Interesting. A couple of years ago I came upon an abandoned seal pup while fishing one of the local beaches. I called the Marine Mammal Rescue Program and they came and picked it up. I had quite a chat with one of the staff. As it turned out the pup I found was euthanized, not an unusual outcome. It's not uncommon for pups to be abandoned - usually because they are pre-mature. FWIW I have also done the same for a couple of birds of prey via OWL including a mature female Bald Eagle that had a broken wing.
Some of the on going research on seal predation is being coordinated with the MMRP. Seal head mount camera studies I believe have used rehabilitated adult seals. So there is some positive feedback from this program for salmon anglers.
It's not up to me to decide if their are too many seals. I kind of suspect the decline in salmon numbers if far more complicated than just this one factor.
There is very credible science and data out there that supports the on-the-ground observations that seals take significant numbers of juvenile coho & Chinook - esp the often larger hatchery smolts. That mortality rate from those interactions alone are often around 50%.
I tire of the misleading & disingenuous denials from the self-proclaimed & self-righteous pro-marine mammal "experts" that it is instead too complicated to do anything about seals - meanwhile - any thing we can possibly do to "save" the SRKW gets ratified into regulations - even if it is also admittedly "complicated".
This argument seems to hold in the public domain even if the experts quoted are instead marine-mammal "experts" and not Chinook experts - and speaking about a topic they know very little about.
Apparently the argument that it is too "complicated" only runs one direction - not two. Very hypocritical IMHO....
Credible science, but necessarily conclusive as it exists. It's confirmed that seals and sea lion eat a lot of young salmon. I think we've always known seals and sea lions eat lots of salmon. Every study I have seen of other predators have found the same thing - raccoons, herons, diving birds Bull and other trout (etc etc) eat 30 to 70% of young salmon. Some of the science also recognizes these high % are often caused by man made modification of stream channels, stream flows and other factors. Huge dumps of hatchery fish have an association with this as well.
Even at this other negative variables like climate change and habitat degradation are not factored in.
I'm pretty sure the sockeye in Cultus Lake haven't been all but wiped out in 70 years by seals alone.
Think about salmon from an evolutionary perspective. Salmon produce a large number of off spring. They have to or they wouldn't be around. It's one of their main adaptions in being evolutionary successful At minimum 2 out 3k to 6k have to survive just to maintain the same return size. That's a return rate of 0.07% or less. I see this as showing it doesn't take much change to trend salmon numbers down. To some extent 'fisheries manager' tried to stem decline through enhancement. Perhaps nature and evolution has caught up with that.
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