Every year, despite having to swim around 80 kilometers against the current, Atlantic salmon manage to reach the dam at the Navarrenx hydroelectric station in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques region. To swim up the Gave d'Oloron and reproduce, the migrants pass through a "fish pass," where a camera monitors their passage. In 2023 and 2024, 520 and 715 specimens were counted, far from the 1,680 adults observed per year, on average. Since the beginning of the counts, such a record had never been observed.

Faced with declining populations, an early suspension of Atlantic salmon fishing was decided by the authorities in 2024. It will be extended to 2025. Ordered in November 2024 by the Pau administrative court, following a request from the Association Défense des Milieux Aquatiques (Association for the Defense of Aquatic Environments), to take the "necessary" measures to ensure that professional fishing in the Adour basin "does not undermine salmon conservation objectives," the authorities are preparing several prefectural decrees. The documents should lead to "a ban on fishing for the whole year," the prefecture told Le Monde. The current plan is to make fishing conditional on compliance with the species' conservation limit, in other words, a minimum number of spawners.

The next measure in the Adour will add to the fishing bans already signed mid-January for rivers in the Seine-Normandy basin, and end December 2024 for those in Brittany. These are applicable in 2025 to both professional and recreational fishermen and include maritime areas. These basins, which along with the Adour are home to France's largest Atlantic salmon populations, are facing similar declines in river numbers.

A decline observed 'everywhere'

"On a Normandy scale, in the mid-2010-2020s, we were at around 1,000 adult salmon; by 2023 and 2024, we've fallen to 234 and 310 spawners respectively," said Florian Deshayes, director of Seine-Normandie Migrateurs, an observatory tasked by the fishing federation with monitoring populations. His counterparts in Brittany report a "critical level that can no longer ensure a sufficient number of spawners" and a halving of the estimated number of juveniles. These findings have also been observed in places that have been off-limits to fishing for decades, such as the Loire basin.

You have 61.54% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.