A Swiss fisher reeled in a surprise on Sunday. The Swiss environment ministry confirmed Wednesday that the hobby fisher had caught the first salmon seen in Basel for half a century. A fish using one of the fish ladders in the eastern French town of Gambsheim. Fish ladders are one of many measures intended to lure salmon back into the formerly polluted Rhine River. A amateur fisherman in Switzerland made the catch of a lifetime last Sunday when he reeled in the first salmon seen in Basel in the last half a century. Experts hail the fish as a sign that efforts to help salmon return to Basel are working and that the species may soon find its way back to the landlocked country in larger numbers. "It's crazy, I can still hardly believe it," Thomas Wanner, 39, told the local Basler Zeitung. On Wednesday, Switzerland's Environment Ministry confirmed to the press that the 36-inch (91-centimeter) fish was indeed a salmon, based on a photo Wanner took of the fish with his mobile phone before releasing it back into the Birs River near where it flows into the Rhine. The size of the fish indicates that it travelled all the way down the Rhine to the open sea before returning upstream to spawn, Erich Staub, an official with the Environment Ministry, told the Associated Press. The round-trip journey is roughly 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) through Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands.
A Swiss fisher reeled in a surprise on Sunday. The Swiss environment ministry confirmed Wednesday that the hobby fisher had caught the first salmon seen in Basel for half a century.
A fish using one of the fish ladders in the eastern French town of Gambsheim. Fish ladders are one of many measures intended to lure salmon back into the formerly polluted Rhine River. A amateur fisherman in Switzerland made the catch of a lifetime last Sunday when he reeled in the first salmon seen in Basel in the last half a century. Experts hail the fish as a sign that efforts to help salmon return to Basel are working and that the species may soon find its way back to the landlocked country in larger numbers.
"It's crazy, I can still hardly believe it," Thomas Wanner, 39, told the local Basler Zeitung. On Wednesday, Switzerland's Environment Ministry confirmed to the press that the 36-inch (91-centimeter) fish was indeed a salmon, based on a photo Wanner took of the fish with his mobile phone before releasing it back into the Birs River near where it flows into the Rhine.
The size of the fish indicates that it travelled all the way down the Rhine to the open sea before returning upstream to spawn, Erich Staub, an official with the Environment Ministry, told the Associated Press. The round-trip journey is roughly 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) through Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands.
