One of our lovely Mermaid science reporters

This is the first of what we hope will be a long series of reports from our resident Mermaids.

Finally there are reports surfacing that tell how many Pink Salmon have been returning to the Pacific coast of North America. We knew that in Alaska last fall the official forecast catch of Pinks of 50 million was blown out of the water with the catch of over 226 million of the silver beauties. They made last falls catch of Alaska salmon the largest in all of history.

YOU GO SALMON!

But it’s been like trying to pry a barnacle off a rock difficult to discover the whole Pacific coast number of returning Pinks. What a lovely name pinks.

Pinks getting ready to do their thing

So this week the number that is finally washing up from Boffinville is that over 650 million Pink salmon came home last fall. That’s a lot of Pinks showing. Especially when the official forecast looks like it was expected to be 149 million. No wonder they have been sitting on that pink count, they were off by 500 million.

The experts are of course claiming that their traditionally very accurate counts were sunk by an “unexpected large amount of ocean plankton” that helped all those beautiful Pinks.  Naturally the experts are not yet willing to say just how all that plankton came into being and fed the historic abundance of salmon everywhere, their forecasts included every factor they say including effects of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and were still caught wildly low. But we are not afraid to say what brought our Pinks home.

You see in the summer of 2012 an ocean pasture restoration project revived the most critical Pink salmon nursery pasture in the NE Pacific. In that work 100 tonnes of mineral dust was sprinkled lovingly into the ocean at just the right location at just the right time for it to replenish mineral dust that has gone missing from the ocean due to high CO2 in the air. The result was an immediate blooming of a vast ocean pasture that began as 10,000 sq. kilometers in size but which blossomed many times larger over the summer and fall months and ocean life kept growing for much longer.

Best of all the restored and revived ocean pasture was just in the perfect place and time to feed billions of cute finny ocean babies that were just starting to try out their fins and their life at sea. We are sure that a lot of those 500 million EXTRA Pinks were thriving in our restored and cared for ocean pasture instead of mostly starving.

Also to that pasture swam great whales by the scores and hundreds, sea birds by the thousands and tens of thousands, and of course many species of salmon where just one of the five species, the Pinks, we now know numbered more than 650 million. Along with the other salmon species and multitudes of other fish certainly a billion fish likely billions of fish came to the pasture to feed and thrive and to give back to the pasture.

No Lollygagging

OK from time to time we take a break from gardening

For you see ocean life doesn’t just lollygag around doing nothing but looking beautiful and stuffing our faces. We work for a living tending to our ocean pastures. We are like worms in a rich garden, the more the garden grows the more we help it grow.

OK some of us like to think of ourselves as farmers instead of worms but you get the idea.

Fin Whales cavorting while gardening and feeding on ocean plankton. It is now known that the great whales are important in sustaining ocean plankton blooms with their  natural fertilizer.

Take the great whales for example. Just recently landlubber scientists have been proclaiming far and wide just how wonderful gardeners the great whales are. Their help to their ocean pasture is as if they were giant earthworms eating vast amounts of ocean plankton, using just a bit for themselves, and depositing the vast majority of what they take in as a rich compost helps sustain their pasture so that it continues to grow.

The same landlubber “discovery” was announced about seabirds who perform the identical task. Giving back to their ocean pasture more than they take from it.

Plankton not only feed whales, fish, and seabirds they do their share of pooping themselves.

Well of course my fish friends and other marine life friends do the same. So once an ocean pasture gets going because of receiving a little dust in the wind from Mother Nature or a little help from our favourite dusting friends (Russ we love you) we take over and do the rest and keep that pasture growing for years more. We truly get by with a little help from our friends. And that means we help our friends get by with our help as we send them multitudes of fish to feed to their children.

So we hope you are glad that your rivers from the Columbia to Alaska are filled with the greatest number of salmon in all of your history. We sure are as our ocean is also filled with the same abundance and it is feeding our orcas, whales, sea lions, seals, sea otters, eagles, cormorants, pelicans, all of ocean life.

Kiss kiss

LETS DO THIS AGAIN… you help Russ provide the magic rock dust we’ll do the hard work tending the pasture and keeping it growing. Together we will Bring Back The Fish.