Salmon Notebooks Reveal Past Bounty

For more than 3 decades, from 1912 to 1948, a government “fisheries overseer” named Robert Gibson and his colleagues filled dozens of notebooks with fish scales from the Skeena River. Now, scientists have used the DNA preserved in those scales to study changes in the fishery. “The conclusion is sobering: Declines have been more precipitous and widespread than previously understood, with the river’s 13 major wild sockeye salmon populations plummeting by 56% to 99% over the period from 1913 to 2014, largely because of overfishing.” Via Science.