By Jeff Nagel
Black Press
Oct 03 2006
It’s a new case of missing salmon in the Fraser River.
This time fisheries managers have lost track of close to five million sockeye that were expected to return but simply haven’t shown up.
It’s now estimated that just 8.7 million sockeye returned to the Fraser this year. That’s a drop of 4.6 million since early September, when officials were projecting 13.3 million. And the previous number had been stepped down throughout the summer from the pre-season estimate of 17.4 million sockeye for 2006.
“It’s a mystery to us as to where these fish have gone,” said Pacific Salmon Commission chief biologist Mike Lapointe.
Most of the missing salmon are late-run sockeye that had been thought to be waiting in the Strait of Georgia before entering the river.
But despite large test fishery catches verifying their presence and visual reports from fishermen of large numbers offshore, Lapointe says they never made it past Mission, where salmon in the river are counted.
“We had some of the largest test catches we’d seen in recent years,” he said. “We’re kind of shaking our heads a bit asking where did these fish go.”
Lapointe suspects miscounting on the ocean was to blame and that the salmon never existed – rather than a scenario where the earlier counts were correct but huge numbers died heading for the river.
Either way conservationists fear it means far more commercial fishing was allowed this season than should have been permitted.
“It’s unbelievable,” said Craig Orr, executive director of the Watershed Watch Salmon Society, upon hearing the new numbers.
“I think we’ll see some damage as a result of this year,” he added. “We’ve got some grave concerns.”
Lapointe said enough salmon may yet return to spawning grounds to ensure good stocks in future, but added that won’t be known for some time.
“I think at the end of the day we’ll end up at reasonable numbers,” he said.
The loss of more than a million salmon in 2004 – albeit in a year with a much smaller and more fragile run than this year’s – triggered a series of inquiries and reports that aimed to find the cause.
“Here we go again,” said Orr, who noted the Conservatives promised to launch a new review into Pacific salmon fishing that would have the power to subpoena witnesses, but has not yet been launched.
Past reviews pinpointed no single cause for 2004’s disaster, but called for much more action to improve the accuracy of fish estimates to aid salmon management decisions.
One of the primary ways to get better estimates is to conduct more test fishing, said Lapointe, but he noted commercial fishermen don’t like that.
“When you take fish away to assess the run, they’re fish that aren’t caught in the regular commercial fishery,” he said.
Various options for improvement have been advanced – some requests from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans date back more than a decade.
“Part of the challenge is we have a system everybody knows has variation in it,” Lapointe said.
One proposal now before the federal government calls for funding of $150,000 to investigate the possibility of setting up a network of marine hydroacoustic devices to count fish in the ocean.
“I think it could work,” Lapointe said. “If that goes ahead it will certainly help.”
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Topic: Missing fish again, makes you wonder. (Read 1028 times)