>Less than a month after four towering dams on the Klamath River were demolished, hundreds of salmon made it into waters they have been cut off from for decades to spawn in cool creeks
Do we understand the mechanisms of this "genetic memory" (my words, no idea if its accurate or if there is a better word for it)? Butterflies knowing where to fly even though it was their grandparents that last did it - eels traveling thousands of miles to breed in a place theyve never seen - countless bird migrations - even something as simple as how it takes a human baby 12-18 months to walk but many animals walk as soon as they are born. I would love to understand better how this knowledge is inherited
Salmon have no "genetic memory" - if you release baby salmon from a hatchery that were bred from adults caught elsewhere, they remember where they were released- not where they are genetically from-, and swim back to the area of the hatchery. It appears to be regular memory learned from experience. It is believed to be mostly chemical sensing, e.g. specific smells that they are remembering and returning to.
Salmon are not 100% effective at making it back to their birthplace, and some small fraction stray randomly- which is what allows them to populate new areas and re-populate others where they were wiped out. This article isn't about a lot of salmon - only hundreds, so this is probably the amount that would naturally stray to this region from others, with or without a healthy returning population.
For example, some ~120k chinook salmon returned to the Columbia river this year, so if 0.01% of them strayed to the Klamath river, you'd get about this many.
Looking at salmon research literature I found a study[0] with the following conclusion:
This study provides convincing empirical support for fine-scale local selection against dispersal in a large Atlantic salmon meta-population, signifying that local individuals have a marked home ground advantage in reproductive fitness. These results emphasize the notion that migration and dispersal may not be beneficial in all contexts and highlight the potential for selection against dispersal and for local adaptation to drive population divergence across fine spatial scales.
Seems like it might simply be that they go where they adapted to thrive.
That doesn't really explain how they know to find this place, decades after the last time any member of their species visited it. It explains why evolution selected for this behavior, but the more interesting part is how it happens in an individual salmon.
I don't think this finding is necessarily relevant here, because Atlantic salmon are totally different. Pacific salmon always die right after spawning. Atlantic salmon return to the ocean after spawning, and will often spawn multiple times.
If some salmon group had been simplistically "programmed" to go up these waters, they would have been trying and failing to go up the river during the entire time the dam was there and so likely wiped out as a group/subspecies.
It seems like the fish would have to have had some kind of way to test if the river lead to adequate spawning grounds. And if they had that, they wouldn't really need any memory of any given river.
> Do we understand the mechanisms of this "genetic memory"
I don't think there is particular evidence for "genetic" memory here. The salmon were already further down river, they just kept swimming upstream. While most salmon do return to the place of their birth, a small percentage always stray, which is how salmon are able to colonize new habitats and survive things like ice ages.
>While most salmon do return to the place of their birth
I wonder to what degree that is even true. Like sure they probably return to the same rivers, but how far up the river they swim is likely unrelated to where they were actually born. If you extend that river further or introduce side streams that didn't exist when they were born, they're probably just as likely to end up in one of those places.
This news is about the end of a dam removal project. I believe this is also the end of the oldest dam removal project. The Klamath and IIRC the local tribes were the original test for salmon restoration/dam breach projects in the PNW, and subsequent programs are copying their success.
One of the things that makes salmon ladders more effective is introducing artificial noise of falling water. Turns out when salmon find themselves in still water they head for the sounds of the inflow, which dams either don't have, or are from spillways that the salmon cannot navigate.
Most salmon want to go back exactly where they are born, and on a three year cycle (or at least, that's the pattern on the Klamath). So if you were to introduce hatchery salmon in 2024, in 2027 and every three years after you'll have a full run, and only a small number of fish in the remaining years. Which probably isn't good for genetic diversity. So you end up having to stock at least 3 times, or just wait and see what happens.
NOAA page listing the history of work on this river (could use a timeline):
> how it takes a human baby 12-18 months to walk but many animals walk as soon as they are born.
This is because humans are born with, comparably, extremely immature brains. The animals that can walk after birth are born with more mature brain development than humans are born with, so they are capable of walking.
