The Times Colonist, 23rd September 2009
Where we go with wild salmon: A blueprint for saving them
By D.C. Reid
If you have ever wondered where we are going with wild salmon, there is a luncheon meeting on Sept. 25, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., that you should go to. The Pacific Salmon Foundation, the not-for-profit organization that funds salmon recovery programs, will have a pretty good list of speakers at the Victoria Golf Club, 1110 Beach Drive. Contact Elayne Sun at the PSF, by phone: 604-664-7664; or by e-mail: esun@psf.ca. The $60 fee is partially tax refundable. So you can do a good thing and feel good about doing it.
The speakers include: Dr. Brian Riddell, past DFO scientist as moderator, who is now president of the PSF; Dr. John Reynolds, Tom Buell Leadership Chair in Salmon Conservation at SFU; Dr. Craig Orr, executive director, Watershed Watch Salmon Society; Hon. David Anderson, former member of Parliament and minister of environment and DFO. There is also a secret speaker who you know but I can't reveal.
Here are a few suggestions of where we can go with saving wild salmon that you can clip and claim as your own:
Eliminate run of river power. Fish can't spawn where a watershed is destroyed. The Toba Inlet project alone will destroy 17 watersheds.
Get fish farms in closed containers, on land, with effluent treatment that also includes taking out the chemicals used, so downstream water is as clean as the upstream water.
Develop cryo-banks so that samples of all eggs and milt of the various runs of the five species can be cheaply stored for the day when mixing and matching of genes is more affordable. This also presents an opportunity for recreating runs that go extinct. Of interest in the Human Genome Project completed some years ago, they found that 80 per cent of human genes are junk and also rapidly transferred here and there. That means that in salmon there are probably just as few that are important.
Put diploid pink salmon netpens virtually everywhere immediately to provide an alternate fishery from wild salmon. Follow up with diploid clipped chinook for the same wild aversion reasons and for alternate fisheries opportunities. The latter has two purposes: Chinook is the species we fish 12 months of the year; and, let's use Cowichan stock because they are the most important for peanut head killer whales. This is so because Cowichan Chinook circle the Strait of Georgia for a couple of years before exiting to the open ocean.
Tax logging a habitat tax (suburbification, too) to be used for the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to save wild salmon spawning grounds. If they can't spawn just once, the run is extinct. Vancouver Island still has 100 years of logging damage choking out the rivers so loud you can hear them crying for help. The tax would also offset countervailing duties.
Develop temperature-resistant salmon. The controversial issue in this one is deciding when a river should be declared as dead and so no salmon strain is negatively affected. But you use strains from warm rivers, for example, probably the warmest river is the Sacramento in California. In B.C., I would say these are probably the fish in the Nichola/Merritt area.
One of the least considered but most important thing about global warming, (besides the hot, low water, low oxygen problems, particularly for coho in side stream puddles), is that the extra winter rain both erodes and buries the reeds where next year's salmon will not wriggle from. This makes sidestream spawning channels, where runoff does not go, extremely important for survival. The Taylor River past Port Alberni is a great example of how to do this right.
And, in one breath because I have run out of room: Put hatcheries closer to saltwater. Make salmon the priority in rivers, for example, consider the Englishman River where there are 33 different stakeholders. Eliminate fishing for herring. Foster saltwater otters on the inside straits because they eat sea urchins and thus result in way more baitfish hiding kelp. Exhume the Tousignant blueprint for wild salmon. Work with the big environmental corps instead of against them. Buy back trolling licences at very fair prices. Eliminate gillnets...
dcreid@catchsalmonbc.com
http://www.timescolonist.com/techno...lmon+blueprint+saving+them/2023487/story.html
Where we go with wild salmon: A blueprint for saving them
By D.C. Reid
If you have ever wondered where we are going with wild salmon, there is a luncheon meeting on Sept. 25, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., that you should go to. The Pacific Salmon Foundation, the not-for-profit organization that funds salmon recovery programs, will have a pretty good list of speakers at the Victoria Golf Club, 1110 Beach Drive. Contact Elayne Sun at the PSF, by phone: 604-664-7664; or by e-mail: esun@psf.ca. The $60 fee is partially tax refundable. So you can do a good thing and feel good about doing it.
The speakers include: Dr. Brian Riddell, past DFO scientist as moderator, who is now president of the PSF; Dr. John Reynolds, Tom Buell Leadership Chair in Salmon Conservation at SFU; Dr. Craig Orr, executive director, Watershed Watch Salmon Society; Hon. David Anderson, former member of Parliament and minister of environment and DFO. There is also a secret speaker who you know but I can't reveal.
Here are a few suggestions of where we can go with saving wild salmon that you can clip and claim as your own:
Eliminate run of river power. Fish can't spawn where a watershed is destroyed. The Toba Inlet project alone will destroy 17 watersheds.
Get fish farms in closed containers, on land, with effluent treatment that also includes taking out the chemicals used, so downstream water is as clean as the upstream water.
Develop cryo-banks so that samples of all eggs and milt of the various runs of the five species can be cheaply stored for the day when mixing and matching of genes is more affordable. This also presents an opportunity for recreating runs that go extinct. Of interest in the Human Genome Project completed some years ago, they found that 80 per cent of human genes are junk and also rapidly transferred here and there. That means that in salmon there are probably just as few that are important.
Put diploid pink salmon netpens virtually everywhere immediately to provide an alternate fishery from wild salmon. Follow up with diploid clipped chinook for the same wild aversion reasons and for alternate fisheries opportunities. The latter has two purposes: Chinook is the species we fish 12 months of the year; and, let's use Cowichan stock because they are the most important for peanut head killer whales. This is so because Cowichan Chinook circle the Strait of Georgia for a couple of years before exiting to the open ocean.
Tax logging a habitat tax (suburbification, too) to be used for the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to save wild salmon spawning grounds. If they can't spawn just once, the run is extinct. Vancouver Island still has 100 years of logging damage choking out the rivers so loud you can hear them crying for help. The tax would also offset countervailing duties.
Develop temperature-resistant salmon. The controversial issue in this one is deciding when a river should be declared as dead and so no salmon strain is negatively affected. But you use strains from warm rivers, for example, probably the warmest river is the Sacramento in California. In B.C., I would say these are probably the fish in the Nichola/Merritt area.
One of the least considered but most important thing about global warming, (besides the hot, low water, low oxygen problems, particularly for coho in side stream puddles), is that the extra winter rain both erodes and buries the reeds where next year's salmon will not wriggle from. This makes sidestream spawning channels, where runoff does not go, extremely important for survival. The Taylor River past Port Alberni is a great example of how to do this right.
And, in one breath because I have run out of room: Put hatcheries closer to saltwater. Make salmon the priority in rivers, for example, consider the Englishman River where there are 33 different stakeholders. Eliminate fishing for herring. Foster saltwater otters on the inside straits because they eat sea urchins and thus result in way more baitfish hiding kelp. Exhume the Tousignant blueprint for wild salmon. Work with the big environmental corps instead of against them. Buy back trolling licences at very fair prices. Eliminate gillnets...
dcreid@catchsalmonbc.com
http://www.timescolonist.com/techno...lmon+blueprint+saving+them/2023487/story.html
