Only a handful of Chilko sockeye have been able to pass through the slide zone to date, casting doubt over the future of the superfish – and perhaps the future of Fraser salmon
Every year, as the famed Chilko Lake sockeye return to spawn and die, hundreds of Tŝilhqot’in celebrate with their annual Nation Gathering on the banks of the Chilcotin River in British Columbia. The main events include fish cutting, fish eating and a hotly-contested fishing derby.
The Chilcotin is a tributary of the Fraser River, once the world’s foremost sockeye factory with annual returns of 100 million fish, which comprised up to 80 per cent of the regional diet in times before European contact. Today, stocks throughout the Fraser basin, an expanse of land nearly the size of the United Kingdom, are a fraction of what they once were, butChilko sockeye as a source of hope.
The numbers are bleaker on the Chilcotin. Since July 30, sonar has detected 31 chinook and 16 sockeye passing through the slide area, according a report from the Tŝilhqot’in National Government’s Salmon Emergency Task Force. They were hoping for 150,000, alreadyThose counts represent the collapse of a fish that once sustained much of what is now B.C., yet the outcry that marked 2009 has been replaced with a sense of resignation.
Professor Scott Hinch, who has authored or co-authored some 300 papers on Pacific salmon, recalls a sweltering summer day in 1994, when the paramount importance of temperature to salmon survival became apparent to him. He was monitoring salmon runs around Hell’s Gate, the violently rapid stretch of the Fraser about 200 kilometres upstream from Vancouver, when he noticed the tagged fish he was tracking turning around and going downstream.
Fish Sockeye Fraser Future Degree Degrees Temperature First Nations University Of British Columbia Stephen Harper
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