gold river

I had the pleasure of talking to a few old timers long time steelheader and members of the steel head society,

their main points where closing down hatcherys never brought the fish back, bait bans never brought the fish back and closing down the fishery never brought the fish back.

funny how many of them now work as ocean salmon guides supported by....you guessed it hatcherys
Yup, that is me. But, we need to address the big issues driving the decline. Seal predation, and before that we had a killer whale eating everything in sight. No point building hatcheries as food processing plants for pinnipeds. Those S0 Chinook come out as really small smolts that aren't as appealing a meal as a fat smartie steelhead smolt. And, the law of large numbers - huge hatchery Chinook releases create a wave of fish so that eventually some get past the furry things. But, I'm someone will try suggesting that if we only removed the gill nets the Gold would recover.
 
Only seen a net on the gold once. Backside of Upana feb 2000.

I'm guessing with a comment like that searun you must think nets don't play a factor in our IFS decline?

Just so we are clear imo a seal cull cant come soon enough. Seeing multiple seals in the lake hole over the years is frustrating to say the least...then there was the back to back years we had a seal in the Hotel run and the graveyard on the thompson....
 
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Only seen a net on the gold once. Backside of Upana feb 2000.

I'm guessing with a comment like that searun you must think nets don't play a factor in our IFS decline?
From a risk assessment perspective, Rob Bison's work concluded that taking fishery removals down to zero vs addressing predation produced very different results. 39% change in adult spawner abundance for addressing fishery removals as opposed to 486% if you achieved doubling survival of out-migrant smolts by addressing inshore predation. Pretty clear to me that the role of nets represents far less recovery risk as opposed to pinniped predation. Its much more sexy to chase the shinny penny of nets and ignore the silent killer of predation. Looking around the province we have many other examples (not just the Gold) where there are no nets, and yet steelhead populations dramatically declined. If you follow pinniped population growth it closely mirrors steelhead abundance declines. It took a while for the pattern to catch up with the larger base population of stream-type chinook, but we now have a similar echo crisis. The problem however is people avoid the tough conversations around addressing cute furry problems.
 
Pretty hard to envision a widespread pinneped cull. All culling would have to take place away from prying eyes either at night or areas so remote that nobody could get any cell phone video footage of said cull. Unfortunately the only way the public would go for a cull is in the mouths of killer whales.
For the record, I am firmly in the camp that the only good seal/lion is a dead seal/lion.
 
From a risk assessment perspective, Rob Bison's work concluded that taking fishery removals down to zero vs addressing predation produced very different results. 39% change in adult spawner abundance for addressing fishery removals as opposed to 486% if you achieved doubling survival of out-migrant smolts by addressing inshore predation. Pretty clear to me that the role of nets represents far less recovery risk as opposed to pinniped predation. Its much more sexy to chase the shinny penny of nets and ignore the silent killer of predation. Looking around the province we have many other examples (not just the Gold) where there are no nets, and yet steelhead populations dramatically declined. If you follow pinniped population growth it closely mirrors steelhead abundance declines. It took a while for the pattern to catch up with the larger base population of stream-type chinook, but we now have a similar echo crisis. The problem however is people avoid the tough conversations around addressing cute furry problems.
For a start Bisson stated he doesn't know the Gold situation all that well and of that those that do there is a belief the issue has to do with forestry or loss there of. Others do think pinneped predation is part of the problem.

His idealized scenarios of what could be achieved for IFS really shouldn't be applied to the Gold with the expectation the best possible results would be the same. Best I could see there was no direct data on what seals are taking from the IFS population. Mostly it was extrapolated from studies on other areas which themselves extrapolate a wide pinneped impact from limited data sets. While he does seem to think some sort of seal cull, he didn't talk about any other predation, was the best possible response available, most evidence on culls indicate there is always the risk some other predator, will fill the niche left by culled seals.

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cheers
 
good thing the do nothing strategy is just as valid as all the others. Someone might have to act and do something otherwise.
 
Just thought I'd add that at the 2019 BCWF selective fisheries conference where Bob Hooton did a presentation of commercial fishery bi-catch of steelhead. He stated there is Zero...that's Zero as in 0...evidence that seal predation has any association with the rapid decline of IFS. Video of all those presentations and discussion are available on Youtube.

Of course absence of evidence isn't necessarily evidence of absence but that does high light a problem with pinneped predation research - people are extrapolating the results everywhere without any supporting evidence yet repeat it as if it were gospel truth.
 
Just thought I'd add that at the 2019 BCWF selective fisheries conference where Bob Hooton did a presentation of commercial fishery bi-catch of steelhead. He stated there is Zero...that's Zero as in 0...evidence that seal predation has any association with the rapid decline of IFS. Video of all those presentations and discussion are available on Youtube.

Of course absence of evidence isn't necessarily evidence of absence but that does high light a problem with pinneped predation research - people are extrapolating the results everywhere without any supporting evidence yet repeat it as if it were gospel truth.
Just posted this on another forum ..

I have a hard time believing seals and sea lions are targeting IFS and upper Fraser chinook smolts … think about this for a second – the numbers of smolts are so very few ( sometimes less than 100 per river, if that) spread out over several months, in the entire lower Fraser River. It simply is not worth one seal putting out the energy to find one of these smolts, let alone the hundreds we hear about. Another statement thrown around is that these upper Fraser chinook smolts are large and a high caloric count is not really that accurate. I have electroshocked chinook juveniles in the upper Fraser River and many of its tributaries; they average about 6-7”.

I have also worked on the both the Albion and Whonnock test fisheries in the lower Fraser and have seen firsthand the carnage seals cause there.
 
