Stephen Hume
Vancouver Sun
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Five years ago, a senior fisheries biologist in Galway, Ireland, warned what lay ahead for British Columbia's wild salmon: Infestations of sea lice around fish farms followed by a collapse of wild stocks wherever baby salmon migrated through concentrations of the parasites.
Dr. Greg Forde was not a radical environmentalist, as the aquaculture industry routinely characterizes critics. He worked for Ireland's western regional fisheries board, struggling to cope with a collapse of wild stocks in a sea lice-infestation that emerged after fish farms came to that coast.
More than stocks collapsed. The sport fishing industry, a major revenue producer there -- as in B.C. -- was rocked to its foundations as game fish dwindled.
"The awful thing is about lessons not learned," Forde told me back then. "It's all déjà vu. It's the most frustrating thing to hear what's happened here has now happened in B.C."
His colleague, Seamus Hartigan, in charge of managing the Galway River salmon fishery, echoed Forde's sentiments. "It happened in Norway for years and we didn't pay any attention," Hartigan said. "It's happened in Ireland and you [in B.C.] are not paying attention. Do you want to learn by other people's mistakes or do you want to learn by your own mistakes?
"Norway had some of the best rivers in the world for the production of massive salmon -- they are just gone," Hartigan said. "Why couldn't we learn from that? Why can't you learn from us? Is the B.C. government willing to make a place in the scheme of things for indigenous species?"
The five-year-old question is poignant considering the gloomy forecast for the fate of pink salmon on the province's mid-coast in a new study reported last week by Scott Simpson. It argues that if sea lice infestations associated with fish farms on migration routes continue, pink salmon stocks on the mid-coast can be expected to collapse into localized extinctions.
Sounds like a 2007 assessment in Ireland which warns that if prized sea trout stocks are not to be lost, "the elimination of sea lice on and in the vicinity of marine salmon farms must be a constant priority."
The B.C. study, published in the journal Science, adds to Scottish research which found sea lice from fish farms killed up to 50 per cent of migrating smolts and it strengthens the argument that sea lice propagated in net pens here kill baby pinks the same way.
A paper published last year in the North American Journal of Fisheries Management found that dying pink salmon smolts carried twice the load of blood-sucking sea lice as healthy fish.
The self-interested aquaculture industry dismisses this research as biased. The federal department of fisheries and oceans, mandated to protect wild stocks while promoting aquaculture, protests that the studies "overstate" risks. Our provincial government, paralyzed by ideology, ignores the problem even as its own legislature committee on sustainable aquaculture advises otherwise.
Let's be clear. If the extinctions forecast by this new study take place as predicted, it will be an ecological catastrophe for the mid-coast. Pink runs sustain bears, killer whales, eagles, seals, sea lions and trout. Their decaying bodies fertilize riparian forests and maintain the nutrient levels for aquatic plants, insects, amphibians and fish in rivers.
If the pinks go, expect the chum, coho and chinook to follow, perhaps sooner than you think. Then the bears. Then the fishing lodges.
Even as plans ramp up for industrial gravel removal from the lower Fraser, preliminary stock assessments for salmon returns in 2008 suggest a dismal year for dwindling runs already ravaged by neglect, mismanagement and loss of spawning and rearing habitat.
Eight of 14 sockeye runs to the Fraser watershed are forecast to reach less than target escapement and are declining, some rapidly. Out of 12 chinook runs to the Fraser or Georgia Strait, nine fall in this category. All four such coho runs are listed as "of concern."
So here's the question for readers: Will B.C. be a better place without wild salmon?
If you think not, you'd better get organized, act like citizens in a democracy and prepare to hold politically accountable those who dither, deny and do nothing despite the warnings.shume@islandnet.com© The Vancouver Sun 2007
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Topic: B.C. wild salmon in danger of extinction (Read 1551 times)