Tag: Freshwater

A year on from being declared an endangered species in Great Britain by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), new data indicates that wild salmon populations are continuing to decline at an alarming rate. In Great Britain, this iconic and once common fish now shares its status with the tiger and the Ganges river dolphin.

From 27-29^th of January environmental organisations from around the world gathered at Fishmongers’ Hall for a critical conference – Wild Salmon Connections, hosted by The Missing Salmon Alliance, aiming to activate an urgent, renewed international focus on wild salmon, inspiring action to secure thriving wild salmon at the heart of healthy ecosystems.

The event implored politicians, regulators and industry to do far more to support wild salmon recovery across both the Atlantic and Pacific where populations of these keystone species are in severe decline. Demonstrating both the gravity of the salmon’s decline, and the convening power of Fishmongers’ Hall as a venue, government officials from the UK, Scotland and Norway spoke at the event, as did representatives of Indigenous Peoples of the Pacific who made a plea for world leaders to save wild salmon and the many cultures which depend on them. You can watch recordings of all sessions from across the 3 day conference here.

Daniel Zeichner MP, Minister of State for Food Security and Rural Affairs, was in attendance and spoke at the event. He said ‘The plight of wild Atlantic salmon is of concern to all of us’, and ‘Last summer when the Secretary of State took charge in his very first week he set out five key priorities for the department in which I serve and two relate very directly to the issues that are under discussion here. One is to clean up our rivers, lakes and seas and the other is to ensure nature’s recovery’.

Mairi Gougeon MSP, Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs, Land Reform and Islands; and Andreas Bjelland Eriksen, Norway’s Minister of Climate and the Environment, also spoke at the event and agreed on the urgent need to do more to protect and restore wild salmon.

In the wake of this keynote international conference the Missing Salmon Alliance have released its Wild Salmon Connections Declaration calling for urgent action and a renewed sense of purpose to arrest the decline and accelerate the recovery of wild salmon.  The declaration calls upon governments and all organisations involved in the conservation of wild salmon, to take strong and bold action to: 

• Deliver strong policies, actions, and funding to address the range of human pressures that threaten wild salmon and ensure wild salmon have free access to cold clean water and healthy rivers and oceans – the conditions they need to thrive.
• Enable action to conserve, protect and restore rivers at a catchment scale and at a pace that is commensurate with the urgency of the crisis.
• Deliver coordinated action to prioritise evidence gaps in understanding the decline in wild salmon populations.
• Recognise the vital importance of the leadership of Indigenous Peoples, whose resilience and stewardship hold the key to restoring balance and safeguarding this shared resource.
• Urgently address the dramatic decline in salmon sea survival rates through actions to mitigate the impacts of climate change, including warming oceans and shifts in prey species, and manage human pressures that may impact wild salmon
• Develop and implement effective public and private funding mechanisms (including natural capital markets) that will support urgent efforts to deliver the necessary actions detailed in this Declaration.

Following on from the conference, now is the time to focus on deliverable action that can help to halt the decline in the wild Atlantic Salmon. The Company will continue to support the Missing Salmon Alliance in delivering essential research to better understand the drivers of this decline, providing the evidence base to drive the required action at a political level. The Company’s support for the Riverwoods campaign continues to deliver catchment scale, ecosystem restoration, providing the habitat and cold, clean water essential for the survival of the “king of the fish”.

Myanmar (formerly Burma) is a country of breathtaking landscapes, rich human history, and abundant biodiversity, home to over 600 freshwater fish species (compared with about 40 freshwater species in the British Isles). 

Our scientific knowledge of Burmese fishes began with the fish collections of British colonial and Indian explorers, most of which are now held at London’s Natural History Museum (NHM). In the period following World War II right up until the turn of this century, Myanmar was inaccessible to scientists, until the year 2000 when international scientists could again mount Burmese expeditions, collecting  new specimens of Burmese fishes both known and unknown to science. A lot of these new unstudied specimens also rest at the NHM. 

In 2024, as part of our Fisheries Charitable Trust’s ongoing support for fish research at the NHM, ‘Simon Birch Legacy’ Funding was granted to help unlock the secrets held in these collections through digitization, giving the global research community access to this rare resource. The work involved a specialist Curatorial Assistant, Chrissy Williams, cataloguing over 600 jars of specimens, taking high quality photographs, and recording and harmonizing detailed geographical information for 220 locations. This was often difficult, and so a native Burmese speaker had to be recruited from a local South Kensington restaurant to help translate place names! Ten species that Chrissy catalogued were new to the NHMs collections, unsurprisingly as Burmese species new to science are still being discovered every year. 

Unfortunately, political conditions have deteriorated in Myanmar in recent times, while threats to freshwater biodiversity from deforestation, mining, hydroelectric dam projects and invasive species are ever increasing. The collections held by London’s Natural History Museum therefore represent an irreplaceable global asset in both cataloguing species and developing our understanding of the evolution of fish diversity in one of the world’s most significant biodiversity hotspots. 

2023 saw the lowest wild Atlantic Salmon numbers since records began and time is running out to address the dramatic decline in salmon stocks. Riverside tree planting is one, immediate solution to helping to address this, providing shade to protect salmon from rising temperatures and creating habitats for the range of species salmon rely upon.

