Cover Caption

• Published in: Conservation Letters
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley 2012
• Subjects: Nature and Landscape Conservation; Ecology; Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics; Fraser River; Pacific; Sockeye; Pink salmon
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1755-263x.2012.00271.x; https://api.wiley.com/onlinelibrary/tdm/v1/articles/10.1111%2Fj.1755-263X.2012.00271.x; http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1111/j.1755-263X.2012.00271.x/fullpdf

Cover description : Sockeye salmon returning to spawn in the Adams River, a tributary of the Fraser River watershed in British Columbia. For years scientists have struggled to understand what factors have been responsible for declining survival in many Fraser River sockeye salmon populations beginning in the early 1990s. In this issue, Connors et al. shed light on this mystery by simultaneously considering evidence related to multiple possible explanations for the declines in Fraser sockeye populations (pages 304–312). The researchers found that increasing numbers of pink salmon across the North Pacific Ocean appear to be leading ‐ directly or indirectly ‐ to increasing competition for food with Fraser sockeye salmon, especially when the juvenile sockeye salmon first migrate past large numbers of farmed salmon. These findings suggest that the effect of exposure to farmed salmon may be mediated by the state of the ecosystem, highlighting the danger of focusing only on a single factor when trying to understand declines in salmon populations. This photo was taken by Conor McCracken ( http://www.cdmimages.com ) in the Adams River in the fall of 2010. The over‐under image was shot by holding the camera half under and half out of the water.