Fraser River (British Columbia) Sockeye Salmon Runs Collapsing

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VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- Water in the Fraser River warmed up too fast last summer for regulators to avoid huge losses of spawning salmon, Canadian Fisheries Minister Geoff Regan says. "I'm saying we manage to the conditions we saw, and what's happened is the weather has been warmer than expected, the water levels low and we've seen significant results from that," Regan told reporters Monday.

He was responding to warnings from some provincial fisheries experts of a major ecological disaster on the basis of fish counts indicating only a small fraction of the predicted number of sockeye were reaching their spawning grounds in northern British Columbia.

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In the early Stuart sockeye run, one of the first to conclude, one count indicated that fewer than 10,000 of the expected 90,000 sockeye reached spawning grounds, said Don Radford, the Fisheries Department's regional director of fisheries management.

Officials also said the Upper Adams River sockeye run was expected to be 130,000 or more fish but biologists have counted fewer than 10,000 on the spawning grounds north of Adams Lake, about 45 miles northeast of Kamloops. Mike Galesloot, a biologist with the Secwepemc Fisheries Commission, a nonprofit division of the Shuswap First Nation, said this was supposed to be the big year in the Upper Adams River's four-year cycle."

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http://www.adn.com/business/story/5587247p-5518864c.html

[donsu]

1. tick, tick, tick

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