August 12, 2009
Hauling truckloads of hitchhiking juvenile salmon around dams is one silly way to save a species. And it doesn't work either.
As four dams were built along the lower Snake River in southeastern Washington from the late 1950s to early 1970s, it took only a few yearsfor the river's healthy salmon populations to plummet. By the mid-1990s, the populations of four types of salmon had been declared endangered or threatened. The federal expenditure of $8 billion since then for fish ladders, hatcheries, habitat restoration and, yes, trucks and barges to transport the salmon around the dams has not restored the fish.
