Human and Salmon Both rely on Resilience for Survival

Humans and salmon have at least one thing in common; neither does well in unstable conditions. What researchers have uncovered is that resilience is a key component for humans and salmon to survive and thrive. Resilience is defined as the ability to tolerate or recover from disturbance. Researchers studying salmon in the Pacific Northwest have started to examine the long-term salmon persistence in the region through what they term the lens of resilience. Their observations indicate that the traditional focus on maintaining production and harvest is diverting attention from what they state is a more fundamental concern about the fish’s ability to withstand disturbances and persist. “The problem with the way we've managed fisheries in the past is we've tried to force a dynamic system into a static condition that actually, in the long run, makes the system much more unstable. The natural world has adapted to disturbance so, ironically, when you try to stabilize it, for example through raising fish in a hatchery, you make it less stable.” said Dan Bottom, a salmon biologist with NOAA Fisheries and a courtesy professor at Oregon State University. Salmon, that are raised in fish hatcheries, are produced to maintain a stable population size. One consequence of this process is that many of these fish “are not capable of living outside that narrow range of tolerances” in which they were produced in the hatchery. “Fish raised to a uniform size all released at the same time are likely to be less flexible to the vagaries of nature,” Bottom added. What this means is that efforts to stabilize fish populations through artificial production will backfire and depending upon the extent to which the hatchery replaces natural re-seeding techniques of salmon habitat in rivers and streams, the population of salmon will become less resilient to natural disturbances. “We try to manage natural resources so we can have things nice and predictable, but we're now facing tremendous changes, in terms of climate, globalization, and other human impacts, so today there are a lot of very dynamic changes going on to which humans have to be really skillful in adapting, and in assisting other organisms, such as salmon, to adapt.” said Court Smith, an OSU anthropologist. “Traditional harvest management of salmon has focused on taking maximum yields of the dominant life-history types, while conservation has come to focus on so-called ‘critical habitats’ of those same population components. This management approach has narrowed significantly the spectrum of life history traits of salmon, and thereby reduced the resilience of salmon.” said Michael Healey of the University of British Columbia. The concept of resilience has applications that go far beyond salmon and fishing. Smith says “We should all be interested in resilience, because it adds a little different twist to the way we think about things. We have a human system interacting with a biocomplex system; if humans are going to survive over a long period of time, we need to be able to adapt to change and disturbance, rather than trying to make everything stable, as we have with our current policies.”