The Salmon and the Rainforest are One System

It’s not embeddable unfortunately, but I just saw this astonishing six-minute video by David Suzuki, legendary Japanese-Canadian zoologist and communicator of ecology with the public.  He explains, at a crystal-clear 8th-grade level, the temperate rainforest ecosystem of the North American west coast and the role of the salmon in nutrient cycling from the ocean to the land.  Watch it watch it, both for the ecology, and for the clarity and explanatory power of his storytelling.  The whole thing gave me chills.

And lest we forget, this used to be true in my home of the Northeast as well – salmon, shad, alewives, sturgeon, and more all performed the ocean-to-land ecological role that Suzuki describes.  Those migratory fish constitute major “missing partners” in our present-day Northeastern forests.   And, lest we also forget, thanks to the now-in-motion undamming of the Penobscot River, they could soon start to run in large numbers and occupy that niche again.