Researchers revealed that hundreds of Atlantic salmon swimming past the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame cathedral this year alone to be back to Seine River. It is said that the reappearance of salmon and other species chased from these waters by dams and pollution is all the more remarkable because no efforts have been made to reintroduce them. The researchers said that the Atlantic salmon came back on their own.
Bernard Breton, a top official at France’s National Federation for Fishing, told that there are more and more fish swimming up the Seine. He added the numbers have exceeded this year beyond imagination. It is told that 2008 was already a record-breaking year, with at least 260 tallied on a video system in the fish passage of the Poses dam above Rouen, a city roughly half way between Paris and the Atlantic Ocean.
It is evident that the Seine hosted a flourishing population of salmon, a migratory species that return from the sea to their freshwater birth place to reproduce. But the construction of dams, and especially the fouling of the Seine with chemical runoff from industry and agriculture along with organic pollution, led to their local extinction sometime between WWI and WWII.
According to scientists the main reason of the returning back of Atlantic salmon is cleaner water. Breton informed that in the mid-1990s, “between 300 and 500 tonnes of fish died in the Seine up river from Paris every year because of pollution. Scientists at France’s National Institute for Agricultural Research who track salmon say it is a “bellwether species”, a living indicator of their habitat’s state of health.
It is explained that Atlantic salmon used to be abundant throughout the north Atlantic, from Quebec to New England in the west, and from the Arctic Circle to Portugal to the east. But over the last three decades, their populations have plummeted, with commercial catches declining by more than 80 percent. The returning of Atlantic salmon to Seine is a good sign and