It's not completely brain development, look up the stepping reflex in human babies. Humans are just as neurally pre-wired to walk as foals are on day one but we're also born long before we're anywhere near strong enough to do it, it takes at least another 6 months of physical growth and strengthening out of the womb before babies even try.
sure - but how did a horse foal learn how to walk within an hour of their legs being in contact with the ground? Or even for human babies, how are they hard wired to search for milk or even breathe?
The book Bird Sense by Tim Birkhead covers birds’ magnetic sense in Chapter 6. Research has demonstrated that seabirds have a magnetic map and compass that they use to navigate home, but it doesn’t discuss how this knowledge is inherited.
I believe Salmon use a similar mechanism, but it might be supplemented with chemical signatures. For Salmon, it’s possible that they genetically inherit the capability but learn the location at birth.
> seabirds have a magnetic map and compass that they use to navigate home, but it doesn’t discuss how this knowledge is inherited.
It’s not something that was decided by one ancestor and then inherited by everyone else.
It was something that certain birds had a tendency to prefer. Those birds thrived and reproduced at a higher rate, while birds without that preference presumably found less suitable homes.
It’s just natural selection and normal genetic variance. Some offspring every year will be born with slightly difference preferences due to the influence of various genetic differences. Some of those differences will be more beneficial for finding a good “home”, others less so.
There was a recent report of a very confused penguin showing up on a beach far from their normal habitat. Apparently this happens every once in a while. Those cases did not win the genetic lottery (though hopefully it made it back to a more suitable climate)
Salmon do use magnetic senses to navigate the oceans as well, but it is an acute sense of smell (among other things) that allows (most of) them to return to the headwaters of their birth.
these are hatchery fish; they were born on the klamath and they're returning to it. the only difference is that now they can make it to tributaries and spawn naturally, instead of being collected and having their eggs harvested and fertilized by humans back at the hatchery
It's not a genetic memory. They return to the place they were born. This is probably based on the "scent" of that place, and maybe other factors.
Some percentage either accidentally or deliberately go up a different river, which is how the species spreads. That's very likely who this story is about.
I think the point is if they "return to the place they are born" then why would they go back to the waterways freed up by destroying this damn. Clearly they have some heirachy in where they prefer to spawn and this place is at or near the top, or they would have opted to return to where they were born
I know it's going to sound like a bunch of hooey, but information really is the most intrinsic element of all aspects of this universe, especially when it comes to life. The life force is a thing that is interrelated with our physical bodies, but is not the physical body. It's just like the zen concept of "Not 2, not 1". Our minds have the same relationship with our brains. They're not separate, they're not the same; they're interrelated.
That we can't "see" the other side of the connection with our science is due to our science being built with our physical world's constituents (matter & energy), thus those other dimensions are immeasurable with our science's tools. Rupert Sheldrake speaks of this when he says that the genetic code's protein construction genes do not and can not account for the resulting organism's shape. That coordinated construction requires a separate guiding force. That interrelationship is similar to the "memory" that creatures such as salmon have, which is intrinsic to their entire being, not just their physical body, which is only half of our being's totality.
Whether or not this is “true,” it’s not explanatory.
Someone asked how a thing works, and the answer above is essentially just restating that it does in fact work, for some ineffable, immeasurable reason.
So while interesting to think about, it’s not a useful response to the question.
what you're saying is basically untestable and that's why most scientific minded people only talk about such things over beers or dismiss it entirely. It's not unlike religion or crystals. I mean we can't necessarily disprove them as they are based mostly on faith in an untestable conclusion.
> Rupert Sheldrake speaks of this when he says that the genetic code's protein construction genes do not and can not account for the resulting organism's shape. That coordinated construction requires a separate guiding force.
Of course there's a separate guiding force. It's the biochemical environment around the cell. Cells operate on chemical signals they receive from their environment and generate the same; these cause cells to differentiate themselves based on their genetic code, which where the resulting organism's shape comes from. This isn't some kind of mystery, we know how this works, and matter & energy are indeed sufficient to explain it.
> Rupert Sheldrake speaks of this when he says that the genetic code's protein construction genes do not and can not account for the resulting organism's shape.
> That interrelationship is similar to the "memory" that creatures such as salmon have, which is intrinsic to their entire being, not just their physical body, which is only half of our being's totality.
