Has the headline been changed since you commented?
The headline on HN at the moment is "As Alaska's salmon plummet, scientists home in on the killer". The headline on the article itself is "As salmon in Alaska plummet, scientists home in on a killer". I don't see any way to read those as suggesting science is killed the salmon.
If you continue just a little bit, when you get to the source, it should make things more clear. Considering the source is important, as is reading the article!
Oh.My.Gosh. "Ich". Have had a home aquarium guy forever. Got a few Ich infestations (always after introducing new, store-bought fish). Although not the same strain (tropical usually is Ichthyophthirius Multifiliis). Sounds pretty much like the same infection progression. Me, and every other tropical aquarium enthusiast, HATES Ich. Now doubly so given a favorable opinion of wild salmon.
What happens when you get Ich in an aquarium: While tendrils start to show up then lengthen on your fish. You try a few treatments, but by the time you see it it cannot be stopped easily. When your fish are covered by pretty long white "shite" strands, they start to die. Worse than any horror film you might have seen. Man do I hate Ich.
I've been fortunate enough to never encounter it with my fish, but it's all over forums and subreddits related to aquaria. Fish get it constantly. If you aren't checking them daily it seems fairly easy to get an infestation that's beyond treatment. I can't imagine. I actually care for my fish quite a bit, and would hate to see them wiped out like that. Each tank I have is a sort of sanctuary, a little ecosystem to steward.
Ironically, this year has been particularly good for salmon fishing in south-central Alaska, where the large majority of the population lives. But who knows for how long.
I wonder if the ones that make it to spawn had something in their genes to help them survive the parasites and warmer temperatures. Hopefully they do, and the overall population adapts.
It will frustrate me until the day I die the sheer NUMBER of problems directly attributable to human-caused climate change and how every government damn near world-wide simply refuses to do anything.
We know the fucking problem, we know the fucking solution, and we simply don't because the rich people would lose a bit of money and they control everything.
> we simply don't because the rich people would lose a bit of money and they control everything.
This is at best an oversimplification, and at worse another convenient lie we tell ourselves because then we ("the never rich enough!") can feel righteous anger about nothing happening, while not being responsible for it.
Years ago, the government elites of France decided that global warming was a serious problem and they should cut down on fossil fuel usage. And then what happens? Nationwide violent protests, because the one thing "we the people" hate more than global warming is higher gas prices.
Years ago the French elites supposedly decided to so solve the global warming problem by suddenly putting a big tax on gasoline, which hit rural France hardest, and in a quick manner. I don't even see it as sincere from the beginning, I think they made to seem like they were doing something so they could seem to do it differently. Mélenchon could implemented the needed measures without any backlash - except from the bourgeoisie.
> Years ago, the government elites of France decided that global warming was a serious problem and they should cut down on fossil fuel usage. And then what happens? Nationwide violent protests, because the one thing "we the people" hate more than global warming is higher gas prices.
This is at best an oversimplification, and frankly, it feels like a pretty deliberate one.
Yes, the Yellow Vest protests began because of a proposed fuel tax by Emanuel Macron, which was set to directly impact lower income/rural voters. Which it would, because wealthier people in metro areas don't drive nearly as much. The movement evolved over time to incorporate many rural vs. city conflicts, things like lack of government services in non-populous areas, low minimum wages, and overall income inequality and all the social ills that follow it.
People weren't upset that gas was getting more expensive: they were upset that it was becoming unaffordable in areas in which buying it is not optional. You simply cannot live in the rural areas of any western country without a car. Period. Paragraph. The infrastructure demands a vehicle or you cannot get around. So when people are already struggling and ostensibly green-minded ideas like gas taxes are proposed, with no alternatives for them besides driving: yes, they get pissed off.
