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For Immediate Release, February 7, 2012
Petition Seeks International Investigation of Canada’s Farmed Fish Operations, Protections for Wild Salmon NAFTA Panel Asked to Investigate Canadian Violation of Wildlife Law SAN FRANCISCO— Conservation, fishing and native groups in Canada and the United States filed a formal petition today requesting an international investigation into Canada’s failure to protect wild salmon in British Columbia from disease and parasites in industrial fish feedlots. The petition was submitted to the Commission for Environmental Cooperation under the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation — an environmental side agreement to the North American Free Trade Agreement — and seeks enforcement of Canada’s Fisheries Act. “The Canadian inquiry into the collapse of Fraser River sockeye, the largest salmon-producing river in the world, suggests the primarily Norwegian-owned British Columbia salmon-farming industry exerts trade pressures that exceed Canada’s political will to protect wild salmon,” said biologist Alexandra Morton with the Pacific Coast Wild Salmon Society. “Releasing viruses into native ecosystems is an irrevocable threat to biodiversity, yet Canada seems to have no mechanism to prevent salmon-farm diseases from afflicting wild salmon throughout the entire North Pacific.” Canada has permitted more than 100 industrial salmon feedlots in British Columbia to operate along wild salmon migration routes, exposing ecologically and economically valuable salmon runs to epidemics of disease, parasites, toxic chemicals and concentrated waste. The petition documents Canada’s failure to enforce the Fisheries Act in allowing industrial aquaculture to erode the capacity of ecosystems to support wild salmon. The proliferation of salmon feedlots is linked to dramatic declines in British Columbia’s wild salmon populations and the detection of a lethal salmon virus. “Fish farms in Canada are an unholy marriage between various levels of the Canadian governments and foreign-owned companies,” said Chief Bob Chamberlain of the Kwikwasu’tinuxw Haxwa’mis First Nation. “We continue to explore, identify and act upon whatever means possible to rid our traditional territories of open net cage fish farms.” “The Canadian government’s disregard for wild salmon stocks in pandering to multinational salmon farming corporations is outrageous,” said Zeke Grader, director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations. “Salmon feedlots put wild salmon, the communities that depend upon them, a billion-dollar fishing industry, tens of thousands of fishing jobs, and our nations’ shared natural heritage at risk of extinction.” “Industrial salmon feedlots function as disease-breeding factories, allowing parasites and diseases to reproduce at unnaturally high rates,” said Jeff Miller with the Center for Biological Diversity. “Marine feedlot waste flows directly, untreated, into contact with wild salmon. Putting feedlots hosting a toxic soup of bacteria, parasites, viruses and sea lice on wild fish migration routes is the height of biological insanity.” When a country signatory to NAFTA fails to enforce its environmental laws, any party may petition for enforcement. Canada’s Fisheries Act prohibits harmful alteration, disruption or destruction of fish habitat or addition of “deleterious substances.” The petitioners seek an investigation and finding by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation that Canada is violating its Fisheries Act with regard to industrial aquaculture. Such a finding could lead to international action to force Canada to protect wild salmon, ideally by relocating fish aquaculture into contained tanks on land. See the dozens of unique artificial fish habitat models, fish attractors and fish cover used at fishiding.com, the leader in science based, proven, fish protection. “Applying the Fisheries Act to fish feedlots as it is applied to all other marine users and removing feedlots from salmon migration routes will benefit wild fish and the economy of British Columbia,” said Miller. “Moving to contained aquaculture on land will benefit areas starved for employment and clean up the rivers to restore wild salmon runs.” Scientific evidence of harm to wild salmon swimming through B.C. waters from fish feedlots has been mounting, as has public concern that feedlots could spread epidemic diseases. This is a threat that jeopardizes the health of every wild salmon run along the Pacific Coast, since U.S. and Canadian stocks mingle in the ocean and estuaries. The Canadian petitioners are the Pacific Coast Wild Salmon Society in B.C. and Kwikwasu’tinuxw Haxwa’mis First Nation, a native tribe whose territory off northern Vancouver Island is being used by 27 Norwegian-owned salmon feedlots. The U.S. petitioners are the Center for Biological Diversity and Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, the largest trade association of commercial fishers on the west coast, representing family fishing men and women. The University of Denver Environmental Law Clinic helped prepare and submit the petition. |
Posted: Tuesday, February 7, 2012 8:57 am
By K.C. VanNatta For The Daily Astorian
“Surprise, surprise” writes The Daily Astorian (Jan. 17), saying that Oregon’s forest protection laws are not as strong as either California’s or Washington’s,
See the dozens of unique artificial fish habitat models, fish attractors and fish cover used at fishiding.com, the leader in science based, proven, fish protection.