This is all pseudoscience and borderline religious thinking. Rupert Sheldrake and others pushing this line of thinking are not grounded in reality or science.
I’m surprised this is the most upvoted sub comment at the time I’m responding. Is pseudoscience like this really becoming so pervasive that comments like this pass as good information?
> even something as simple as how it takes a human baby 12-18 months to walk but many animals walk as soon as they are born.
That's just a matter of muscular development. Human babies are born early; I believe this is usually attributed to the difficulty of getting the head through the birth canal.
My 100% speculation is emergent behaviour from the brain itself. Same way human interactions have remained largely the same over thousands of years. Also, we don't notice the salmon that swam up dead ends elsewhere.
The story about eels is especially fascinating. I was told in my fishing course they can even get across small patches of land to continue on their journey. I did not bother to fact check it though.
> Human babies physically cannot walk. It’s not merely a knowledge check.
They physically cannot walk, but they also don't know how to. We know this because they need to practice and acquire skill. If they are deprived of opportunity to learn but their body continues to mature, their mature body does not give them the mature skill.
I never crawled. My parents were worried, they went to doctors who assured them that I was mostly alright, and then one day, I got up and started walking.
I saw the exact same behavior with my ex-gf's sister's son, who we took in after he was in foster care from birth. The child had clearly not been engaged with properly... the back of his head was bald because he was always on his back in a cramped bassinette and at 11 months he hadn't even learned to turn over. Within 3 months of being with us, he was walking.
The simplest answer in this specific case is that there is no genetic memory involved, and salmon will just swim upstream into any fresh water stream they come across.
> Do we understand the mechanisms of this "genetic memory" (my words, no idea if its accurate or if there is a better word for it)?
It’s not actually a memory that gets encoded in genes.
It’s a tendency to behave in certain ways as influenced by combinations of genes
Ancestors who had the same tendencies, drives, and preferences would have some similar behaviors, resulting in some of them going toward the same places.
So not an actual memory that gets inherited, more like personality traits (but in a more general sense) that lead to similar outcomes.
There is a field of epigenetics which studies heritable changes in cells that occur without DNA alteration, but these signals are much simpler than memories and not a mechanism for carrying memories across generations. A lot of pseudoscience has been written around epigenetics right now so you have to be careful about where you source info on this.
but I am not even kidding.
they include a tiny bit of magnetic material in their ear.
but it must be a genetic construct that informs them what to do with north, they use it to move to particular
undersea canyons out in the ocean they have never been to.
It is a mystery, like lots of other phenomena that science fails to explain. Personally I think all those creatures are much more intelligent and aware than we give them credit for. Viewing these creatures as simple automatons is as silly as viewing humans as such.
Animal behavior usually has a weird combination of inborn instinct and learned behavior.
The one I've read about that stuck with me was dam building by beavers. Some part of the behavior is driven by a dislike of the sound of running water. Someone did an experiment with speakers playing the sound of running water and the beavers near the speakers would attempt to cover them with sticks and mud.
In my head I'm imaging that sound is like nails on a chalkboard to beaver.
Instinct shows up locally as emotion. An individual animal acts based on their emotional state, and their emotional state is governed by a set of rules deep in their brain of which they are not conscious, many of which are set by birth.
This is true of humans as well. We each make food selections based on what tastes good. We seek particular sexual partners because it feels good. We protect and raise kids because it makes us feel good to do so.
This causes all sorts of evolutionarily weird side effects like people treating pets like kids in order to access the same emotional state as parenting. Or beavers covering speakers with mud and sticks.
evolution uses whatever hook it can find to tune behavior. Brains of sufficient complexity have to learn, you can't fit even enough information in DNA to manually wire up a brain, and its hard enough to guess how a barin will end up being wired. you can attach a squirrels optic nerve to their auditory cortex and they'll learn to see. (I may have the animal wrong). You can grow a brain completely inside out that will function.
Instincts are deterministic, but learned behaviors.
"Dislike" may be an anthropomorphism. Perhaps it's more of an opportunity for the beavers, since dams are their habitat and provide a food source for them.
