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[troutbreath]

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.
 




 

[chris gadsden]

Natives may have to divvy up salmon catch
Paul J. Henderson, The Times
Published: Friday, May 02, 2008
Add an expected low return of sockeye salmon to the recent rise in world food prices and First Nations along the Fraser River are in for a hard year, according to Ernie Crey, policy advisor to the Sto:lo Tribal Council.

"With few or no salmon this summer, I expect great hardship in many of the villages on the Fraser," Crey said.

The life cycle for salmon is four years and so the sockeye expected to return this year are from eggs laid in 2004, which was a "disaster" of a year, according to Crey.


The Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) has predicted a run of between 1.7 and 2.7 million sockeye, down from the 4.4 million average for a low-cycle year. But that number might be even lower as Crey says the pre-season runs have been consistently overestimated over the last decade. Last year DFO predicted a run of about six million and more like two million returned.

"This puts us in the position where we don't know what to expect from year to year," he said.

Given the low returns expected, there will not only likely be no commercial fishing openings, but even the food and ceremonial catches for First Nations may need to be rationed. For this reason DFO has asked the 94 bands in the Fraser River watershed to "share" the 2008 catch, and this may mean rationing between and within Indian bands.

Crey has been and will be involved with meetings to figure out how this sharing will be done, and he wants to make sure Sto:lo and other First Nations groups on the Fraser are the ones making these decisions over their principal source of dietary protein.

"DFO should not be put in charge of such momentous decisions in the lives of the Fraser River First Nations," he said. "These are decisions we need to make for ourselves."

How the division of fishing and catches will be done is yet to be determined, but it has to be done in advance or there may be trouble on the water this summer.

"The season that will come and go in 2008 won't be without tensions and disappointments," Crey said. "Not everyone will get what they thought they might. Will it bubble and boil over into trouble? Maybe, but that's the whole purpose of planning.

"Now, with rapidly rising food prices, the looming salmon crisis for 2008 will only be made that much more difficult and painful for the aboriginal people on the Fraser River."

With the dismal return expected meaning trouble for this food source, there is also a cultural loss underway. Because the salmon run in the summer, kids are out of school and so families traditionally work and fish together on the water.

"The cultural life of the 94 Indian bands on the Fraser will be transformed immediately and perhaps irrevocably," he said.

"I've seen people lose their fisheries entirely. They don't fish anymore. There are people that used to know how to make nets, weirs, salmon traps, that sort of thing, who would also in their spare time carve fish from wood or chip it out of jade, draw and paint salmon cultural totems. A lot of that has stopped in the watershed because fishing has stopped.

"Traditional pursuits developed over the millenia can almost vanish in a single generation."




© Chilliwack Times 2008
 

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