Atlantic salmon have returned to France's Seine River with gusto, after disappearing for the past hundred years. This year has seen hundreds of these salmon swimming past the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame cathedral, researchers told AFP. It is remarkable that salmon and other species, which had previously been chased away by dams and pollution, are now popping up again without any human effort to bring them back. "There are more and more fish swimming up the Seine," said Bernard Breton, a top official at France's National Federation for Fishing.
"This year the numbers have exceeded anything we could have imagined: I would not be surprised if we had passed the 1,000 mark," he told AFP over the phone.
Note EU-Digest: Pollution controls are showing results. In the mid-1990s, "between 300 and 500 tons (600,000 - one-million pounds) of fish died in the Seine up river from Paris every year because of pollution," said Breton. Over the last 15 years, massive efforts, including a new water purification plant, have effectively cleansed the river of post of its pollutants.
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