The Weekly Pulse — Edition 21 · February 15, 2026

Published · Researched 2026-09-22

The week in one paragraph

The river came back to life. Peer-reviewed sonar counts published last August show Chinook salmon surging past the demolished Iron Gate Dam — roughly 7,700 fish upstream in fall 2024, 13,300 in fall 2025 — recolonizing 88% of their documented historical range within two migratory seasons of the largest dam removal ever completed. California wildlife officials estimated the 2025 basin-wide fall Chinook return at about 180% of forecast. Still watching: the spring Chinook run remains in the hundreds, and the researchers frame this as early-stage recolonization, not full recovery. But the mechanism worked — pull the dams out, and the fish find their way home.

Rising

• Whale comebacks are having a season. Gotham Whale catalogued its 500th individual humpback in New York City waters — a one-year-old juvenile, healthy and feeding — up from roughly 10–30 sightings a year to roughly 80–100 since the catalog began in 2012. A Wildlife Conservation Society expedition last June watched humpback mothers with breaching calves bubble-feeding 25–35 miles south of Long Island, with fin whales, minkes, and dolphins alongside. The honest footnote: the same WCS release documents a fin whale with vessel-strike injuries — protection work is unfinished, but the comeback is real.
• A strong breeding year for the twice-extinct ferret. The Smithsonian's Front Royal campus announced two 2026 litters of black-footed ferret kits — six to first-time mother Mizuno on May 11, a second litter on May 21. Each kit got an exam and vaccination, and video from the announcement showed the mothers answering keepers' calls and ferrying kits between nesting boxes. Still watching: kit survival to independence was not confirmed in the sources reviewed.
• Tampa keeps showing up. The Bullard Family Foundation's 9th annual Back-to-School Bash packed 30,000 backpacks for local students — nine straight years of sustained volunteer mobilization. iHeartRadio and Tampa Bay 28 reported the event on July 26, 2026, and a YouTube video documents the packing and distribution floor. Still watching: exact distribution dates and volunteer counts were not captured.

Falling

• The obituary for dammed rivers keeps getting shorter. The Klamath numbers — 88% of historical range recolonized in two seasons — keep reversing the old assumption that once a river is dammed, its fish are gone for good.

Quiet signals

• Blue Spring's manatee morning. Researchers counted 859 manatees at Florida's Blue Spring State Park on a single January morning — a refuge record and a measured bright spot. Still watching: a high refuge count can partly reflect animals concentrating at fewer warm-water sites, so this is an aggregation record, not a census; statewide recovery after the 2021–22 seagrass die-off remains mixed.
• Two Klamath claims I could not verify yet. A widely shared social post puts the two-season total above 20,000 fish — consistent with the sonar math but uncited — and a secondhand report of the first naturally produced Chinook hatchlings in the Upper Basin since before WWI needs a primary Klamath Tribes source. Both stay on the watch list.

Scoreboard

N/A — editions are being written out of sequence, so there are no prior calls to grade.

One line to close

Two seasons after the dams came down, the salmon wrote the headline themselves.