STRANGE things can happen in nature and one of the strangest must be how the descendants of salmon that "emigrated" from Germany to Ireland 100 years ago are now finding their way back to the Fatherland. It is all part of a massive restocking programme on the mighty River Rhine along with some other Continental waterways, in which Ireland's Salmon Research Agency at Furnace, Newport, Co Mayo, is playing a crucial role.
The agency director, Dr Ken Whelan, is supervising a programme under which huge numbers of salmon ova from the agency's Burishoole fishery, and from the Delphi fishery and the Shannon, are being sent to the Continent to restock the Rhine. A century ago the Rhine was the best salmon river on the Continent but industrial pollution and other environmental horrors inexorably took their toll until salmon stocks were wiped out altogether in the 1940s.
Over the past decade a clean up drive along the river resulted in the heartening sight of salmon and sea trout appearing in some tributaries. This spurred scientists not only in Germany but Holland and Switzerland through which the Rhine also flows, to undertake a restocking programme. This week the research agency will send the first part of a consignment of one million salmon ova, most of which will be placed in the Rhine though some will also go into the Weser and the Elbe.
In a way this will be the repayment of a historic debt. In the middle of the last century when the then unpolluted Rhine and Weser were teeming with healthy salmon, ova were taken from them to help to boost salmon numbers in Irish waters, particularly in the River Ilen in Co Cork, the Ballisodare in Co Sligo and Lough Currane in Co Kerry. German scientists requested ova from some of these waters in order to retrieve remnants of the German salmon genes in Ireland, and 30,000 ova from the River Ilen were acquired by the research agency and sent back to their ancestral home.
The ultimate aim is to return the Continental rivers to the state where anglers can once again cast from their banks with a reasonable chance of catching a fish. The Irish agency will play a major part in the programme over the next six years or so.
It will be good to see these rivers coming back to life, though we'll scarcely see a return to the time when Dutch and German commercial fishermen could catch 80,000 salmon in the Rhine in a single season.