I like the sound of running water from a fountain. But if I hear it inside, I assume there’s a leak and I go looking for it to fix. Maybe the beavers just need to visit the zen garden.
The impact of human presence on those behaviors can't be overstated, either.
There's been a disturbing trend with the return of the salmon for people to dress them up in little outfits and take selfies with them because they're so exhausted and easy to catch; it's like shooting fish in apparel.
I have a guy in my family who worked to remove dams over a small tributary river of the Seine, in Normandy, France. It took him several years to remove the 300+ dams, the oldest ones being easily 150 years old. The very first year after his work was completed the salmons came back.
Now he works in the environmental police, and is often called to handle cetaceans getting lost in the Seine delta. People freak out because it is an unusual sight nowadays, but he told me this is just a return to how things were. They are stories of dolphins swimming as far back as Paris in the past centuries.
I guess this means we're doing something right, I hope one day we'll be rid of this poisonous brown opaque water flowing through our cities. I really hope one day to be able to see this "clear water" my grandpa told me he learned to swim in.
That depends on a lot of things. There are lots of clear mountain streams with all kinds of things living in them, and not all brown streams are brown for the same reason.
I've seen crystal clear lakes in the Alps teaming with life - aquatic and amphibious. But I don't think that's what my late grandfather meant.
I think he was talking about less turbid water than it is today. I don't think I could see my hand if I were to ever plunge it in the Seine, not that I'm foolish enough to try.
Lots of discussion about salmon memory and such, but is it possible this is just Salmon finding "hey this is a great spot"? It is hard to imagine salmon not being flexible to some extent, and still surviving.
Salmon are also making a resurgence in some areas where storm water runoff is being controlled and filtered. A chemical in tires to prevent cracking is lethal for Chinook and Steelhead, so keeping that out of watersheds could create huge population increases due to the amount of eggs. "6PPD-quinone, that is deadly to coho salmon at extremely low concentrations and is often found in urban streams. Stormwater run-off from roads kills both juvenile and adult coho within a matter of a few hours. Even stormwater diluted to a mixture of just 5 percent highway runoff still killed juvenile coho, the new research found." https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/roadway-runoff-...
Sometimes young Moose from the north run past the mating grounds through excitement. They end up in my neighborhood for the season and then run back north.
The article tells both sides of the story of the dam removal in as fair a way as I think is possible. Many of the locals were against it and there was a strong advocacy group that fought for it, including a tribal constituency.
I came away from the article feeling I understood both sides better but with less certainty about what was the right choice.
Not a bad article, all things considered, but I do think it gives a shallow treatment to reasons of the objectors to dam removal.
How many people are impacted and how? Will they lose their businesses, jobs, and life savings?
The closest it comes is talking about the spotted owl, where 30,000 people lost their loverhoods without compensation due to an environmental regulation that not only failed to deliver, but was doomed from the start. What are the parallels here?
> According to PacifiCorp, the Oregon-based company that owns the Klamath dams today, the structures are mainly monitored and controlled remotely—from Lewis River, Washington, more than 500 kilometers away. Local jobs add up to 13, and all the affected employees either retired, voluntarily left the company, or will be reassigned within it.
from the link. probably a few more people in recreation indirectly affected, but these are small, remote reservoirs. It's not like we're draining Lake Powell here[1]
> How many people are impacted and how? Will they lose their businesses, jobs, and life savings?
A good place to start would be an economic analysis of all the people downstream, all the cultures and livelihoods that were lost due to the installation of the dam in the first place.
The dam was only up for less than a century, yet your statement implicitly assumes the water now belongs to those who control the dam. To claim that the dam beneficiaries are somehow the victims and the downstream communities are the bad guys for wanting their livelihoods back - preposterous and disingenuous.
Let's correct your error: the river has been feeding downstream cultures for centuries. Fishing on the Klamath was at one point a livelihood supporting tens of thousands of people. The dams (combined with the timber industry) have completely decimated the salmon habitat and the fishing industry with it. Those who installed the dam and used it did so explicitly to take resources from one place and use them for their own benefit. We have a word for that - theft. And now they're being asked to return those resources. The horror! Spare me the crocodile tears.
