NATURE: Salmon: Running the Gauntlet

Investigate the parallel stories of collapsing Pacific salmon populations and how biologists and engineers have become instruments in audacious experiments to replicate every stage of the fish’s life cycle in NATURE Salmon: Running the Gauntlet, airing Wednesday, May 23, 2012 at 8 p.m. on WXXI-TV (DT21.1/cable 11 and 1011). Each desperate effort to save salmon has involved replacing their natural cycle of reproduction and death with a radically manipulated life history. Our once great runs of salmon are now conceived in laboratories, raised in tanks, driven in trucks and farmed in pens. NATURE goes beyond the ongoing debate over how to save an endangered species to expose a wildly creative, hopelessly complex and stunningly expensive approach to managing salmon.