Montpelier — Biologists are trying to determine whether a warm, dry fall is responsible for a drop in the number of landlocked Atlantic salmon that swam up a Lake Champlain tributary in Vermont to spawn this fall or if there could be other reasons behind a five-year decline.
FILE – In this Aug. 29, 2017 file photo, fisheries experts move a landlocked Atlantic salmon caught by net in the Huntington River into a bucket in Huntington, Vt. Statistics kept by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that 42 salmon were trapped in fall 2018, at the Winooski River fish passage where technicians carried them around the dam and released them upstream so they could continue to their spawning grounds. That number compares to 84 trapped in the Lake Champlain tributary in 2017, and a high of 189 in 2011. The 2018 figure was the lowest since 2009. (AP Photo/Wilson Ring, File)
