World Fish Migration Day

Next May 21, 2022, global attention will be celebrated on opening rivers and restoring migratory fish populations . Together, we've created a massive movement that connects hundreds of thousands of people around the world with the same importance: protecting rivers and fish. ” The more people become aware of the enormous challenges that fish face, to survive in the modern world, the more opportunities the fish have to lend them a helping hand.

Migratory fish are fish that swim from fresh to salt water and vice versa. These fish suffer greatly from the fragmentation of water systems. With the results of the research, we can take better measures so that the fish swim from one water to another without damage.

And there are fish that migrate. This is less noticeable because it takes place under the glistening water surface. There are many species of fish that migrate; you could call them migratory fish by analogy with the term migratory birds. A well-known migratory fish is the eel, which, in order to reproduce, has to swim all the way from Volendam to the Sargasso Sea and then swims all the way back as a small glass nematode. But in addition to eels, three-thorned sticklebacks, sea and river pricks, salmon, sturgeons, elves and fints, sea trout, muscles and wood are among the migratory fish.

Of these, there are two categories. You have species that live in the sea as adults and look for fresh water to reproduce, the so-called anadromous fish. On the other hand, the catadromous fish: they live in fresh water and migrate to the sea for reproduction — the eel mentioned is an example of this. There are also freshwater fish that migrate, such as pike and perch. They look for narrower streams from wider water with sufficient shelter to spawn and deposit eggs.
Hell of a job to express your pulling behavior

But whatever category you belong to as a fish, it's a hell of a job these days to be able to express your pulling behavior. Man makes life miserable for migratory fish with dams and locks for navigability, water mills in streams (once there were thousands of water mills throughout Europe), dams, and to top it all off the Afsluitdijk and the Delta Works. In the end, in the Netherlands, only the Nieuwe Waterweg and the Westerschelde remained as openings through which migratory fish could enter, for the rest they were in front of a closed door.