The voice of B.C.'s organized fishing industry workers
LETTERS
The Fisherman welcomes letters to the editor. Letters must be signed and should be brief.
Aquaculture spreads to Island lakes
The provincial Ministry of the Environment, and rightfully so, seems to exhibit a zealous protection of its wild steelhead broodstock, and various concerned fishing groups were assured that aquaculture hatcheries and other operations would not be situated in areas affecting the spawning of such salmonids.
The hatcheries on Big Tree Creek and the proposed Roberts Lake hatchery clearly violate this stipulation. Roberts Lake is connected directly to the Bear River (Amor de Cosmos), a productive river for steelhead and cutthroat trout, as well as ■ pink, coho and chum salmon.
The fact that distance separates Roberts Creek from the Bear matters little, when we consider the devastating outbreak of IHN, the dreaded "sock-eye" disease, at the Summerland hatchery in the Interior of British Columbia a few years ago, and a more recent yet similar disaster in Washington, again involving steelhead. Diseases could easily be transmitted from the hatchery to the native salmonids in Roberts Lake, and vice versa, and then transmitted via migrating trout in the Roberts-Bear system.
A quick look at a map of proposed aquaculture sites (saltwater) in the local Department of Fisheries and Oceans office shows clearly the boom or bust, illogical impetus behind this aquaculture industry. Now, the same mentality is spreading to our relatively pristine, productive and as yet unspoiled and uncrowded Vancouver Island lakes.
I hope the general populace will help the Sayward residents in their protest, and I strongly urge the Ministry of Environment and Parks, and the Comox Strathcona Regional District board to preserve our Island lakes, and begin to trulymanage the aquaculture resource now.
Robert Bell-Irving QUATHIASKI COVE, B.C.
Chinook tag a landing tax
The decision to force commercial fishermen to pay for chinook tags is nothing more than imposition of a landings tax. We must protest paying for tags. A lot of fishermen have to borrow money for licences and now they will have to borrow for tags.
The commercial licence started for $100, then it went to $200 and then we were told the $100 increase was for salmon enhancement. Then it went to $400 and now to $800. All this was for enhancement. Now the $1 per chinook. Where is all this money going?
The fisheries department is giving free tags to sport fishing kids from the time baby get a name to 16 years. The agent selling sport licences gets 40 cents to write out a licence and 40 cents a pack of four tags. With licences going to kids for free, very few people are buying tags, they are borrowing them from their kids.
Karl Larson,
LUND
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The real cost of depletion
Logging on one watershed cost the fishing industry $8 million
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• Feeding the fry at Qualicum hatchery: losses at this and other facilities have been traced to siltation caused by clearcut logging. These losses can be calculated, says fisherman Steve Lawson, in the millions of dollars. Environmental problems are the fundamental reason salmon stocks have been unable to rebuild.
now under way by Tahsis Co. in that watershed.
In this case, the logging company's'precaution to control the effects of flash flooding has been to raise the bridges and to remove obstacles along the river channel so that increased run-off and debris will be less likely to get caught up and dam the river, which creates the flash flood when the dam gives way.
This is not likely to be sufficient protection for the hatchery, however, as the buildings are expected to be flooded out by the increased run-off alone. The Conumu watershed up to now has been intact and this has been a very successful hatchery serving five rivers in the area and providing millions of dollars in economic returns.
In fact, the economics are quite astounding if you account for the dollar value of the destruction. In the Little Qualicum. if we consider both the spawning channels and the river and their respective egg survival rates, the difference between an average year and the 1986 fry emergence rate is 53.5 million eggs.
Multiply this figure by 1.5 percent, which is the rate of return of mature fish for this river and it yields an amount of a little more than 800,000 salmon which will not be returning in 1989.
To place a dollar value on this loss, simply multiply by an average value per fish for all species of say $10 and this will put the cost of the destruction in excess of $8 million.
One must assume that federal fisheries would be deeply concerned by this kind of habitat destruction and cost, but not only were charges not laid, but fisheries had to be heavily pressured to even look seriously at the incident.