Measures like these have been protested far and wide because of things exactly like this, because governments keep trying to offset the costs of green policy on working class voters who are already struggling, because their donors are the wealthy elites who don't want to pay for it despite being eminently able to. And worse still these results are then used to say "see, people don't REALLY want to save the planet" when it's quite bluntly obvious, to me anyway, that what people don't want to do is..... starve.
The two big differences are 1) the rate of change (a huge amount higher than most planetary systems) and 2) that we have a large and growing population dependent on the many services our planet provides at a stable temperature. Of course, completely neglecting the rest of the natural world.
Warming and cooling would and will happen with people or without people -that's fact. The issue that many people have is about "when" it's happening. It upsets those that it's happening now as induced by people's activities and not by natural cycles or natural causes (eruptions, new species producing/emitting GHGs, etc.)
It is human caused. It simply is. We have decades of research all saying the exact same thing, some of which was funded directly by the energy industry trying desperately to prove it's not.
It is. This is not a debate anymore, if you disagree, you either don't understand or don't want to understand and neither of those is my or anyone else's problem to solve. You're wrong.
Why is it important to you what the cause is? Don't you think it is important to do something about it even if it wasn't human-caused? Should we only solve problems that we cause?
It looks like you have a few similarly confused commenters who think this is relevant to addressing the problem. It's a mystery why you want to derail the discussion to a debate about the cause rather than how to fix it. Maybe you're trying to say that understanding the cause is relevant to the solution, but if you are, you need to say it a lot more clearly.
Because trapping us in this endless debate of what the "real" cause is has been the go-to strategy for the oil and gas industry, where no matter how many times it is bloody proven, they hem and haw and say "well we need more evidence" but they aren't like, not selling gasoline anymore until we know it's safe are they? They just keep doing exactly what we're pretty damned sure is killing the planet, while endlessly debating whether it is or not.
The thing about human-caused things is humans can choose to stop doing the causal things.
The set of potential solutions would be quite different if the cause wasn't humans. Might even be impossible.
But we have quite a lot of evidence that we have been affecting the climate pretty substantially since the beginning of industrialization and increasingly so since, so it makes sense to work on the human causes.
I share your frustration, but I think you're blaming the wrong group. The median voter simply does not care about climate change, and is not willing to shoulder any of the short-term costs necessary to address it. They'd rather have cheap gas for their car, not have to look at fields of solar panels, and signal their opposition to "wokeness".
> They'd rather have cheap gas for their car, not have to look at fields of solar panels, and signal their opposition to "wokeness".
None of that has to change to solve climate change, so that's good news for those voters. If you think those changes are necessary, you are being lied to.
The bad news for them is that not solving climate change will make their gas, food, housing, and healthcare prices skyrocket. The choice for most voters is like deciding whether to spend $0 now, or $10,000 later. Choose wisely...
The culture war bullshit you're referencing is a propaganda effort on the part of corporate media to manufacture outrage around policies their funding organizations and figures disagree with, namely the promotion of clean energy and weaning us off fossil fuels and cars more generally.
You aren't wrong but that block of ill-informed voters didn't simply manifest from the ether. It was created for a purpose and it's working.
Stop burning fossil fuels, build infrastructure to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Extract the minimum number of fossil fuels necessary to serve non-fuel uses.
It's definitely not easy, but it's not even particularly hard, either. The solutions are there and ready to go. Everything we need to do to solve it has been done before[1]. We have done and continue to do many more difficult things than solve climate change.
The only difference between the hard things we are doing, and solving climate change, is the latter would make the ludicrously-wealthy very slightly less wealthy, instead of very slightly more. That's it. That's the whole debate. That's what we're burning the planet for.
[1] With the exception of carbon capture, which is only necessary now because we wasted so long doing nothing.
