Big salmon runs expected in British Columbia
Odd Grydeland, FishfarmingXpert, March 5, 2014
There are also positive signs for salmon returns in other areas, including the States of Washington, Oregon and California.
Despite numerous predictions by environmental groups and anti-salmon farming campaigners that the sky is falling on the region’s salmon stocks due to parasites and pestilence originating in these salmon farms, record numbers of wild/enhanced salmon are coming back to spawn in many of the rivers on the west coast of North America. Jeremy Maynard is a sport-fishing guide and writer for the Campbell River-based newspaper Courier-Islander, and he describes the forecast for this summer in B.C.;
There’s much to look forward to in the coming summer fishing season around southern BC but one of the potential highlight features is the return of sockeye salmon to the Fraser River. Note the caveat of the word potential, for there are no sure bets when looking ahead with salmon these days and this cautionary perspective seems to apply especially to Fraser sockeye in the past couple of decades. However the recently released 2014 forecast is of a size that even if it only came in at half the projections we would still have some good fishing for these prized salmon.
The phrase “Fraser sockeye” gets used in the media as though they are one monolithic stock but the reality is that there is a lot of complexity built into those two words. That should come as no surprise given the enormous area sockeye inhabit in this watershed and there are over 80 individual sockeye stocks that comprise the Fraser aggregate. Each of these is categorized for management purposes in four main run-timing (entry into the river) groups — Early Stuart, Early Summer, Summer and Late.
One distinctive feature of sockeye salmon is what is called cyclical dominance, which means that, all other factors like marine survival notwithstanding, not every year generates the same abundance of fish. This relates to another distinctive feature of this salmon species as most stocks spend a year or so rearing in a lake before migrating to sea and it is thought the lake environment can’t sustain a large number of sockeye fry each and every year, needing a few years of lower demand — less sockeye fry — for the lake ecosystem to recover its maximum productivity.
The majority of sockeye stocks are four-year old fish when they mature, although there are some age-five’s and a few age-three’s, notably the Harrison River stock which unusually has evolved to rear in the river without a lake residency before migrating to sea, in effect a year early. This background is useful to consider when thinking about the 2014 forecast because perhaps more importantly than with any other salmon species the brood year has big implications for the return year and of course 2010 was a special brood year, that of the “biggest return in a hundred years” as it was frequently described in the media then.
Because on their homeward journey some Fraser sockeye migrate through the southern side of Juan de Fuca Strait and are caught in US as well as Canadian waters, management of these fish is one of the cornerstones of the joint Pacific Salmon Treaty. Thus DFO staff work in conjunction with Salmon Commission staff when making determinations about these fish and one key piece of information is the pre-season forecast.
Before looking at the 2014 forecast it is worth having a quick look back at the 2010 forecast and what actually occurred. These forecasts are given a percentage probability that the run size will be below a certain number so the higher the possible return number of fish the higher the probability it will be less than the amount given. The pre-season forecasts are given a range of probabilities all the way from 10% (low number of sockeye) to 90% (very high number) but for pre-season planning purposes the 50% probability number is used.
In 2010 the 50% probability number for the aggregate (all run-timing groups) was about 11.5 million sockeye and the 90% probability number was nearly 29 million. As we found out, nature beat the one in 10 odds and easily exceeded even that very large amount, with the run-size (catch plus escapement) estimated in-season at 34.5 million sockeye. Fishermen of all kinds had a bonanza, with a commercial catch in Canada alone of 10.45 million sockeye.
So, to the 2014 pre-season forecast. At 23 million sockeye the 50% probability forecast is more than twice the 2010 forecast at the same level, with the 90% probability number this year estimated at 72.5 million! At this upper end the calculations start to range outside of those encountered before and so the confidence level in the predictions must be a little less than usual, however there’s many decades of experience by those who develop the forecast and the data is the data….
The starting place for the 2014 pre-season forecast is the spawning grounds in 2010, with between 15 and 16 million sockeye assessed in the escapement estimates. Conditions were favourable with good egg-to fry and then fry-to-smolt survival, about 55 million from Chilko Lake alone. The smolts from the dominant age-four maturing sockeye migrated out in 2012, with the leading indicators suggesting favourable conditions in the critical first few months at sea.
The coho and pink salmon from around the southern BC coast that went to sea in 2012 and returned in 2013 did well overall, in the case of pink salmon very well — a record return to the Quinsam River, the biggest return in over 50 years to the Squamish and a 26 million pink return to the Fraser to cite but a few examples. Coho were proportionately less strong but clearly the 2013 return year was the best in some time and broadly showed the rebuilding trend for these salmon is continuing. It seems reasonable to hope that the young sockeye fared as well as these other salmon species and we can only further hope they then found decent feeding on the high seas.
It’s worth mentioning that Fraser sockeye aren’t the only stock that has a strong pre-season forecast, for the return to the Stamp/Somass watershed near Port Alberni might be very large as well. There was a record return of jacks, precocious males, in 2013, the number of which is often taken as an indicator of how a given year class survived in the first months at sea. Alberni Inlet might be a place to go to catch some early summer sockeye before the Fraser fish start to show.
It’s early days yet and fishermen shouldn’t let their expectations get too out of hand, all the same if the pre-season forecasts come in even remotely on target the summer of 2014 could be one to remember!
