NEWS

Monday, June 04, 2007

Globe and Mail covers part of Fraser Sockeye conference

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Community: Fraser Valley

The Globe and Mail covered the Fraser Sockeye Salmon: Moving from Talk to Action conference today in an article entitled Flawed number crunching cited for overfishing.

A conference on the state of the Fraser River salmon fishery will today hear how a miscalculation of the numbers of returning sockeye led to the species being overfished by 1.1 million during the summer run of 2006.

The vast majority were taken commercially in the ocean and in the lower reaches of the river, resulting in fewer sockeye making it to their spawning grounds far inland and a collapse in mid- and upper-Fraser native fisheries.

The coverage in the Globe focused only on one aspect of the conference, while the conference covered topics like Cultus Lake Sockeye salmon, changing fishing patterns from saltwater to in-river, fish wheels for accurate counting and identification of species and intergrated river and resource management.

The numbers of Sockeye salmon in the Fraser River in 2006 was covered at the conference, but within the larger context of how that specific failure is indicative of larger flaws in the way we address salmon, salmon stock projections and conservation of the habitats that salmon depend on.

For a good outline, here is the full program of topics for the day:
Speaking for the Salmon conference program (PDF file).