This was eventually done, months later, in an erosion study, but for some reason to this day they steadfastly refuse to release of copy of it.
None of the reasons or excuses given for this action stand up in the face of such staggering losses. The Little Qualicum case is unique in that it could be the first incident of this kind in which the careful documentation of the river by hatchery personnel provides a cost-benefit comparison that points up the significant economic value that should be placed on preserving a healthy watershed.
The fisheries department has been given wide-ranging powers and they would do well to use them actively to protect, on a corporate scale, this very valuable and much-loved public resource.
These problems have been with us for some time now and, in spite of much effort and money invested in hatcheries, we and the salmon continue to lose ground to the cumulative effects of pollution and habitat destruction.
Unfortunately, there has not been any provision made in the corporate structure for a conscience and we cannot reasonably expect them to act in a responsible manner until such time as the laws of man are made to reflect more closely the laws of nature.
We citizens, as individuals and organized groups, must continue to inform the public so they in turn may act in helping to bring about these changes which will promote and healthy and productive environment for the benefit of this and all future generations. • Steve Lawson, is a trailer who fishes the Sea Wolf out of Tofino. This article is adapted from a version printed in the Westerly News.
By STEVE LAWSON
RECENT discussion about the decline of the chinook stock in Georgia Strait has downplayed some issues which must be faced as we confront this problem in other areas of the coast.
I believe that there are three important factors that are the major contributors to the decline of the salmon stocks. First, Georgia Strait is a unique climatic basin bounded by Vancouver Island, the Olympic Peninsula and the Coast Range.
This basin is being supplied continually, all day and every day, with air and water pollutants from six pulp mills, all of which are chemically-operated plants as opposed to the newer mechanical process plants now used in other parts of the world.
The result is that many thousands of tons of sulphur dioxide released annually into the atmosphere over the Straits and elementary chemistry will show that all that is needed to produce sulphuric acid is the addition of water.
There is now confirmation as well that significant amounts of dioxins along with other toxic chemicals are also being loosed into these air and water environments.
Secondly, we must consider the effects of mine tailings in the watersheds which exist at both active and abandoned mining operations. The pollution here again involves acids. These are formed by the oxidation and addition of water to the tailings.
The acids in turn leach an array of toxic chemicals, including heavy metals, from the tailings into the watershed. There is a worldwide organization of mining engineers which has identified the release of arsenic into the rivers of the world as a major environmental crisis that we will be dealing with in future.
The mining industry has been sitting on this information for several years now, most likely because they don't want to draw attention to the fact that there is no known remedy for the situation.
The use of tailings ponds merely provide a stopgap of a few years of reduced leaching and there now is consensus that once this acid leaching process is initiated it will continue for centuries.
We may be in even more serious trouble than we now realize because chinook salmon are the most sensitive to pollution and they may well be an indicator of what will befall the remaining species unless we begin immediately to protect the water quality in our rivers.
The third major factor in the decline of the salmon is the more familiar one of habitat destruction resulting from present methods of clearcut logging in the watersheds. An
example of what is happening in this regard can be shown by an incident that occurred in January, 1986.
Heavy run-off and debris-choked streams at McMillan Bloedel's clearcuts on the west side of Mourft Arrowsmith on Vancouver Island caused a flash flood that resulted in the siltation of Cameron Lake for a three month period.
This silt then entered the Little Qualicum River and smothered most of the 160 million salmon eggs and salmon enhancement spawning channels, reducing egg survival to one-seventh of its average rate.
Some of the spawning channels were so silted that they had to be bulldozed out and replaced. This is not an isolated incident.
The hatchery personnel say that several other hatcheries are having the same difficulties.
The Conumu River hatchery in Nootka Sound is expected to be completely washed out, buildings and all, as a result of logging
• Clearcut logging above Qualicum hatchery in 1980 and 1981 threatened the viability of one of the coast's most productive enhancement projects.
THE FISHERMAN / JUNE 17,1988 • 5