> The closest it comes is talking about the spotted owl, where 30,000 people lost their livelihoods without compensation
This is absolutely nothing like the spotted owl situation. This attitude of people vs nature is a false dichotomy. Salmon have cultural, economic, and nutritional value that makes them a keystone resource for those communities. The issue is not the salmon's survival, it's the survival of the people who depended on them.
People will believe and fight for literally anything, surely thousands of years of con men has taught us that. The fact that this guy with a whopping 4 generations in the area doesn't agree means next to nothing to me.
A lot of the local opposition to dam removal is because of this guy specifically. Here's his article on why the toxic cyanobacteria that was in the former reservoirs is actually good for the river:
It pretends to be a regular news site, and even "scientific", to the point where it fooled Google and his site was often at the top of search results. He was also aggressively promoting his articles on Facebook.
The guy is confusing green algae with bacteria. He's also ignoring the fact that the kind of blue-green "algae" in question, Microcystis aeruginosa, isn't the nitrogen-fixing kind. He has no clue was he's talking about, but that doesn't stop him, and he's unfortunately a major source of "knowledge" (confusion and misinformation) for the locals here.
> Resistance to dam removal on the Klamath is emblematic of the profound mistrust of official narratives that increasingly leads to such upside-down outcomes as survivors of climate disasters denying climate change, or rural communities accusing the wildfire fighters who protect their homes of deliberately setting the fires. Reservoir Reach is a place where, if KRRC is using helicopters to prep for dam removal, it must make sure the public knows that the choppers aren’t carrying out black ops against American sovereignty on behalf of the United Nations.
The author seems to have developed quite a strong bias about the area.
All these dams on the Klamath river did have fish ladders where the salmon could go upstream and spawn. Removing the dams just increased the number of fish swimming upstream. Some of the fish ladders had glass walls and people could watch the fish going up & down the ladder.
From the 2013 department of the interior report discussing dam removal "Klamath Dam Removal Overview Report for the Secretary of the Interior: An assessment of science and technical information":
> In particular, the Klamath Tribes of the upper basin have experienced their 92nd year (period starting with initial dam construction) without access to salmon and have continued to limit their harvest of suckers to only ceremonial use for the 25th consecutive year because of exceptionally low numbers and ESA protection.
I don't think that's accurate. The remaining dams have ladders, but the lowermost dams had no (or inadequate) ladders, hence the total absence of salmon from the upper Klamath.
> Although the Bureau of Reclamation’s Link River Dam and PacifiCorp’s Keno Dam currently have fish ladders that will pass anadromous fish, none of PacifiCorp’s Four Facilities (i.e., Iron Gate, Copco 1, Copco 2, and J.C Boyle dams and associated structures) were constructed with adequate fish ladders and, as a result, anadromous fish have been blocked from accessing the upper reaches of the Klamath Basin for close to a century.
I'm lucky enough to have a salmon-bearing stream on my property here in the northwest. They are an extremely inspiring species to watch through their lifecycle. Tenacious.
I'm surprised we could never engineer a proper salmon "elevator" to bypass the damn. Given the price of removing the damn, there seems to be a huge budget for creating some sort of high-tech Robo-elevator to scoop the fish out and drive them way upstream in a robo-vehicle.
Maybe a giant net that lies at the base of the damn, and periodically lifts out of the water to catch the fish and automate the transportation of them to ideal next step drop.
Fish ladders have been around for centuries. They have mixed results.
I went to Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River between Washington and Oregon and it was kind of like being in an aquarium watching the fish swim upstream. They seemed to get tired and would float backwards with the water current and then start swimming again against the current.
There are definitely ones that work very well. Ladders with just the right water flow and step sizes, chutes that whisk away fish in a tube, etc. As dumb as it sounds one of the more effective methods is having fish collect into concentrated tanks that are then trucked upstream to the right spot.
But why? The cost of upkeep for the dams compared to the amount of utility they provided was already too high to preserve the dam. Adding this sort of mechansim would only add to the cost of upkeep, making the preservation of the dam an even worse proposition.
