Salmon prospects slightly brighter for 2009
Fisheries and Oceans Canada says the salmon returns in 2009 will be no worse than this year
Scott Simpson, Vancouver Sun
Published: Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Coming off a difficult and sometimes disastrous season, sportfishing operators got a bit -- a tiny bit -- of encouragement Tuesday from marine scientists with Fisheries and Oceans Canada.
Delegates to the annual conference of the Sport Fishing Institute of British Columbia heard that salmon returns in 2009 will be no worse, and in some cases could be substantially better, than in the angling tourism season just passed.
Weak salmon returns coupled with a crashing U.S. economy took business away from luxury ocean-fishing lodges along the B.C. coast this summer and forced at least one operation, St. John's Fishing Lodge on the Queen Charlotte Islands, into receivership. Sport Fishing Institute president Robert Alcock of Delta Tackle told the conference that for some companies, business was marginal and for a few, "devastating" but expressed optimism that the outlook for next year's fishery was brighter.
That was confirmed, cautiously, by fisheries division manager Brian Riddell, who said stocks of chinook up and down the B.C. coast are in reasonable shape and should be well set to sustain a sport fishery next summer.
However Riddell, in a panel discussion involving other fisheries department staff, said key sport species such as chinook and coho are still experiencing depressed ocean survival compared to a decade ago.
"Things are looking a little better. But we do need to be a bit objective here -- it's looking a little better, but . . . we are below target on many populations. We are not getting the marine survival that we had benefited from in the early 1990s," Riddell said. "Since the mid-1990s we have definitely seen a change where we are in a lowered state of production."
Riddell said climate change is having uneven and sometimes inexplicable impacts upon fish populations, and that the situation is adding to the uncertainty.
"People may debate how quickly climate change will occur, the magnitude, but there is no question whatsoever that the uncertainty and the variability between populations is greater now than I've ever seen in 30 years," Riddell said.
That variability could cause new opportunities to open up, or force fishing closures if individual populations take a sudden, unexpected drop.
The fisheries department's most senior researcher, Dick Beamish, noted that chinook and coho are in decline both in population numbers and as a percentage of total annual salmon catch -- particularly in the Strait of Georgia.
In 1970, those species comprised 15 per cent of B.C.'s total annual salmon catch. They're now down to two per cent while the two least desirable species for commercial and sport fishermen alike, pink and chum, account for 88 per cent of the catch.
The other 10 per cent are sockeye, which were the single largest contributor to the salmon catch as little as a decade ago.
Beamish suggested that the change in relative abundance of different species of salmon mirrors a seasonal shift in ocean temperatures.
For example, pink and chum migrate in early spring and enjoy relatively optimum temperature and feeding conditions in the Strait of Georgia as climate change causes spring weather to arrive earlier each year.
Chinook and coho, by contrast, tend to migrate into the Strait in late spring and summer, when conditions are less than optimal.
Possibly in response to the rising water temperature, ocean survival rates have fallen 75 per cent for coho and chinook since 1997.
"This is a process within the Strait of Georgia that is progressively causing fewer coho to survive, or killing more coho, over the summer months," Beamish said.
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Topic: Salmon Outlook Better For 2009? (Read 14031 times)