Salmon migration can make trees grow thirty percent faster
Each year, millions of fish act as a biological delivery service, carrying massive quantities of deep-sea nitrogen into forest soils that were once starved of nutrients.
When a grizzly bear drags a salmon into the woods of the Pacific Northwest, it is doing more than just eating. It is acting as a courier for nitrogen and phosphorus that the fish spent years collecting in the open ocean. Because salmon are anadromous—meaning they live in saltwater but return to freshwater to spawn—they act as a massive nutrient pump, moving life-sustaining minerals against the flow of gravity and water. In some river systems, these fish provide up to twenty-five percent of the nitrogen found in the local foliage, essentially fertilizing the wilderness from the inside out.