From todays Surrey Leader paper
Report slams overfishing on the Fraser
By Jeff Nagel
Jun 13 2007
Last year's run of Fraser River sockeye salmon was seriously overfished because managers relied too much on often faulty pre-season forecasts, according to a new analysis.
The report, prepared for the Watershed Watch Salmon Society, concludes 1.1 million too many returning summer-run salmon were caught mainly by a commercial fleet eager to net its first profitable sockeye harvest in several years.
"More caution should have been taken during the season," the report says.
Enough fry hatched in 2002 and went out to sea to generate a bumper crop of 17.4 million returning salmon in 2006. But the bulk of the run consisted of sockeye that originated from one tributary -- the Quesnel River -- and biologists who saw the juvenile fish before they left the river worried they would be easy pickings for predators at sea.
"They were very small and there were concerns about their ocean survival rates being very low," said Watershed Watch executive director Craig Orr. "We did know this information before, but we still went with these fairly high predictions."
Ultimately, around 8.7 million sockeye are thought to have returned and about 3.4 million of them actually made it back up river to spawn.
Orr presented the report Monday at an SFU conference on the Fraser River salmon fishery.
He said more caution is needed this year by the international Pacific Salmon Commission, which assesses incoming data, and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
Although pre-season forecasts are "notoriously unreliable" they are treated as reliable, Orr said, and that fuels the fishing industry's expectations and pressure on managers.
The challenge is little current information is known when sockeye start to arrive in nearby ocean waters -- when commercial boats want to catch them. Only after they have passed and headed up river do counts and estimates improve.
Bert Ionson, DFO's regional resource manager for salmon, agrees too many sockeye were likely caught last year, but says there was no way to know that at the time.
Initial test catches showed large numbers of sockeye incoming and commercial fishermen were accusing managers of being too slow in giving them the green light.
Ionson said enough spawners returned to most tributaries to meet conservation goals.
"We've got some systems where we would have liked to have seen a lot more fish," he said. We're anticipating there won't be a long-term impact as a result of that."
Climate change is expected to put salmon under increasingly greater stress in the years ahead.
Diminishing glaciers and snow packs are expected to result in warmer B.C. rivers with reduced flows. That combined with warming ocean temperatures will add to the thermal stress on salmon when water isn't cold enough.
DFO's pre-season forecast predicts a total return of about six million sockeye this summer. Ionson said it appears an east coast court ruling won't interfere with DFO's ability to count incoming salmon this year.
The Larocque decision limits the department's ability to use the sale of fish from test fisheries to offset the cost of counting operations.
"The test fishery is going ahead," he said, adding DFO has been given extra money to pay the higher cost of counting without the offset from sales.
Some other test fisheries for other species or other areas are being curtailed because not enough money is available.
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