No offense, but that opinion is clearly uneducated or misinformed; the sheer numbers that die en route from genetic inferiority completely dwarf the combined numbers of those taken by predators along the way — including humans. Furthermore, fishing for salmon during their spawning season is as much a test of an angler’s skill as it is about their wilderness survival fluency. Every single predator in that biome is out for salmon if they can get it, and many of them give little to no fucks at all about disemboweling the competition — including humans. Couple that with the fact that the male salmon have a singular, monosyllabic purpose and it’s mostly the females that are taking in food at any opportunity (unless you fashion a bait ball of salmon eggs for the males to instinctively destroy as a threat), and you’ve got yourself one helluva challenge on several fronts.