I occasionaly imagine a satire skit where "The great mistery of the dissapearing Salmon" episode is done on fishing boat decks, fish plants and the super market fresh and canned fish sections, montyesk AMAZMENT! and OUTRAGE!, whilst the whole industrial mining operation goes on around them
If you’re implying that fishing is the main culprit, I’d invite you to do some further reading. These fisheries are carefully managed to ensure that salmon are able to spawn. Granted, there is the existence of trawling boats which do cause real harm. Yet, almost all commercial fishermen detest the practice of bottom trawling due to the harm it causes.
41 millions pounds of sockeye were caught in Bristol Bay this season. I was up there working on a boat myself. Yet, the rivers were still thick with sockeye at the end of the season. It is not a free-for-all where people are allowed to catch fish in any manner they want, the rules and regulations are there to ensure that fishing is not impacting the long-term viability of these runs.
Well the detesting trawling angle is valid but similar to how you could detect coal mining in West Virginia the mountains/sea bottom is gone either way.
I believe the single most important policy change for fishiers would be to end trawling, second being sort out international regs.
Both very hard, both bad news for kings. But at some point people are going to see the outcomes in their grocery stores and maybe that’ll start change.
The fisheries are carefully managed to keep the fishermen happy.
Whether or not that results in collapse of fishing stocks is down to greed and blind luck. When the coin lands heads, you get the Atlantic cod fishery collapse, where all the fishermen were insisting that the existing regulations were already onerous enough, and then one day there was no more cod.
Global warming is playing out in AK in a way only as observable down south with perhaps the dwindling skiing and the colo river. Wrapping that all up into how you phrased it is pretty darn close to the ol “greedy undisciplined Native” trope.
But sure, blame the tribes, and make sure it’s done extra strongly on the next sport fishing trip in Ak that can’t offer Kings as you’ll be seen as very aware of the issues by your guide.
I've lived next to two different reservations in WA state and I can confirm the fantastic equipment.
Also, on a random tour of the Leavenworth fish hatchery, we stumbled upon a fishery-management-sanctioned culling of "excess" fish at the Leavenworth fish hatchery into large blue food grade containers as part of tribes "share".
The whole story of where the fish are going is useful, even if it contradicts your preconceptions.
If the worst thing you can say to prove a point is “they have fantastic equipment,” well arguably they could be owed some good equipment in exchange for the total culture, socioeconomic collapse. And fantastic equipment tends to produce less waste.
That’s also ignoring we’re talking salmon run numbers and you’re talking excess at the hatchery. There’s no issues at the hatchery, they can sudo user their way into more fish at that stage. What’s at obvious issue is what happens to the fish when they’re out there and growing and then coming back to spawn.
Also interesting how you can laser in on the natives and ignore… all of the dams in WA, Or, Cali and their documented 50 yr+ impact on west coast salmon.
Like I said, have lived next to rezs myself. The coded language from WA, Idaho, MT, WY non-natives tends to be anything but coded.
Yes, the river system of about 10 others that the US successfully dammed up in the hot passion of 1950’s engineering culture run wild and successfully more or less ended the salmon runs south of British Columbia?
Yes, definitely the fishing patterns from tribes, not the 10-15 concrete dams.
Headline reads like these salmon are being killed by science.
Has the headline been changed since you commented?
The headline on HN at the moment is "As Alaska's salmon plummet, scientists home in on the killer". The headline on the article itself is "As salmon in Alaska plummet, scientists home in on a killer". I don't see any way to read those as suggesting science is killed the salmon.
Yes - the submission title used to be
seemingly a goofy copy-paste thing.I was intrigued because I genuinely thought that’s what it said.
Yeah this should seriously be re-titled lmao
It's not? Industrialization, pollution, and climate change are downstream effects of science.
They're all being killed by the big bang.
If you continue just a little bit, when you get to the source, it should make things more clear. Considering the source is important, as is reading the article!
hungmung's comment is alluding to the misleading syntax of the submission title
Oh.My.Gosh. "Ich". Have had a home aquarium guy forever. Got a few Ich infestations (always after introducing new, store-bought fish). Although not the same strain (tropical usually is Ichthyophthirius Multifiliis). Sounds pretty much like the same infection progression. Me, and every other tropical aquarium enthusiast, HATES Ich. Now doubly so given a favorable opinion of wild salmon.
