Salmon fry

There has been a lot of buzz surrounding the speculation, which was tossed around this week, that a volcanic eruption on an Alaskan island back in 2008 is somehow responsible for the boom in the salmon population this year in the rivers of British Columbia in Canada.

If this speculation proves to be correct, it will help biologist’s to shed some new light on the rather unpredictable sizes of the populations of salmon year in and year out. It will also lend credence to the controversial idea of seeding the oceans of the world with iron to help lend a helping hand to other fish species, who have seen a decline in their populations. However, some scientists, who were contacted by Nature, have cautioned that the theory is “far fetched”.

After the salmon population took a nose dive back in 2009, the sockeye salmon made a big comeback in British Columbia’s Fraser River this year. It has been suggested that the reasoning behind this is that the iron in the ash from the volcanic eruption on Kasatochi island, which created a rather huge influx of phytoplankton, may have indirectly provided the salmon with the food they needed to stage a miraculous comeback. This suggestion was made by Tim Parsons, a prominent Canadian scientist, and has a government-awarded medal named after him for ocean scientists.

It looks like he may be getting yet another feather in his hat, if the scientific community chooses to explore this theory further. If its possible to refurnish fish stocks around the globe by seeding the ocean with some iron, we should take the opportunity.