Posts tagged: salmon recovery

75,000 Salmon Smolts ‘Die While Being Trucked to San Pablo Bay

May 20, 2008, by 3 comments

2008 isn’t exactly turning out to be the Year of the Salmon.

Populations up and down the West Coast are under siege from water diversions, dams, predators and habitat loss. And scientists keep citing mysterious “ocean conditions” (possibly related to climate change) as imperiling salmon food supplies in the ocean.

It’s not even safe to be a hatchery salmon:

About 75,000 of 180,000 young fall-run Chinook salmon being hauled in tanker trucks from the Coleman National Fish Hatchery in Anderson to San Pablo Bay near Vallejo Monday died. “We are kind of in the stages of trying to figure out what went wrong,” Scott Hamelberg, the hatchery’s manager, said early Monday afternoon. “It’s part of the risk of trucking fish.”

About 41 percent of the smolts being trucked Monday died. Scientists plan to perform necropsies — animal autopsies — on some of the dead smolts to determine their cause of death, said Alexandra Pitts, spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Sacramento. “They are going to see what they can see in them, which can tell them a lot more of what happened,” she said.

See you at the piles of dead salmon smolts, Tom Chandler.

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Salmon Aid Festivale Set for Oakland May 31-June 1

May 19, 2008, by No comments yet

It’s interesting that the laws created to protect species like salmon have produced… well, not much really.

Salmon and steelhead are teetering on the brink up and down the entire West Coast, and a festival dedicated to "raising awareness" of the issue is either a welcome ray of hope or a sign of the impending salmon apocalypse.

salmonaid

Honest, I’m not sure which, but uniting folks behind salmon — including groups that formerly laid a lot of hate on each other — can’t be bad.

By uniting commercial, tribal, and sportfishing interests with conservation organizations, chefs and restaurant owners, and the American consumer to celebrate and restore our wild salmon and healthy, free-flowing rivers, SalmonAid will inform the public about the historic, cultural, economic, dietary, and environmental benefits of healthy wild salmon populations and the threats to their continued existence.

Concert attractions include Les Claypool and a zydeco band (Zydeco Flames). And yes, it’s free.

Are the recent commercial closures forcing the public to focus on the issue — and mobilizing support among spineless politicians before it’s too late? We’ll see.

See you at the salmon festival, Tom Chandler.

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Another Flawed Columbia Salmon Recovery Plan Filed by Feds: Salmon Advocates Sneer

May 7, 2008, by No comments yet

It’s not as if we expected more. The administration’s last three Coumbia Basin salmon recovery plans have been found so wanting by a federal judge that he ordered the administration back to try again.

After all, these are the same Feds who wanted tried to escape a workable salmon recovery plan by suggesting the dams are part of the natural landscape, or that the law only required they have a plan — not necessarily one that would recover salmon.

With that kind of mindset driving the creation of some seriously flawed salmon recovery plans, yesterday’s announcement doesn’t exactly come as a surprise — nor the reaction to it. Read more →

Salmon Recovery Dependent on Actions of Next Administration?

April 15, 2008, by 1 comment

The West Coast’s ongoing salmon crisis isn’t exactly a secret to regular Underground readers, and it’s safe to say we’ve seen more salmon-related stories in major media channels in the last three years than in the prior 30.

This time, the New York Times Op-Ed lays it out: the next president will have to focus on rebuilding our commercially valuable salmon stocks, or find out what coastal economic collapse really looks like: Read more →

Salmon Fishing off California, Oregon Coasts Canceled

April 11, 2008, by 6 comments

As expected, the collapse of salmon stocks in the Sacramento River has resulted in the cancellation of the salmon season off the California and Oregon coasts (only limited recreational Coho salmon fishing will be allowed off central Oregon).

The news wires are crawling with stories, suppositions, animosity and outright rage, though the collapse of the final commercially viable run in California (the Sacramento Chinook runs) remains somewhat shrouded in mystery.

The Underground’s Crack Team of Salmon Analysts have extensively studied the situation and decided two things will almost certainly occur:

  1. Lots of finger pointing as to the cause of the collapse (Scientists and fishermen point their fingers at habitat loss, water quality, Delta water diversions and ocean conditions)
  2. There will be lots of farm-raised salmon on the dinner menu

See you at the grill, Tom Chandler.