Readit News
Do we understand the mechanisms of this "genetic memory" (my words, no idea if its accurate or if there is a better word for it)? Butterflies knowing where to fly even though it was their grandparents that last did it - eels traveling thousands of miles to breed in a place theyve never seen - countless bird migrations - even something as simple as how it takes a human baby 12-18 months to walk but many animals walk as soon as they are born. I would love to understand better how this knowledge is inherited
Salmon are not 100% effective at making it back to their birthplace, and some small fraction stray randomly- which is what allows them to populate new areas and re-populate others where they were wiped out. This article isn't about a lot of salmon - only hundreds, so this is probably the amount that would naturally stray to this region from others, with or without a healthy returning population.
For example, some ~120k chinook salmon returned to the Columbia river this year, so if 0.01% of them strayed to the Klamath river, you'd get about this many.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2017.075...
This study provides convincing empirical support for fine-scale local selection against dispersal in a large Atlantic salmon meta-population, signifying that local individuals have a marked home ground advantage in reproductive fitness. These results emphasize the notion that migration and dispersal may not be beneficial in all contexts and highlight the potential for selection against dispersal and for local adaptation to drive population divergence across fine spatial scales.
Seems like it might simply be that they go where they adapted to thrive.
[0] https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.aav1112
I don't think this finding is necessarily relevant here, because Atlantic salmon are totally different. Pacific salmon always die right after spawning. Atlantic salmon return to the ocean after spawning, and will often spawn multiple times.
It seems like the fish would have to have had some kind of way to test if the river lead to adequate spawning grounds. And if they had that, they wouldn't really need any memory of any given river.
So, a bunch of salmons have been trying each year in the river with that dam? But:
"hundreds of salmons failed to swim past a dam"
didn't break the news
I don't think there is particular evidence for "genetic" memory here. The salmon were already further down river, they just kept swimming upstream. While most salmon do return to the place of their birth, a small percentage always stray, which is how salmon are able to colonize new habitats and survive things like ice ages.
I wonder to what degree that is even true. Like sure they probably return to the same rivers, but how far up the river they swim is likely unrelated to where they were actually born. If you extend that river further or introduce side streams that didn't exist when they were born, they're probably just as likely to end up in one of those places.
Glad they are doing well.
One of the things that makes salmon ladders more effective is introducing artificial noise of falling water. Turns out when salmon find themselves in still water they head for the sounds of the inflow, which dams either don't have, or are from spillways that the salmon cannot navigate.
Most salmon want to go back exactly where they are born, and on a three year cycle (or at least, that's the pattern on the Klamath). So if you were to introduce hatchery salmon in 2024, in 2027 and every three years after you'll have a full run, and only a small number of fish in the remaining years. Which probably isn't good for genetic diversity. So you end up having to stock at least 3 times, or just wait and see what happens.
NOAA page listing the history of work on this river (could use a timeline):
https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/west-coast/habitat-conservati...
Whites Gulch Dam, ca 2008:
https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/building-networ...
This is because humans are born with, comparably, extremely immature brains. The animals that can walk after birth are born with more mature brain development than humans are born with, so they are capable of walking.
https://www.livescience.com/9760-study-reveals-infants-walk....
Edit: the article mentions lower concentration of harmful algae and a cooler temperature.
I believe Salmon use a similar mechanism, but it might be supplemented with chemical signatures. For Salmon, it’s possible that they genetically inherit the capability but learn the location at birth.
It’s not something that was decided by one ancestor and then inherited by everyone else.
It was something that certain birds had a tendency to prefer. Those birds thrived and reproduced at a higher rate, while birds without that preference presumably found less suitable homes.
It’s just natural selection and normal genetic variance. Some offspring every year will be born with slightly difference preferences due to the influence of various genetic differences. Some of those differences will be more beneficial for finding a good “home”, others less so.
There was a recent report of a very confused penguin showing up on a beach far from their normal habitat. Apparently this happens every once in a while. Those cases did not win the genetic lottery (though hopefully it made it back to a more suitable climate)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DggHeuhpFvg
Some percentage either accidentally or deliberately go up a different river, which is how the species spreads. That's very likely who this story is about.
