The Ontario government has launched a plan to reintroduce Atlantic salmon to Lake Ontario, a species that got wiped out more than a century ago.

An excerpt from the globeandmail.com story:

Over the past 20 years, the province has added a number of the fish to the lake as part of a restoration plan, and over the next year about 400,000 Atlantic salmon will be released into three Lake Ontario watersheds, David Orazietta, the parliamentary assistant to Minister of Natural Resources David Ramsay, told a news conference.

"Atlantic salmon were an important part of the lake's original fish community and a valued resource for first nations people and early settlers in the area.

"Habitat loss doomed the Atlantic salmon, and they disappeared from the lake in the late 1800s," Mr. Orazietta said.

Early efforts to restore the species failed, largely because the streams necessary for spawning and rearing young fish, which stay in the rivers for two to three years before moving into the lake, were severely degraded, according to information on the project.

But ministry research has found that the watersheds have improved enough to support the species, and three watersheds -- the Credit River, Duffins Creek and Cobourg Creek -- were selected for the release.

The salmon are a strain selected from the LaHave River in Nova Scotia and the ministry, which will release millions of young salmon during the next five years, is testing two other strains for evaluation in Lake Ontario.

The fish are predators and the ministry expects that they will live on alewives and rainbow smelt. If the release is successful, they will join rainbow and brown trout and coho and chinook salmon as important sport-fish species in the lake. ...

Mark Mattson, president of the environmental group Lake Ontario Waterkeeper, said he welcomes the private-sector donations to restore the fish, but he said the public should be cautious about the project.

"It's a nice thing to do, but it doesn't mean addressing the real problems or the enormity of the problem on Lake Ontario that we are currently facing, and in some ways, it gets us around them," Mr. Mattson said.

"It makes people think we are doing something positive and worthwhile and the government is involved in restoring the lake, but restoration is a big word. This isn't restoration to us. . . .

"Restoration is going and tackling and dealing with the big issues of the rivers that we've lost, the ones that are unhealthy and unable to host these fish."

There's a website: bringbackthesalmon.ca.