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Charges that roe herring gill-netters sour spawning grounds with huge volumes of dead fish appear to have been refuted by tests carried out last year by the Nanaimo Biological Station.
Using special gear designed by UFAWU Victoria Local secretary Cliff Gissing, a tireless advocate of the merits of herring gillnetting, station researcher Doug Hay set out to determine how much herring drops from gillnets before it can be landed.
Hay told a fisheries information meeting in Vancouver Dec. 14 that preliminary results of the work indicate gillnetting is not damaging the stocks.
The 1981 program investigated four problem areas: loss of fish that drop out of the net, loss of fish that pass through the net but are injured, the impact of dead fish on the water on the grounds, and the impact of gear concentrations on spawning patterns.
Gissing devised a special net, 18 inches wide and mounted the length of the punt, to catch fish that fell from his 2'/i-inch mesh net. As a check, divers searched the spawning beds under Giss-ing's punt and other punts to see if the net was effective.
In one test, Hay reported, a startling 14 percent of the total volume taken in the net landed in the drop-out net, an unacceptable loss if the fish died.
But in fact most herring survived the experience, he said, and many even spawned in the submerged area of the drop-out net.
Other tests showed a drop-out rate of six to eight percent, Hay said, but in all cases the divers reported that the vast majority of the fish survived. A survey indicated one dead fish every 10 square meters.
Over the entire Lambert Channel spawning area, this suggested about 42 tons lost through drop-out, or about .08 percent of the 5,500-ton total catch.
"With a lethal catch of less than one percent, I don't judge that a serious problem," Hay said. About eight fish were killed and lost for every 1,000 captured.
Similarly encouraging results were achieved in tests designed
to study the survival offish that passed through the gillnet without being caught. For this experiment, Gissing designed a special net in which a web trap was constructed behind the single panel of mesh. All fish which passed through the mesh were captured alive in the trap.
"Our conclusion was that most fish survive," Hay reported, "and not very many suffer scale loss." The trapped fish were impounded and moved by barge to Nanaimo, where many survive to this day.
In related tests, chemical analysis of spawning grounds was carried out to determine whether rotting herring were altering the water. No evidence of "souring" was found.
Hay said the trapping tests proved the high selectivity of gillnet gear. No fish under 200 millimetres were caught in the net, meaning only larger fish were at risk. Fish over 200 mm made up only 30 percent of the stocks in that openings.
Aerial surveys of gillnet concentrations on the spawning area have not yet been fully
analyzed, but about 60 percent of the fleet was fishing over vegetation. Not all vegetation was spawning area, however.
"I have found no evidence of deleterious effects of gillnetters on the spawning grounds or the fish," Hay concluded.'"But the gillnets do take the biggest fish and this may have unpredictable results."
Marked down for future study is the sudden shift of herring spawning patterns which has seen traditional spawning beds abandoned even though large bodies of mature fish are in the area. Hay speculates that concentrations of vessels on the grounds before the spawning begins may force the fish to avoid the area.
Gissing told the meeting he was "reassured about the gillnet impact on the stocks, but I'm still concerned about the impact of fishing on spawning vegetation."
He said he has become convinced that even fish which suffer scale loss can regenerate their scales in as little as six weeks.
Arms race hurts workers in Ontario F-18 jet plant
OTTAWA (LN) — Terry Sar-geant, a member of Parliament and NDP defence critic, never thought buying the McDonnell Douglas F-18 Hornet jet fighter was a good idea. The United Auto Workers now agree with him.
It wasn't always that way and the UAW and Sargeant now find themselves on the same side for different reasons.
Sargeant opposed the deal from the beginning for moral and practical reasons. He is morally opposed to any action that could extend the arms race. But if Canada has to have a new fighter aircraft, he believes the F-18 is not it.
"To begin with it is expensive-as hell. And Canada should not spend what has now grown to $5.2 billion on an aircraft to fulfil a scenario that I don't think will ever happen.
"If war comes," says Sar-
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geant, "it won't be the protracted, conventional kind the F-18 is designed to fight. The money would be far better spent on non-military production that economists have shown always generates a higher economic return. For example, every dollar spent on health care has doubled the economic impact of the same dollar spent on military hardware."
The UAW at first actively lobbied for the F-18 deal. They did that, says UAW Local 1967 president Bill Patrick, on the promise of 2,500 new jobs at the McDonnell Douglas plant in Malton, Ont.
The company denies ever having made such a promise and now, about a year after winning the fighter contract, has laid off 2,200 workers in Malton with the promise of up to 850 more layoffs to come.
The contract calls for "industrial offsets" that require McDonnel Douglas to spend $2.8 billion in Canada. Workers in Quebec and Nova Scotia are already at work on jobs created by those offsets.
Sargeant says he's ready to support the workers' call for an inquiry. But he believes a more useful activity would be research and develop ways to convert the Malton works to something other than aircraft production.
The Ontario Federation of Labor has already endorsed UAW resolutions calling for a full-scale effort to produce rapid transit systems and for public ownership of the McDonnell Douglas plant if the corporation can't keep the workforce fully employed. •
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THE FISHERMAN — JANUARY 29, 1982/11