That we can't "see" the other side of the connection with our science is due to our science being built with our physical world's constituents (matter & energy), thus those other dimensions are immeasurable with our science's tools. Rupert Sheldrake speaks of this when he says that the genetic code's protein construction genes do not and can not account for the resulting organism's shape. That coordinated construction requires a separate guiding force. That interrelationship is similar to the "memory" that creatures such as salmon have, which is intrinsic to their entire being, not just their physical body, which is only half of our being's totality.
Someone asked how a thing works, and the answer above is essentially just restating that it does in fact work, for some ineffable, immeasurable reason.
So while interesting to think about, it’s not a useful response to the question.
Of course there's a separate guiding force. It's the biochemical environment around the cell. Cells operate on chemical signals they receive from their environment and generate the same; these cause cells to differentiate themselves based on their genetic code, which where the resulting organism's shape comes from. This isn't some kind of mystery, we know how this works, and matter & energy are indeed sufficient to explain it.
> That interrelationship is similar to the "memory" that creatures such as salmon have, which is intrinsic to their entire being, not just their physical body, which is only half of our being's totality.
This is all pseudoscience and borderline religious thinking. Rupert Sheldrake and others pushing this line of thinking are not grounded in reality or science.
I’m surprised this is the most upvoted sub comment at the time I’m responding. Is pseudoscience like this really becoming so pervasive that comments like this pass as good information?
That's just a matter of muscular development. Human babies are born early; I believe this is usually attributed to the difficulty of getting the head through the birth canal.
Pretrained brain modules aren’t the most surprising thing. Humans have plenty of pre trained behaviors, some of which kick in a while after birth.
They physically cannot walk, but they also don't know how to. We know this because they need to practice and acquire skill. If they are deprived of opportunity to learn but their body continues to mature, their mature body does not give them the mature skill.
I saw the exact same behavior with my ex-gf's sister's son, who we took in after he was in foster care from birth. The child had clearly not been engaged with properly... the back of his head was bald because he was always on his back in a cramped bassinette and at 11 months he hadn't even learned to turn over. Within 3 months of being with us, he was walking.
Swim until you can't anymore?
Swim until the current is very weak?
Swim until the water smells/tastes nice?
Someone could probably simulate these and see which matches reality the most.
It’s not actually a memory that gets encoded in genes.
It’s a tendency to behave in certain ways as influenced by combinations of genes
Ancestors who had the same tendencies, drives, and preferences would have some similar behaviors, resulting in some of them going toward the same places.
So not an actual memory that gets inherited, more like personality traits (but in a more general sense) that lead to similar outcomes.
There is a field of epigenetics which studies heritable changes in cells that occur without DNA alteration, but these signals are much simpler than memories and not a mechanism for carrying memories across generations. A lot of pseudoscience has been written around epigenetics right now so you have to be careful about where you source info on this.
but I am not even kidding. they include a tiny bit of magnetic material in their ear. but it must be a genetic construct that informs them what to do with north, they use it to move to particular undersea canyons out in the ocean they have never been to.
EDIT: I don’t mean that as a joke. I think on the timescale of evolution the dam was never there.
The one I've read about that stuck with me was dam building by beavers. Some part of the behavior is driven by a dislike of the sound of running water. Someone did an experiment with speakers playing the sound of running water and the beavers near the speakers would attempt to cover them with sticks and mud.
In my head I'm imaging that sound is like nails on a chalkboard to beaver.
This is true of humans as well. We each make food selections based on what tastes good. We seek particular sexual partners because it feels good. We protect and raise kids because it makes us feel good to do so.
This causes all sorts of evolutionarily weird side effects like people treating pets like kids in order to access the same emotional state as parenting. Or beavers covering speakers with mud and sticks.
Instincts are deterministic, but learned behaviors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ImdlZtOU80
https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/the-godf-otter-part...
There's been a disturbing trend with the return of the salmon for people to dress them up in little outfits and take selfies with them because they're so exhausted and easy to catch; it's like shooting fish in apparel.
Now he works in the environmental police, and is often called to handle cetaceans getting lost in the Seine delta. People freak out because it is an unusual sight nowadays, but he told me this is just a return to how things were. They are stories of dolphins swimming as far back as Paris in the past centuries.
I guess this means we're doing something right, I hope one day we'll be rid of this poisonous brown opaque water flowing through our cities. I really hope one day to be able to see this "clear water" my grandpa told me he learned to swim in.
