Millions of B.C. salmon mysteriously ‘just disappear’ in troubling year – Globe and Mail

More bad news for our fishing fleets.

Although spawning salmon are still returning to British Columbia’s rivers – including some, surprisingly, to urban streams – early returns indicate another troubling year, despite some bright spots…. There were good sockeye salmon returns to the Great Central Lake system on Vancouver Island and to the Nass River on the North Coast, he said. But contrasting that were very poor returns on the Fraser River, where only about two million sockeye returned, far short of the more than six million predicted in preseason forecasts. Even more dramatic was the collapse of the pink salmon on the Fraser, with only about five million fish showing up when more than 14 million had been forecast. Mark Hume reports. (Globe and Mail)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/millions-of-bc-salmon-mysteriously-disappear-in-troubling-year/article27089342/

BC Sockeye Season Likely to Close Again this Year – CBC

Just yesterday I heard the well worn argument by an opponent of environmental protections saying in a public meeting that the record return of BC Sockeye in 2010 was proof that scientists didn’t know what they were talking about. Well, it was a short lived record year.

British Columbia’s lucrative commercial and recreational sockeye salmon fishery is not likely to open this year, as Fisheries and Oceans Canada says there are simply not enough fish coming back.

Although there has been enough returning fish to fill the spawning grounds and open an aboriginal fishery, numbers have actually started to decrease.

In order for a commercial fishery to operate, the number of summer run sockeye salmon would have had to be roughly double last week’s count.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2012/08/15/bc-sockeye-salmon-fishery.html

%d bloggers like this: