Atlantic salmon returns to cleaner river Seine in Paris
Last updated 8/18/2009 2:25:51 PM
La Seine attracts more visitors this year. Photo © Zarina Holmes
After an absence of nearly a century, Atlantic salmon have returned to France's Seine River, with hundreds swimming past the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame cathedral this year alone, researchers told AFP.
The reappearance of salmon and other species chased from these waters by dams and pollution is all the more remarkable because no efforts have been made to reintroduce them.
They came back on their own.
"There are more and more fish swimming up the Seine," said Bernard Breton, a top official at France's National Federation for Fishing.
"This year the numbers have exceeded anything we could have imagined: I would not be surprised if we had passed the 1,000 mark," he told AFP by phone.
2008 was already a record-breaking year, with at least 260 tallied on a video system in the fish passage of the Poses dam above Rouen, a city roughly half way between Paris and the Atlantic Ocean.
Historically, the Seine hosted a flourishing population of salmon, a migratory species that return from the sea between December and June to their freshwater birth place to reproduce.
But the construction of dams, and especially the fouling of the Seine with chemical runoff from industry and agriculture along with organic pollution, led to their local extinction sometime between WWI and WWII.
Today, Salmo salar, or Atlantic salmon, is listed as a threatened species throughout Europe.
Imagine the surprise, then, of the weekend angler who reeled a six-kilo (13-pound) specimen just downstream from Paris at the end of last month.
Or the dozing fisherman in Suresnes, also downstream from the city gates, who snagged an even bigger one last October, the first such catch in over seven decades.