Sadly, it seems like things are mostly going in the opposite direction
I think he was talking about less turbid water than it is today. I don't think I could see my hand if I were to ever plunge it in the Seine, not that I'm foolish enough to try.
The article tells both sides of the story of the dam removal in as fair a way as I think is possible. Many of the locals were against it and there was a strong advocacy group that fought for it, including a tribal constituency.
I came away from the article feeling I understood both sides better but with less certainty about what was the right choice.
How many people are impacted and how? Will they lose their businesses, jobs, and life savings?
The closest it comes is talking about the spotted owl, where 30,000 people lost their loverhoods without compensation due to an environmental regulation that not only failed to deliver, but was doomed from the start. What are the parallels here?
from the link. probably a few more people in recreation indirectly affected, but these are small, remote reservoirs. It's not like we're draining Lake Powell here[1]
[1]: be still my beating heart
A good place to start would be an economic analysis of all the people downstream, all the cultures and livelihoods that were lost due to the installation of the dam in the first place.
The dam was only up for less than a century, yet your statement implicitly assumes the water now belongs to those who control the dam. To claim that the dam beneficiaries are somehow the victims and the downstream communities are the bad guys for wanting their livelihoods back - preposterous and disingenuous.
Let's correct your error: the river has been feeding downstream cultures for centuries. Fishing on the Klamath was at one point a livelihood supporting tens of thousands of people. The dams (combined with the timber industry) have completely decimated the salmon habitat and the fishing industry with it. Those who installed the dam and used it did so explicitly to take resources from one place and use them for their own benefit. We have a word for that - theft. And now they're being asked to return those resources. The horror! Spare me the crocodile tears.
> The closest it comes is talking about the spotted owl, where 30,000 people lost their livelihoods without compensation
This is absolutely nothing like the spotted owl situation. This attitude of people vs nature is a false dichotomy. Salmon have cultural, economic, and nutritional value that makes them a keystone resource for those communities. The issue is not the salmon's survival, it's the survival of the people who depended on them.
https://www.siskiyou.news/2024/01/24/blue-green-algae-in-cop...
It pretends to be a regular news site, and even "scientific", to the point where it fooled Google and his site was often at the top of search results. He was also aggressively promoting his articles on Facebook.
The guy is confusing green algae with bacteria. He's also ignoring the fact that the kind of blue-green "algae" in question, Microcystis aeruginosa, isn't the nitrogen-fixing kind. He has no clue was he's talking about, but that doesn't stop him, and he's unfortunately a major source of "knowledge" (confusion and misinformation) for the locals here.
The author seems to have developed quite a strong bias about the area.
To my ears, that is a plain spoken description of the culture of the area, compatible with what I have observed myself over the years.
From the 2013 department of the interior report discussing dam removal "Klamath Dam Removal Overview Report for the Secretary of the Interior: An assessment of science and technical information":
> In particular, the Klamath Tribes of the upper basin have experienced their 92nd year (period starting with initial dam construction) without access to salmon and have continued to limit their harvest of suckers to only ceremonial use for the 25th consecutive year because of exceptionally low numbers and ESA protection.
> Although the Bureau of Reclamation’s Link River Dam and PacifiCorp’s Keno Dam currently have fish ladders that will pass anadromous fish, none of PacifiCorp’s Four Facilities (i.e., Iron Gate, Copco 1, Copco 2, and J.C Boyle dams and associated structures) were constructed with adequate fish ladders and, as a result, anadromous fish have been blocked from accessing the upper reaches of the Klamath Basin for close to a century.
N.B. Keno and Link River are _not_ being removed.
https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/west-coast/habitat-conservati...
Maybe a giant net that lies at the base of the damn, and periodically lifts out of the water to catch the fish and automate the transportation of them to ideal next step drop.
I went to Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River between Washington and Oregon and it was kind of like being in an aquarium watching the fish swim upstream. They seemed to get tired and would float backwards with the water current and then start swimming again against the current.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_ladder
They also had a salmon hatchery literally right after the dam. But they had some stats showing that it also had mixed effectiveness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z3ZyGlqUkA