Climate change, habitat destruction cause fish stocks to plummet: expert
Miro Cernetig
Vancouver Sun
Monday, May 12, 2008
Salmon don't hit the headlines as often out here on the West Coast as they did in the 1980s and '90s, when they were being overfished.
They ought to again, though, given what's now happening out in the Pacific Ocean and this region's rivers.
Chances are you probably haven't heard about it yet, but we're in another salmon crisis, one that's devastating the coast from California all the way up to Vancouver -- and beyond.
The fish simply aren't swimming back in the hoped-for numbers and the shortages are historic.
For the first time in 150 years, California and Oregon shut down the $300-million chinook salmon fishery. Washington state has all but followed suit. U.S. fishermen are now seeking disaster relief.
Off our own shores, things aren't much better. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans has told 94 native bands that they will have to ration their catch of Fraser River sockeye this year, another first.
The commercial sockeye fishery won't likely happen this year on the Fraser, either.
Watching all of this with much trepidation is Alex Rose, a local writer who once worked in DFO as a communications strategist. He's just finished writing Who Killed the Grand Banks? (his answer is greedy East Coast fishermen, DFO mismanagement, botched science and the industrialized fishing fleet).
After two years of researching, talking to the world's fisheries experts, he believes the Pacific salmon fishery may very well go the way of the Grand Banks cod.
"There are so many parallels," sighs Rose, sitting in his West Vancouver hillside home that looks upon English Bay.
A generation ago, there were so many salmon to be had in Vancouver's bay there was an annual salmon derby. "You know, the City of Vancouver even put salmon on its first coat of arms. But in a generation we've gone from unbelievable abundance to a crisis. We take our salmon for granted."
It's hard not to agree with Rose's attempt to link our shrinking salmon fishery with the East Coast cod collapse. We seem to be heading in the same direction: The value of the landed catch of West Coast salmon, once one of B.C.'s major industries, has decreased to $60 million. There's clearly something drastic happening.
This book is a clarion call to refocus on the salmon, often regarded as an indicator species because of their unique life cycle and unique geographic reach: they are born in rivers, go to the ocean for years and return to the same riverbed where they were hatched to spawn -- and die. In essence, the salmon are barometers of the health of both the ocean and our rivers.
What Rose tells us in his book, which spends a number of chapters outlining the West Coast salmon crisis, is that a combination of habitat destruction and climate change, now believed by many scientists to be affecting ocean and river temperatures, are devastating the species.
Equally bad news is that scientists' attempts to repopulate the rivers and ocean with hatchery fish, once seen as the way to save the salmon, aren't the answer, either, contends Rose.
He believes that hatchery programs have been an overall failure because the "man-made" fish go out to sea and compete against wild stocks for food. In many cases, the hatchery fish never make it back anyway.
He recalls this forgotten piece of history: "In order to offer Vancouver's Expo 86 visitors the fishing experience of a lifetime, [DFO] cranked up its coho hatchery capacity and released 10 million juveniles. Trouble was, the fish didn't cooperate and many simply disappeared in what scientists refer to as the black box of the Pacific Ocean."
The statistics are in and they are grim, particularly for the body of water closest to our communities, the Strait of Georgia. In 1988, sports fishermen hooked a remarkable one million coho salmon. By the turn of the century, that catch had plummeted to about 10,000 fish. That's starting to look like a collapse.
It may seem hard to believe; there's still plenty of fish on the grocery shelves. But that's because those salmon are generally coming from the northern runs, less touched by warming rivers and urban development.
But make no mistake about the trend: Our salmon are in serious trouble. And so are we if we don't do more to save this coast's iconic symbol -- a fish that sustains our grizzly bears, bald eagles, killer whales and, if you think about it, our culture.
mcernetig@png.canwest.com© The Vancouver Sun 2008
300 million for the Chinook in the States and we get
60 million and chump change for our fishery. I guess thats what happens when the commercial guys sell Canadian fish down south? Sport fishing gives more bang for the buck.