What happens when you get Ich in an aquarium: While tendrils start to show up then lengthen on your fish. You try a few treatments, but by the time you see it it cannot be stopped easily. When your fish are covered by pretty long white "shite" strands, they start to die. Worse than any horror film you might have seen. Man do I hate Ich.
I've been fortunate enough to never encounter it with my fish, but it's all over forums and subreddits related to aquaria. Fish get it constantly. If you aren't checking them daily it seems fairly easy to get an infestation that's beyond treatment. I can't imagine. I actually care for my fish quite a bit, and would hate to see them wiped out like that. Each tank I have is a sort of sanctuary, a little ecosystem to steward.
Have "been" a home... Sorry for the typo.
Comments are editable for two hours. :)
Ironically, this year has been particularly good for salmon fishing in south-central Alaska, where the large majority of the population lives. But who knows for how long.
I wonder if the ones that make it to spawn had something in their genes to help them survive the parasites and warmer temperatures. Hopefully they do, and the overall population adapts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthyophonus
https://archive.ph/2025.08.19-010419/https://www.science.org...
"Chinook in the Yukon River appear to be particularly vulnerable to a common parasite—and warming waters may be abetting the infection"
Different stories, same culprit everytime.
It will frustrate me until the day I die the sheer NUMBER of problems directly attributable to human-caused climate change and how every government damn near world-wide simply refuses to do anything.
We know the fucking problem, we know the fucking solution, and we simply don't because the rich people would lose a bit of money and they control everything.
> we simply don't because the rich people would lose a bit of money and they control everything.
This is at best an oversimplification, and at worse another convenient lie we tell ourselves because then we ("the never rich enough!") can feel righteous anger about nothing happening, while not being responsible for it.
Years ago, the government elites of France decided that global warming was a serious problem and they should cut down on fossil fuel usage. And then what happens? Nationwide violent protests, because the one thing "we the people" hate more than global warming is higher gas prices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests
Years ago the French elites supposedly decided to so solve the global warming problem by suddenly putting a big tax on gasoline, which hit rural France hardest, and in a quick manner. I don't even see it as sincere from the beginning, I think they made to seem like they were doing something so they could seem to do it differently. Mélenchon could implemented the needed measures without any backlash - except from the bourgeoisie.
> Years ago, the government elites of France decided that global warming was a serious problem and they should cut down on fossil fuel usage. And then what happens? Nationwide violent protests, because the one thing "we the people" hate more than global warming is higher gas prices.
This is at best an oversimplification, and frankly, it feels like a pretty deliberate one.
Yes, the Yellow Vest protests began because of a proposed fuel tax by Emanuel Macron, which was set to directly impact lower income/rural voters. Which it would, because wealthier people in metro areas don't drive nearly as much. The movement evolved over time to incorporate many rural vs. city conflicts, things like lack of government services in non-populous areas, low minimum wages, and overall income inequality and all the social ills that follow it.
People weren't upset that gas was getting more expensive: they were upset that it was becoming unaffordable in areas in which buying it is not optional. You simply cannot live in the rural areas of any western country without a car. Period. Paragraph. The infrastructure demands a vehicle or you cannot get around. So when people are already struggling and ostensibly green-minded ideas like gas taxes are proposed, with no alternatives for them besides driving: yes, they get pissed off.
Measures like these have been protested far and wide because of things exactly like this, because governments keep trying to offset the costs of green policy on working class voters who are already struggling, because their donors are the wealthy elites who don't want to pay for it despite being eminently able to. And worse still these results are then used to say "see, people don't REALLY want to save the planet" when it's quite bluntly obvious, to me anyway, that what people don't want to do is..... starve.