More Fallout From the West Coast Salmon Season Closure (or, "Oh Crap")

March 14, 2008, by 5 comments

With partial closure of the West Coast’s commercial and sport chinook salmon seasons already a fact and a full closure of the season not far behind, the media are sitting up and taking notice.

The economic impacts will surely be huge — big enough to garner attention from around the globe. I thought a quick roundup of articles from a range of media outlets would prove educational. I was right.

First, Britain’s U.K. Independent weighs in with an excellent overview of the situation, including a map of the West Coast of the US (was it for their readers, or the vast majority of geographically challenged Americans?).

America’s west coast looks set to lose almost all of its wild salmon harvest this year, depriving fish retailers and restaurants around the world of one of their key sources of high-quality fish, and raising troubling questions about the viability of commercial fishing in an age of climate change and increased competition over water use.

The New York Times writes some typically tight lead paragraphs focused on the gravity of the situation: Read more →

Fish Farms Lethal to Wild Salmon Populations Says Study

February 21, 2008, by 11 comments

A pair of Canadian researchers feel they’ve proved what most have long suspected; salmon "farms" are largely toxic to wild salmon populations:

DRAMATIC declines in wild salmon populations are associated with exposure to farmed salmon, a new study has claimed.

The research, conducted by two Canadian marine biologists, claims to show dramatic declines in the abundance of wild salmon populations whose migration takes them past salmon farms in Canada, Ireland and Scotland.

According to the authors, previous studies have "clearly shown" that escaped farm salmon breed with wild populations to the detriment of the wild stocks, and that diseases and parasites are passed from farm to wild salmon.

I know how the poor wild salmon feel — or at least I do every time I drive by one of those dairy feedlots in the Central Valley where the smell causes even your car to temporarily lose power.

Gotta be the same underwater.

Central Valley Salmon Populations Facing "Unprecedented Collapse"

January 30, 2008, by 5 comments

image We first covered this in March, so I wasn’t totally surprised to find “collapse” headlines screaming at us from every newsfeed: The chinook salmon runs in the Sacramento River are the second lowest ever recorded, and the 90,000 adult fish are only one-tenth the all-time high (800,000 recorded five years ago).

From the LA Times:

SACRAMENTO — – Faced with an “unprecedented collapse” of California’s Central Valley salmon population, federal regulators warned Tuesday that the West Coast fishing industry is on course toward steep restrictions this year.

The number of chinook salmon returning to the Sacramento River plummeted to near historic lows last year, and fishery experts are predicting similarly light returns this year.

Donald McIsaac, director of the Pacific Fishery Management Council, said the reason for the decline remains unclear.

There’s been a lot of speculation about the non-availability of food for juvenile salmon due to ocean conditions (which many scientists are linking to climate change issues), yet one group remains convinced the problem is at least partially due to Delta water diversions:

The Sacramento River’s “missing salmon” were juveniles migrating to sea in spring 2005, when state and federal water managers “set records for pumping delta water south,” said Mike Sherwood, an attorney with Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental legal group that has been jousting with water managers over water exports.

The Environmental News Service is carrying a slightly more detailed article than the LA Times, but you don’t really have to read the fine print to guess what comes next.

Fishing closures (both sport and commercial), the inevitable government payouts, and yes — the finger pointing.

There are a lot of people hoping this is a one-time event, but the low number of returning “jack” salmon (two year-old fish) suggests poor returns in 2008.

Is this an artifact of global climate change? Are the ghosts of all those delta water diversions and habitat compromises finally coming back to haunt us?

See you buying tofu, Tom Chandler.

UPDATES: Singlebarbed weighed in last night. Now the Eugene, Oregon Register Guard considers the economic consequences to Oregon’s coastal fishing communities — already pummeled by Klamath-related closures and this year’s disastrously low catches:

Earlier this year, the Oregon Salmon Commission released figures that depict one of the worst salmon seasons on record. The fleet landed 463,500 pounds, about 20,000 pounds less than in 2006 — a more restricted season. Between 1979 and 2007, chinook landings have averaged more than 2 million pounds. In only two of those years have landings dropped below 500,000 pounds.

The fleet earned $2.6 million in 2007, slightly less than what trollers brought in the year before, despite the highest price per pound fishermen have fetched since 1981: $5.64.

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