Earlier this month, the executive director of Oakland’s Lake Merritt Institute was at home when he got a call he said was worth getting dressed for -- several salmon carcasses were found on the lake shore. James Robinson had to see these salmon for himself.
You might be thinking, Why get excited about dead fish? Or maybe you’re thinking that given all the trash that washes into Lake Merritt, a dead fish doesn’t seem so surprising.
But, Robinson says, the Chinook salmon are actually an exciting example of nature’s life cycle, and not a human pollution problem. Lake Merritt is an estuary connected to the San Francisco Bay.
At the end of their lives, salmon swim from the ocean into creeks and estuaries like this, find mates, lay eggs, and die. That’s what the salmon found in Lake Merritt were probably trying to do.
In 2021, live salmon were sighted in a creek that enters the lake. That was the first sighting in decades. Robinson says these sightings are a positive sign because Lake Merritt is a window into the entire Bay Area ecosystem. and there’s been a trend of Chinook salmon returning to places all around the bay.