From a risk assessment perspective, Rob Bison's work concluded that taking fishery removals down to zero vs addressing predation produced very different results. 39% change in adult spawner abundance for addressing fishery removals as opposed to 486% if you achieved doubling survival of out-migrant smolts by addressing inshore predation. Pretty clear to me that the role of nets represents far less recovery risk as opposed to pinniped predation. Its much more sexy to chase the shinny penny of nets and ignore the silent killer of predation. Looking around the province we have many other examples (not just the Gold) where there are no nets, and yet steelhead populations dramatically declined. If you follow pinniped population growth it closely mirrors steelhead abundance declines. It took a while for the pattern to catch up with the larger base population of stream-type chinook, but we now have a similar echo crisis. The problem however is people avoid the tough conversations around addressing cute furry problems.

I think you need to listen to that segment of the video again. Bisson clearly said both were idealized scenarios. That means there is a good likelihood they would not be realized in the actual world. What level of a cull could be actuated and what the real outcomes would be can't be estimated based on the data and information available.

I have said people are reading all sort of information and outcomes in the pinneped predation data that is not actually there.

BTW - best I can find, Bison has not published any field research on pinneped predation and there is no research that link the same to the decline of IFS ...none.
 
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Your comment on habitat is simply wrong. That being said while ocean survival is currently poor that is largely out of our control. What we can do is protect the fish once they reach our own waters and preserve existing habitat and restore the rest. I don't know a stream on Vancouver Island that hasn't been ravaged by logging including the Gold so to say the habitat is just fine is off the mark.
What Dave said was actually spot on. During the 80s, the Gold had one of the most spectacular steelhead runs for winter fish anywhere on the planet. While it has certainly been ravaged by logging, its in river habitat hasn't changed much since there. What has changed, are the ocean conditions up and down the coast. If you look at a river like the Megin, completely contained within Strathcona, never been logged in its existence, with huge stands of old growth cedars everywhere, you'll still see that its steelhead populations have tanked to almost non-existent numbers. I'm down in WA and our numbers have similarly dropped. It's the ocean. And that's why hatcheries wont work either. We can put as many fish as we want out to sea, but we are essentially putting cows out to an empty pasture. They wont survive. The hatcheries here in the states that have been successful have been planting SO many fish that just by a numbers game they eventually get a few back, but their return on investment (meaning how many steelhead they get back vs how many they plant) is the lowest it's ever been. In Puget Sound, in particular, the Tulalip tribe calculated that they were spending as much as 1000 USD in hatchery expenses PER FISH. Since it's federal money and the tribes are able to spend it however they want, they are continuing to finance the programs, but their yield is almost zero. When the ocean conditions were better, in the 80s, not only did we have improved sizes of wild runs of steelhead, they even had better hatchery rates of return, simply because the ocean was so much healthier.
I definitely feel you, that we should try to improve as best we can, what we can, which means improving freshwater habitat. But honestly, if they have the perfect gravel beds and the perfect stream flows, only to go to an ocean that is truly sick, we can't expect to see much benefit in terms of returns. Sadly, the science supports this. I know its not what any of us want to hear, but its the reality.
I love the Gold River. I hooked some of my first steelhead there, and to hear the old timers tell stories of 30 fish days on the fly during the winter not only blows my mind, but breaks my heart, to know that I never, nor will I likely ever, see days like those guys did back in the 80s, let alone when they first cut the roads into the area back in the 60s. I would have killed to fish the Heber during Haig- Brown's era. But no amount of funds will ressurrect that stream. Hopefully improved ocean conditions will improve fishing.
I suspect that overharvest of things like sandlance and herring have hurt our steelhead. Commercial by catch (much of it illegal from asia) has taken it's toll. Decadal oscillation giving us warmer ocean temperatures, "the blob", and acidification of the ocean from fossil fuel consumption are probably all contributing. And as long as China is in charge of most of that, we have little power over improving our situation.
 
Just thought I'd add that at the 2019 BCWF selective fisheries conference where Bob Hooton did a presentation of commercial fishery bi-catch of steelhead. He stated there is Zero...that's Zero as in 0...evidence that seal predation has any association with the rapid decline of IFS. Video of all those presentations and discussion are available on Youtube.

Of course absence of evidence isn't necessarily evidence of absence but that does high light a problem with pinneped predation research - people are extrapolating the results everywhere without any supporting evidence yet repeat it as if it were gospel truth.
Cant speak to the Fraser, but pinniped cull on the Willamette River in Oregon was remarkably successful. In one season, they saw the run size increase to 50% greater than predicted using past modeling techniques. Those seals were found to eat as many as 35 steelhead a day, so culling a dozen of them resulted in thousands of steelhead saved over the course of the season. I'm sure pinniped predation varies wildly, depending on how vulnerable returning fish would be, but I would imagine that the Gold steelhead would be especially vulnerable.
I know that the area will likely become repopulated with seals next season as long as there are steelhead for them to eat, and I doubt that anyone sees pinniped culls as a long term solution to improving steelhead populations. That said, it did put more steelhead in the river for anglers to catch.
 
96 hatchery fish weighed in the Wally hall derby this year on Veddar so far... Now i don't know how these numbers compare to other years or hatchery rivers.. That is only the number from guys who entered the derby and not all the other guys fishing and catching a hatchery fish. I miss the hatchery on the Cowichan as many others do. I know the Veddar and Cowichan are not the Gold but just sad not to do nothing to save this river. Oh and the top 3 fish are over 16lbs those are some nice size fish..
 
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