Wouldn't it still be a problem if it wasn't human-caused?
The two big differences are 1) the rate of change (a huge amount higher than most planetary systems) and 2) that we have a large and growing population dependent on the many services our planet provides at a stable temperature. Of course, completely neglecting the rest of the natural world.
Sure, but that's not what's happening.
Warming and cooling would and will happen with people or without people -that's fact. The issue that many people have is about "when" it's happening. It upsets those that it's happening now as induced by people's activities and not by natural cycles or natural causes (eruptions, new species producing/emitting GHGs, etc.)
It is human caused. It simply is. We have decades of research all saying the exact same thing, some of which was funded directly by the energy industry trying desperately to prove it's not.
It is. This is not a debate anymore, if you disagree, you either don't understand or don't want to understand and neither of those is my or anyone else's problem to solve. You're wrong.
Why is it important to you what the cause is? Don't you think it is important to do something about it even if it wasn't human-caused? Should we only solve problems that we cause?
It looks like you have a few similarly confused commenters who think this is relevant to addressing the problem. It's a mystery why you want to derail the discussion to a debate about the cause rather than how to fix it. Maybe you're trying to say that understanding the cause is relevant to the solution, but if you are, you need to say it a lot more clearly.
> Why is it important to you what the cause is?
Because trapping us in this endless debate of what the "real" cause is has been the go-to strategy for the oil and gas industry, where no matter how many times it is bloody proven, they hem and haw and say "well we need more evidence" but they aren't like, not selling gasoline anymore until we know it's safe are they? They just keep doing exactly what we're pretty damned sure is killing the planet, while endlessly debating whether it is or not.
The thing about human-caused things is humans can choose to stop doing the causal things.
The set of potential solutions would be quite different if the cause wasn't humans. Might even be impossible.
But we have quite a lot of evidence that we have been affecting the climate pretty substantially since the beginning of industrialization and increasingly so since, so it makes sense to work on the human causes.
I share your frustration, but I think you're blaming the wrong group. The median voter simply does not care about climate change, and is not willing to shoulder any of the short-term costs necessary to address it. They'd rather have cheap gas for their car, not have to look at fields of solar panels, and signal their opposition to "wokeness".
> They'd rather have cheap gas for their car, not have to look at fields of solar panels, and signal their opposition to "wokeness".
None of that has to change to solve climate change, so that's good news for those voters. If you think those changes are necessary, you are being lied to.
The bad news for them is that not solving climate change will make their gas, food, housing, and healthcare prices skyrocket. The choice for most voters is like deciding whether to spend $0 now, or $10,000 later. Choose wisely...
The culture war bullshit you're referencing is a propaganda effort on the part of corporate media to manufacture outrage around policies their funding organizations and figures disagree with, namely the promotion of clean energy and weaning us off fossil fuels and cars more generally.
You aren't wrong but that block of ill-informed voters didn't simply manifest from the ether. It was created for a purpose and it's working.
Wait, we know the solution? What is it?
Stop burning fossil fuels, build infrastructure to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Extract the minimum number of fossil fuels necessary to serve non-fuel uses.
The solution is not easy. But it is known.
> The solution is not easy. But it is known.
It's definitely not easy, but it's not even particularly hard, either. The solutions are there and ready to go. Everything we need to do to solve it has been done before[1]. We have done and continue to do many more difficult things than solve climate change.
The only difference between the hard things we are doing, and solving climate change, is the latter would make the ludicrously-wealthy very slightly less wealthy, instead of very slightly more. That's it. That's the whole debate. That's what we're burning the planet for.
[1] With the exception of carbon capture, which is only necessary now because we wasted so long doing nothing.
But would that reverse our current problems?
