Sockeye salmon meltdown

Posted by Elizabeth Bluemink

Posted: August 13, 2009 - 4:27 pm

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British Columbia's Fraser River, which has large but troubled salmon runs, is occasionally invoked in the debate over Pebble. Hard-rock mining doesn't appear to play a significant role in the Fraser's problems but it's worth pointing out that the river is having another very bad year.

I'm posting a link to and a blurb from reporter Mark Hume's story in Canada's Globe and Mail today:

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The Fraser River is experiencing one of the biggest salmon disasters in recent history with more than nine million sockeye vanishing.

Aboriginal fish racks are empty, commercial boats worth millions of dollars are tied to the docks and sport anglers are being told to release any sockeye they catch while fishing for still healthy runs of chinook.

Between 10.6 million and 13 million sockeye were expected to return to the Fraser this summer. But the official count is now just 1.7 million, according to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

Where the nine to 11 million missing fish went remains a mystery. "It's beyond a crisis with these latest numbers," said Ernie Crey, fisheries adviser to the Sto:lo tribes on the Fraser. "What it means is that a lot of impoverished natives are going to be without salmon. ... We have families with little or no income that were depending on these fish. ... It's a catastrophe," he said.

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The story doesn't flesh out all the possible causes for the collapse, or even the scientific theories that have been advanced during the Fraser's previous poor runs, but it does discuss one theory: that the salmon were killed by sea lice infestations from fish farms.

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