--Chad Love

The state of Lousiana is beginning the long process of rebuilding fish stocks in the Pearl River, which suffered a massive fish kill earlier this year after a paper mill's illegal discharge.  

From this story in the St. Tammany News: 

Wednesday afternoon, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries started one step in the long process of rehabilitating the ecosystem of the Pearl River. The LDWF released 30,000 channel catfish and 24,000 bluegill fingerlings into the river at the Highway 59 Boat Launch in Pearl River, in an effort to boost the fish population back to its pre-August levels.

Over 500,000 fish in the river died from oxygen depletion in both St. Tammany and Washington parishes in August, after the Temple-Inland paper plant in Bogalusa released “black ink,” a combination of burnt wood pulp and chemicals in quantities that far exceeded levels set by the Department of Environmental Quality. Some of the fish that died were the rare Gulf sturgeon, which is on the federal endangered species list. Also killed were trout, eels, and mussels.  

--Chad Love

A deadly virus that has decimated commercial salmon farms has now shown up in wild salmon in the Pacific northwest.

From this story in the New York Times:

A lethal and highly contagious marine virus has been detected for the first time in wild salmon in the Pacific Northwest, researchers in British Columbia said on Monday, stirring concern that it could spread there, as it has in Chile, Scotland and elsewhere. Farms hit by the virus, infectious salmon anemia, have lost 70 percent or more of their fish in recent decades. But until now, the virus, which does not affect humans, had never been confirmed on the West Coast of North America.