california
Well-Known Member
I would completely agree with that. The science is clear thus far that some problem seals are contributing to significant out-migrant smolt (steelhead, chinook, coho) predation. The numbers are staggering.
The solutions are not at all clear however.
The other great unknown is what happens out on the high seas - research funding and program launch this winter is going to find out for the first time. Will be interesting research that we can follow on the web daily - they are going to report daily updates.
There is no doubt seals prey on outgoing smolts. They always have and always will. Of course in recent history we have also been responsible for enabling them. Most estuaries, esp in the Salish Sea, have had the wetlands where smolts can seek refuge drained and replaced with dikes and breakwaters. We provide convenient haul outs on those breakwaters, or put log booms in the area which make great haul outs, safe and right on top of the prey. In many watersheds we have replaced the natural cycle of predator wary smolts trickling into the estuary gradually, with great floods of hundreds of thousands, or millions of plump naive tank raised smolts. At the same time we have removed large amounts of the biomass of alternate prey items like herring and groundfish. Some of the more comprehensive research pegs it at over 30 million chinook smolts eaten by seals coast wide, much of that in the salish sea. It is a big number to be sure, but is still a fraction of the 200 million in hatchery releases of chinook over that same range, and chinook stocks in areas with low seal predation are also depressed. Seal populations stabilized a decade ago, yet Chinook populations continue to decline. So very clearly there is much more going on than seals. The SRKW.org conclusions that seals are THE problem, and killing them is the solution is not true, and only based on a small slice of the science. I accept that some limited removal of problem animals, particularly those using choke points, man made or natural, to target adult returning fish, (far more damaging as these are the natural selection survivors) is likely necessary. If FN were to somehow reaquire and develop a taste for seal again I think it would be within their rights to hunt and utilize them them in that way, however that seems unlikely. There is no commercial value in these animals. They are only one of a long line of animals eating smolts, which includes other adult salmon. Its also worth noting that there is a large seal cull going on every day. There are over 300 transient whales, each needing a seal or sea lion meal every second or third day on average. That's probably at least 30,000 per year.
I don't see the conclusions of the clearly biased and questionable credibility of SRKW.org being helpful to our cause. I do believe that is aimed at mainly appeasing other sport fisherman, but seems it will have little credibility anywhere else. Searun, your posts are almost always much more reasoned, and do not seem to mirror the messages on SRKW.org very closely. My hope is the actions outlined in the new Wild salmon recovery plan are actually implemented, as the only hope for the future is in rebuilding wild stocks, for sport fisherman, FN, commercial, and whales. I was happy to see it's a WILD salmon recovery plan, and DFO has learned from the mistakes of the past of believing hatcheries are the answer. The shift of seeing them as tool to recovery of wild stocks is important.