I occasionaly imagine a satire skit where "The great mistery of the dissapearing Salmon" episode is done on fishing boat decks, fish plants and the super market fresh and canned fish sections, montyesk AMAZMENT! and OUTRAGE!, whilst the whole industrial mining operation goes on around them
If you’re implying that fishing is the main culprit, I’d invite you to do some further reading. These fisheries are carefully managed to ensure that salmon are able to spawn. Granted, there is the existence of trawling boats which do cause real harm. Yet, almost all commercial fishermen detest the practice of bottom trawling due to the harm it causes.
41 millions pounds of sockeye were caught in Bristol Bay this season. I was up there working on a boat myself. Yet, the rivers were still thick with sockeye at the end of the season. It is not a free-for-all where people are allowed to catch fish in any manner they want, the rules and regulations are there to ensure that fishing is not impacting the long-term viability of these runs.
Well the detesting trawling angle is valid but similar to how you could detect coal mining in West Virginia the mountains/sea bottom is gone either way.
I believe the single most important policy change for fishiers would be to end trawling, second being sort out international regs.
Both very hard, both bad news for kings. But at some point people are going to see the outcomes in their grocery stores and maybe that’ll start change.
The fisheries are carefully managed to keep the fishermen happy.
Whether or not that results in collapse of fishing stocks is down to greed and blind luck. When the coin lands heads, you get the Atlantic cod fishery collapse, where all the fishermen were insisting that the existing regulations were already onerous enough, and then one day there was no more cod.
The killer is as always side effects and direct effects of global warming. Meaning humans are the killer.
[flagged]
Wait until you find out about Native American's unrestricted fishing rights and their use of modern commercial fishing ships and equipment.
Rich comment, but a an old one.
Global warming is playing out in AK in a way only as observable down south with perhaps the dwindling skiing and the colo river. Wrapping that all up into how you phrased it is pretty darn close to the ol “greedy undisciplined Native” trope.
But sure, blame the tribes, and make sure it’s done extra strongly on the next sport fishing trip in Ak that can’t offer Kings as you’ll be seen as very aware of the issues by your guide.
What if it's rich, because it's true.
I've lived next to two different reservations in WA state and I can confirm the fantastic equipment.
Also, on a random tour of the Leavenworth fish hatchery, we stumbled upon a fishery-management-sanctioned culling of "excess" fish at the Leavenworth fish hatchery into large blue food grade containers as part of tribes "share".
The whole story of where the fish are going is useful, even if it contradicts your preconceptions.
Have lived next to 2-3x reservations myself.
If the worst thing you can say to prove a point is “they have fantastic equipment,” well arguably they could be owed some good equipment in exchange for the total culture, socioeconomic collapse. And fantastic equipment tends to produce less waste.
That’s also ignoring we’re talking salmon run numbers and you’re talking excess at the hatchery. There’s no issues at the hatchery, they can sudo user their way into more fish at that stage. What’s at obvious issue is what happens to the fish when they’re out there and growing and then coming back to spawn.
Also interesting how you can laser in on the natives and ignore… all of the dams in WA, Or, Cali and their documented 50 yr+ impact on west coast salmon.
Like I said, have lived next to rezs myself. The coded language from WA, Idaho, MT, WY non-natives tends to be anything but coded.
>arguably they could be owed some good equipment
No
>The coded language
There isn't any coded language here. PNW Indian tribes should not be given extraordinary fishing rights.
True on the Columbia river too
Yes, the river system of about 10 others that the US successfully dammed up in the hot passion of 1950’s engineering culture run wild and successfully more or less ended the salmon runs south of British Columbia?
Yes, definitely the fishing patterns from tribes, not the 10-15 concrete dams.
Both things can be true
I cannot stand withholding headlines. single-celled fish parasite called Ichthyophonus
Especially on paywalled content.
The headline clearly says that 'Science' is the culprit.
without reading the article it must be humans.
Or the "global warming left the environment more hospitable to some horrible parasite/disease".
you missed the gory parasite details
Root cause is still humans. Parasite is thriving because of warming waters, caused by anthropogenic climate change.