NEWS

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Event report: Against the current? The fate of our wild salmon

EMAIL PRINT

Community: Fraser Valley

About a dozen people spent the early evening on Monday night, April 16th, in Room C of the Roundhouse Community Centre, talking about the future of wild salmon.

Craig Orr of Watershed Watch presented on the current conditions that wild salmon face. He covered a great swath of issues, from the influence of climate change, to fish farming and commercial fishing.

Craig introduced a new concept to me. Thermal stress days: the number of days a salmon spends in a river multiplied by the temperature of the water. For instance, a sockeye salmon that spends 28 days in 20C water experiences 560 thermal stress days.

So how are thermal stress days related to salmon health? Simple put, the more higher the thermal stress days, the higher the salmon mortality and less chance of health spawning.

For instance, Sockeye salmon all carry an parasite in their kidneys called parvicapsula minibicornis. In good conditions that Sockeye are adapted for the kidney infection remains dormant and only takes the weakest or longest in the water. It’s a healthy population control mechanism. But Sockeye become weaker with rising thermal stress days, so we’re starting to see more of them killed before they spawn by kidney infections.

Solutions for Wild Salmon

The story for wild salmon, while it has challenges, is not all doom and gloom. Here are a few things Craig mentioned that we can do to help our wild salmon.

• Save salmon habitat. Salmon can’t live without rivers, streams, water and the land surrounding our waterways.
• Promote Canada’s new Wild Salmon Policy
• Limit mixed-stock fishing to stop damaging stocks of concerns. (Mixed-stock fishing is when we fish out in the open ocean and not close to river estuaries so we don’t know the native watershed of the salmon we’re taking.)
• Promote selective fisheries that allow a balance between salmon now and salmon in the future.
• Search our past for solutions to today’s problems. People have lived their lives closely intertwined with Pacific salmon for thousands of years. Our predecessors here have lessons to teach us if we’re open and willing to learn.
• Create local, made-in-BC solutions that work for salmon communities. For instance, in-river fisheries far predate offshore. And, even in mixed-stock runs, fishwheels are a great way to fish salmon with more accuracy.
• Kill fewer salmon. To hedge our salmon populations against management and environmental uncertainty we need to make sure more than enough of them get to spawn. The equation is pretty simple, we either help salmon now so we can have them forever, or we take too many now and don’t have them again.
• Give salmon the right to water. Craig made the point that in BC we all take water for granted, yet the salmon, who need it most, often aren’t considered in water use discussions.
• Save water! In one day an average Canadian uses 342 L of water!
• Promote sustainable aquaculture—stop subsidizing environmental damage through what’s often referred to as ‘externalities’
• Promote effective targets for climate change legislation. The Fraser River is at a key point for temperature change because of its southern location.
• Think Ecosystem and make sure that we save the species we still have, like the oolichan.

One of the main points Craig made that hit home for me was how we need to change our thinking about the world around us. We need to understand that the natural world works independently of our influence. In most cases, it works far better without our influence. And we need to start configuring our world to the natural world, rather than the other way around.

We need to fit into the natural world.