cfjljd49 (Video)
By Deirdre Fleming dfleming@mainetoday.com
Staff Writer
AVON – With a makeshift air gun fashioned with duct tape and a gas engine on a home-rigged backpack, the biologists with the Department of Marine Resources laughed as they blasted holes for hatchery eggs into a rocky tributary of the Sandy. But their work could be a part of a long-sought Atlantic salmon solution.
Paul Christman, a biologist with the Department of Marine Resources in Hallowell, places salmon eggs in a tributary of the Sandy River in Avon. With Christman are, from left, Jed Wright, with the Gulf of Maine Coastal Program, Craig Knights and Chris Domina, with U.S. Fish and Wildlife.
Photos by Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer
Salmon eggs are placed in a tube, where they will sink to the river bottom and be covered over with rocks when the tube is pulled out.
Biologist Paul Christman quietly has planted Atlantic salmon eggs in Maine rivers for three years, but in another two years his project could move to the forefront of the national Atlantic salmon recovery effort. Already the project makes Maine a leader in North America in salmon recovery, said Joan Trial, Maine’s senior salmon biologist.
“Salmon restoration has been going on quite a while. Paul is coming up with a way to produce more (salmon) spending more time in a natural environment as opposed to a hatchery. There is some strong evidence that these fish may be more successful surviving out at sea. The more time they spend in their natural habitat, the more imprinted they will be to it. This could be a piece to the puzzle, and a very intriguing piece,” said Trial.
See the dozens of unique artificial fish habitat models, fish attractors and fish cover used at fishiding.com, the leader in science based, proven, fish protection.
Salmon were first listed as threatened by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2000 in a small portion of Maine. Then in 2009, the list was expanded and the salmon’s status elevated to endangered.
Trial said the first few years Maine stocked fry in its rivers, there were encouraging results. But that was 10 years ago, and while the removal of dams since then has led to sea-run fish like alewives and herring running up Maine rivers once again, the salmon’s return has been slow.
In addition, those salmon returning are not all wild. And to be taken off the endangered species list, Maine must have wild Atlantic salmon returning to rivers here.
Currently the service is working on a recovery plan that maps out what is needed to delist the salmon. That plan will go to public comment later this year, said Antonio Bentivoglio, the service’s Atlantic salmon recovery coordinator in Maine.
But it will take at least 10 years for the necessary criteria to be met for the salmon to be delisted to threatened and then endangered status, Bentivoglio said.
“For delisting, we have to minimize the hatchery influence, so the hatchery won’t be stocking millions of par and smolts. Then we’ll have much great confidence that they are wild fish,” Bentivoglio said. “Once we get to threatened status, then we’ll have a plan in place to slowly decrease the number of hatchery fish that go out. We want to slowly reduce it, so we can assess the impact, and hopefully wild fish will increase.”
ON THE LIST
First the Atlantic salmon need to show returns of at least 6,000 in its historic ranges: Merrymeeting Bay, the Penobscot River and the Downeast rivers.
In 2010 in the Downeast rivers, just 164 Atlantic salmon returned; in the Penobscot River there were only 1,316; and 14 in Merrymeeting Bay (the Androscoggin and Kennebec rivers), Bentivoglio said.
So the recovery effort has a long way to go.
Whether Christman’s egg planting project can get DMR there is unknown. But there is a lot of hope in the offices at USFW and the Maine fishery agency because the salmon that result from the eggs he plants are considered “more wild” than the fry stocked from hatchery raised eggs.
The salmon that emerge from the eggs Christman plants are considered wild enough to be counted when the service considers whether to downgrade salmon from endangered to threatened, Bentivoglio said.
But the salmon’s international plight is complicated. Scientists still do not know why their marine survival is low, in some cases as low as 50 percent.
