. They are somehow disappearing at sea.

• Exactly what is causing this loss is unclear, but there are several plausible theories.
  
• There could be changes in ocean temperatures that affect salmon migration or reduce the amount of food available to them.
  
• Wild salmon could be catching diseases or parasites from farmed salmon as they swim past aquaculture sites.
  
• Escaped aquaculture fish that are poorly adapted for survival in the wild could be displacing wild fish.
  For more on Aquaculture, click here
  
• Or, their numbers could be so few that they have begun to behave differently or somehow cannot sustain their population.
  

No-one really knows if any or several of these potential problems are the cause of salmon loss at sea, but scientists are working hard to try to find out. If they can figure it out, it is just possible we might be able to stop the 'king of fish' from going extinct in the Bay of Fundy and elsewhere on the Atlantic coast.

 

 

 

A Live Trap Trawl that was used in a joint DFO/ASF research effort aboard the Alfred Needler to find inner Bay of Fundy post-smolts at sea. Successfully captured, the fish were measured and described, then released alive back into the ocean.