“Salmon are breeding in England’s River Don for the first time in over 200 years,” reports The Doomslayer.
The BBC reports:
Atlantic salmon have been confirmed as breeding in the River Don for the first time in more than two centuries.
The Don Catchment Rivers Trust (DCRT) said discovering a wild-born salmon in the river was the first evidence of successful spawning since they were wiped out by pollution and man-made barriers in the 18th and 19th Centuries.
It follows more than two decades of installing fish passes to reconnect the river, allowing salmon to return…salmon returned to Doncaster’s centre after water quality started improving.
The Don used to be ecologically dead, full of pollution and blocked by concrete.
Other major rivers have also seen rising numbers of fish. The number of fish species living in the Chicago River has risen from 5 to 70 over the last 50 years.
For over a century, the river that flows through Paris (the Seine) was so dirty that it was illegal to swim in it. But now, it has become so clean that swimming in it was recently legalized by the City of Paris. “Mussels sensitive to pollution and thought to be on the point of extinction in France have been discovered in the Seine in Paris,” as water quality has improved, reported The Guardian.
The survival of the mussels is a good thing, because they help purify water. Each mussel can filter over 10 gallons of water per day.
In Germany, a sludge-filled river became a thriving ecosystem: “For more than a century, Germany’s Emscher river carried sewage and industrial sludge through the Ruhr, earning a reputation as an open sewer. Now, after a massive cleanup, the river is becoming a thriving ecosystem once again.”