Creating Riverwoods is a series of films and editorial features produced by SCOTLAND: The Big Picture and funded by the Fishmongers’ Company’s Charitable Trust that provides information and inspiration for land managers seeking to embark on a journey of river catchment restoration.

Creating Riverwoods showcases a series of case studies – featuring landowners, gamekeepers and fisheries experts who have come together to restore the health of Scotland’s threatened rivers, through a range of practical interventions. It is hoped that the transformative positive effects of their actions will further increase appetite and ambition for ecological restoration in and around our rivers.

These videos are accompanied by the Practioner’s Guide to Woodland Restoration, which provides practical advice for those engaging in tree planting project including landowner engagement, woodland design, funding applications and delivery.

Together these videos and guide can help to kickstart wide-scale tree planting across the UK’s river catchments, supporting healthier rivers for salmon and all those who depend upon them.

A new report from Shoal, funded by the Company’s Fisheries Charitable Trust, celebrates the 212 “new” freshwater fish species recorded in 2021. From a blind eel found at the bottom of a well in a school for the blind in India to the Wolverine fish, named after its curved spikes tucked under its gills used to ward off predators, the report demonstrates that “there are still hundreds and hundred more freshwater fish scientists don’t know about yet”.

Shoal, a conservation organisation co-founded by the Company in 2019, works to halt extinctions and recover populations of the most threatened freshwater species around the world. Their New Species 2021 report highlights just how much life there is still to be discovered in rivers and lakes around the world.

An average of four freshwater fish were newly described every week in 2021, a rate that Harmony Patricio, Shoal’s conservation programme manager finds surprising against a backdrop of declining freshwater biodiversity, “it’s fascinating that over 200 new freshwater fish species can be described in just a single year,” she explains, “you might see this level of new discovery for organisms like plants or insects, but not really for vertebrates.”

Every discovery can help scientists to learn more about freshwater species, including their anatomy, their evolution and their environment. With 80% of freshwater species having gone extinct in modern times, and freshwater fish disappearing at twice the rate of terrestrial species, it is hoped that this report, the first of its kind, will raise awareness of the incredible range of freshwater species out there and inspire efforts to protect them for future generations.

There is currently very little known about what happens to juvenile wild Atlantic Salmon as they journey from our rivers to the sea, however we do know that their numbers are in crisis, dropping from 8-10 million in the mid-1980s to 2-3 million today. To improve our understanding of what is happening to these salmon, and the factors that are causing this decline, the Missing Salmon Alliance, convened and funded by the Company’s Fisheries Charitable Trust are conducting two ambitious tracking programmes across Scotland. By better understanding what is causing this decline, we can then work to begin to halt and reverse the trend and secure a future for this iconic species. The below videos provide an overview of the tracking projects’ objectives and work so far, with initial results to be shared in the coming months.

The Moray Firth Tracking Project

The Moray Firth Tracking Project is a key element of the Missing Salmon Alliance’s work, providing valuable information to help understand smolt migration routes, and to identify the threats they face on their journey to sea. When launched in Spring 2019, the Moray Firth Tracking Project was the largest, most ambitious acoustic tracking project to ever be undertaken in Europe.

West Coast Tracking Project

Right now, there is very little information of what happens to our young salmon as they journey around our coasts. This presents a number of problems when trying to safeguard this important species. If we do not know where they are going, for example, we cannot make informed decisions to minimise the impact from the dangers they face. The West Coast Tracking Project will fill this gap in our knowledge, tracking wild Atlantic salmon over a three-year period to better understand their migration routes and, ultimately, to inform policy on how best to look after them.

On November 26, the newly formed Missing Salmon Alliance launched their plan of action designed to tackle the alarming decline in wild Atlantic Salmon numbers, to over 150 delegates from key organisations in salmon conservation, at a landmark conference held at Fishmongers’ Hall.

The Missing Salmon Alliance, established with support from the Fishmongers’ Company, brings together the Atlantic Salmon Trust, Salmon & Trout Conservation, the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust, the Angling Trust and Fish Legal to address the 88% decline in Atlantic Salmon numbers since the 1970s.

The Prince of Wales, Patron of the Atlantic Salmon Trust and Salmon & Trout Conservation, said in a video message to the Forum which launched the Missing Salmon Alliance:

“The very future of a species that has been swimming in our oceans and seas for over 6 million years will be in jeopardy … We simply cannot allow this to happen in our lifetime. Having our four leading salmon conservation organisations working together, through the Missing Salmon Alliance with support from both the private and public sectors is hugely encouraging.”

Central to the Missing Salmon Alliance is the Likely Suspects Framework, a programme that will work with international scientists and researchers to identify the key pressures on the Atlantic salmon’s life cycle and use this to direct action to where it is most needed to begin to reverse this decline in population.

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The framework builds on the findings of the Moray Firth Tracking Programme, which tracks salmon smolts progress from their spawning grounds out to see. The initial findings of this study, supported by the Fishmongers’ Company’s Fisheries Charitable Trust, were shared at the conference