I'm going to step out on a limb and say YES!
In January 2006 there was a volcanic eruption (Mt. Augustine in AK) which resulted in a huge amount of volcanic ash being sent into the atmosphere. I remember this very clearly since I was working at YVR and we had a large spike in aircraft landing there as the airport in Anchorage was closed due to the ash clouds. This went on for some time however before Anchorage reopened to air traffic. It was a popular theory in 2010 that the size of the Sockeye return was partly attributed to the eruption 4 years prior. The theory goes that volcanic ash provides essential nutrition or contributes to the food chain for zooplankton, phytoplankton, plankton, krill, etc. If this is true, then the bottom portion of the food chain was getting a massive dose of nutrients required for their their existence. It was thought that the abundance of lower food chain food was geographically in the right place at the right time for the Fraser sockeye in their developmental years.
Anyways, I'm just some guy on the internet, and I love a good storey as much as the next guy. I don't know of any papers that were conclusively able to link these two phenomena together, but the topic of seeding the ocean with volcanic ash has been repeated in the news. The Haida Salmon Research Corporation contracted a company to conduct some very controversial seeding experiments but the results do not appear to be very clear either.
Have a read for yourself.
http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/elist/eListRead/impact_of_last_years_rouge_ocean_fertilization_experiment_still_unclear/Lots of interesting material to read but it might leave ones head spinning, but if the Pavlof volcano continues to spew ash into the atmosphere for a few weeks, we should know by 2020 if a possible connection truly exists.
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Topic: Fishing 2020 (Read 5027 times)