reuters.com — By Teresa Carson PORTLAND, Oregon (Reuters) - The U.S. government on Thursday closed almost all of the ocean off the West Coast to salmon fishing, clearing the way for governors of states hard hit by years of declining catches to seek federal relief...
May 2, 2008 View in Crawl 4
friedcalamariMay 2, 2008
Let's PUNish them.
qball1974May 3, 2008
LOL
prometheansparkMay 3, 2008
No. Plenty of salmon left the river to the ocean, they just never came back. We don't know what happened to them, it's a big ocean, but it was almost certainly something to do with ocean conditions - which have relatively little human influence.
prometheansparkMay 3, 2008
The origin of this problem is with the central valley run of king salmon. This run is usually very large (hundreds of thousands to millions of fish), it is also backed by a hatchery which prevents fishing pressure from affecting the number of baby salmon that go to sea each year. Sea lions are a problem for some smaller runs that have to gather under fish ladders where they make easy targets, but for the sacramento river run of salmon this is not the case. Salmon fishing was very poor last year, and since salmon grow fast this means that fishermen didn't catch enough of this years fish to explain their disapearance. Somewhere between the hatchery and last year, the salmon just disappeared. It's doubtful that river conditions did this because two years of fish were decimated, they were in the river at different times and it's unlikely that something in the river could have killed such an unusual number of fish twice like this. The fish were all together at the same time in the ocean though, so the leading theory is that something about the bait and ocean temperature led the fish to either starve, get sick, or get lost. It's a big ocean and we don't really know. Fortunately the hatcheries will churn out lots of fish this year to make up for the lack of returning fish from the ocean, and the hatcheries are improving their release protocols to help with the survival rate of the fish in case that was a factor. We should know next winter if there is a healthy number of returning 3-year old fish (most come back when they're 4), that will indicate there are enough fish out there to support the fishing industry. There are too few fish right now so they prefer to get disaster relief over spending time and fuel to produce a mediocre yield.
onedeepMay 3, 2008
Actually, it is a bit more complicated than that.Knocking down the tree canopies along the water's edge has increased overall temperatures of the water itself, making less hospitable to redd and fry.Runoff from development puts contaminants in the water, killing a lot of those who do make it through the higher temperatures.Overfishing gets those who make it to the ocean.Sea lions only really become obnoxious and decimate populations at fish ladders. Salmon have to concentrate along a certain path (as opposed to spreading out across the entire width of the river, making it easy for the lions to destroy the fish returning to spawn
orph3usMay 3, 2008
I agree about switching to pure fishing farms. I wonder why they don't do that? Too expensive? Laws against it?