Canadian Pink Salmon Runs In Trouble In Broughton Archipelago

[hatrack]

"Pink salmon get little respect, they are too easy to catch and lack the manly bravado of the greater game fish, and being mild and delicate, are valued less by fish buyers. Yet the ecology of all Pacific salmon species in our region is interconnected with that of the lowly pink, and what threatens the survival of pinks today, may threaten all in the near future.

Something is going wrong with the wild pink salmon runs in Canada’s Broughton Archipelago (see map on page 10). Improved ocean conditions and careful fisheries management have generally produced very robust returns of salmon to streams along the British Columbia Coast, even in areas immediately adjacent to the Broughton, yet stocks in this one area continue to spiral downward.

Pink salmon (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha) has a strictly two-year life cycle; so any particular stock is comprised of an even-year and odd-year cycle, with negligible interchange between the two. Thus an incident that effects spawning productivity in 2002 would be reflected in the size of the returning run in 2004 but not in 2003 or 2005, and so on.

Spawning and migration conditions in the Broughton Archipelago had been severely impacted by logging in the 1940s and 50s, but by the late 90s returns had rebuilt to exceed any previously recorded for both odd and even year classes. Then in 2002 and 2003 the runs collapsed. From 3.6 million in 2000, the 2002 run came in at 147,000, and from 1.5 million in 2001, the odd-year class came back at just 188,000 in 2003.

EDIT

http://www.whatcomwatch.org/php/WW_open.php?id=468&PHPSESSID=030e9687ff77590f4fa2861319d3026f