As other runs diminish, pinks become the target

Mark Hume
September 14, 2009
The Globe and Mail

With sports anglers crowding the banks of the Fraser River and lining up on the coastline approaches – including near the legendary 14th hole at Furry Creek Golf and Country Club that juts out into Howe Sound – one might wonder if the headlines about a salmon collapse were wrong.

If all the salmon are gone, what are these people fishing for?

The answer is both as simple and complex as the world of salmon.

In British Columbia, there are five species of salmon: chinook, coho, sockeye, chum and pink.

They arrive to spawn at different times of the year but the runs often overlap.

Even among the species, there are distinct stocks. Fraser River sockeye, for example, are divided into early Stuart (for the Stuart River system), early summer, summer and late stocks. They are all the same species, returning to the same river system, but at different times and headed to different places to spawn.

The vast majority of sockeye have now returned to the Fraser and its many tributaries, and that's why the Department of Fisheries and Oceans is able to say with reliable accuracy that only about 1.3 million fish made it back. About 10.6 million were expected, based on projections made four years ago when a large number of sockeye successfully spawned, and because monitoring showed big, healthy young salmon were headed out to sea. They just never came back, and the reason isn't known. Sea-lice infestations from fish farms, ocean changes and an influx of new predators, brought by warmer Pacific currents, are all suspects.

Read the full story in The Globe and Mail

Read related story in The Globe and Mail - Salmon in the pink on the Fraser River

Read background news stories on the crash of the Fraser River sockeye