Critics of Iron Fertilization said there would be toxic algal blooms, but what else change in 2012 that might be causing the record salmon runs ?

In 2013 and 2014 we are seeing record Salmon runs, it seems possible that iron fertilization has played a part in this success.

In 2011, Scientific American ran an article asking what is killing off the Fraser River Sockeye Salmon ? A sockeye salmon run with a historical average of eight million fish worth over $1 billion. Since the early 1990s the numbers of Fraser sockeye have steadily dwindled, reaching a particularly troublesome nadir in 2009 when more than 11 million sockeye were forecast to return and only 1.4 million showed up.

The large number of missing Fraser River sockeye in 2009 prompted a Canadian federal judicial inquiry into the matter, the Cohen Commission. And just to underscore how little scientists understood of the fish, the sockeye run in 2010 was a once-in-a-century bonanza, with 34 million fish flooding the river. "From a historic low to a historic high almost—that creates a lot of uncertainty for management but it also raises questions on why it's swinging so much," says U.B.C.'s Farrell. The USGS's Winton points out that the sockeye run of 2010 was an anomaly, in the face of a steady and worrisome decline in Fraser sockeye over the years.

There was a Salmon fact sheet that considered the 2010 30 million Sockeye salmon run an anomoly.



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