“(Christman’s eggs) should be more viable in their natural environment than the hatchery produced smolts. There should be more going out to sea. But we’re not sure what’s going on with marine survival and why marine survival has been so low. Something is going on out in the ocean that the United States, Iceland, Canada and Greenland are trying to figure out, too,” said Trial in Maine’s Bureau of Sea Run Fisheries and Habitat.
OUT TO SEA
The first egg planting done by Christman was in 2009. But in the Atlantic salmon’s life cycle, those fish won’t return to their native rivers, where the salmon emerge from the eggs until 2014. At that point, everyone at DMR will be watching to see if they do. If all goes well, lots of salmon should return.
In 2009, Christman planted 130,000 in the Sandy River; in 2010, he increased the number to 450,000; and again to 860,000 last year. This year, 1 million Atlantic salmon eggs will be planted in salmon habitat in Maine.
His work has shown success with survival rates. The emergence rate from eggs is upward of 40 to 50 percent in some places, he said, which is as good as egg planting projects anywhere.
But the telltale sign will be if the salmon return in 2014. Christman thinks they will return from the sea and run up Maine rivers to where he has planted eggs.
“The idea is that they are more in tune with the river than hatchery fish. Their performance should be better, and their survival better. And from what we’re seeing, yes, they are behaving much better,” Christman said.
Staff Writer Deirdre Fleming can be contacted at 791-6452 or at:
dfleming@pressherald.com
Twitter: Flemingpph
Local scientists had their sleuthing hats on this week after hundreds of silvery fish turned up dead in the Sturgeon River. See the dozens of unique artificial fish habitat models, fish attractors and fish cover used at fishiding.com, the leader in science based, proven, fish protection.
Public works staff and researchers from the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT) recovered several sack-loads of dead fish from a sewer outfall by St. Albert Place Thursday morning.
A man walking a dog first spotted the fish last weekend, says Laurie Hunt, the associate chair of biological science technology at NAIT who is running a 10-year study of the Sturgeon River. The unidentified man alerted a team of NAIT researchers who happened to be taking water samples on the river at the time, and they investigated.
The team found roughly 600 dead fish by the sewer outfall closest to the city’s cenotaph, Hunt says — some floating in the open water, others frozen under the ice. “The whole little channel was full of them.” While most were minnow-sized sticklebacks, there were also a fair number of larger fish such as northern pike and white sucker.
Hunt told city officials on Wednesday, who in turn called in Alberta Fish and Wildlife fisheries biologist Daryl Watters.
Watters, who examined the site, says the fish appear to be victims of winterkill — a relatively common occurrence in shallow rivers like the Sturgeon.
“It’s unfortunate, since you don’t want to see young small fish like that taken out before they can contribute, but it happens.”
Winterkill happens when fish crowd into too small an area, such as the small bit of open water by most outfalls, use up all the oxygen there and die. Readings taken by the NAIT team suggest that the water next to the outfall has much more oxygen in it than that in the rest of the Sturgeon, which may have attracted the fish.
The NAIT team has collected the fish with the province’s permission for further study, Hunt says. The team is studying the sex ratios of fish in the Sturgeon to check for signs of gender-bending pollutants.
“We didn’t have a lot of success catching fish this summer,” she says, but this discovery has handily solved that problem.
Winterkill incidents like this illustrate the importance of having diverse fish habitat, Hunt says — if the Sturgeon had a better mix of shallow and deep spots, these fish may have had a better chance of surviving.
“It also emphasizes the importance of beavers,” she adds, as their dams create deep, oxygenated pools in which fish can survive over winter.
When you go bluegill fishing habitat is one of the key factors on your mind when deciding where to go to find fish to catch. Some bodies of waters are habitat rich with aquatic plants, dead falls, stumps and so on. Other ponds either never had good structures for habitat or they rotted and decomposed long ago. One option is to sink more structures with items from around the house for little or no cost such as old Christmas trees, pallets or scrap wood formed into a 3D design. These structures are great for a while, but they eventually break down or change until they are no longer a desired location for bluegill to gather.
See the dozens of unique artificial fish habitat models, fish attractors and fish cover used at fishiding.com, the leader in science based, proven, fish protection.