Voluntary borrowing ratios by the big banks and other financial houses got us in the fix we are in. Voluntary by-catch limits on king salmon, chum salmon, herring, squid, etc, have the marine ecosystem in the collapse it is undergoing. And I need to start repeating, it is not 'foreign fishing.' Unless you consider Seattle a foreign nation. That's where the West Coast and Alaska trawl fleet is based out of for the most part. By volume of harvest that is. There are smaller trawlers based out of places like Newport, OR and Kodiak, AK.
The collapse of our marine ecosystems, which includes ten thousand miles of anadromous streams in Oregon and Washington alone, are the result of unsustainable fishing practices. And of course using gold dredges in the middle of some big spawning rivers, building dams galore, and cutting down the shade trees didn't help. Like the financial industry which spent billions of dollars influencing our very own representatives to stab us in the back, the big trawl companies spend scores of millions doing the same thing. The spending continues unabated, at least in the fishing industry.
Some people are flabbergasted as to how the salmon runs could get so poor, all the way from the Sacramento River to Norton Sound in the Bering Straits. A bunch of people are mad as hell and aren't going to take it anymore, and are joining conservation groups by the truck load. But what can you do when the Deputy muckety-muck of the Oregon Dept. of Fish and Wildlife says that the estuaries won't support any more smolt?
Are the runs now even close to what they were a hundred years ago, or 150 years ago? Not by a long shot; maybe at about 5%. So why is ODFW saying in effect "don't bother building up the runs"? Is it because one astute Legislator wants the public involved by way of a hatch-box program, because you can't wait on bureaucrats? Gosh, if the runs came back, it might make them look foolish!
I've not heard of such a good notion as the hatch-box idea in a long time. The contraption is only about a foot long, made of hard plastic with a lot of little holes. Holes too small for the chinook eggs to go through, buy big enough for the little alevins to wiggle through once hatched. Get eggs from someone who knows what they are doing, fill up the trays, bolt the box back together, tie an anchor on it and chuck it in a creek. You have no lack of creeks and rivers to put them in; places that used to have spawning salmon, but don't now.
The beauty of it is that Mrs. Higgins' fifth grade class can adopt a hole on some creek to restore the run in, and henceforth take an interest in the ecology of that creek. Maybe those kids would even learn to not be afraid of walking in the woods. How else are you going to create a sensitivity for stream, river, and marine ecosystem health?
What you get without some sort of education is highway departments putting in steel culverts that block salmon passage, fishermen who troll in the summer and drive a Cat up fish creeks in the winter, County Commissioners who allow gold dredging in the middle of salmon streams and rivers(STILL!!!), non-selective commercial fishing methods where not appropriate.(Not that any non-selective methods are appropriate, but I'm being politically correct here because I have relatives who are commercial fishermen in Alaska. Alaska also has many fisheries where there is no by-catch to speak of.)
Lets put some numbers on chinook by-catch in the trawl fisheries. In the whiting mid-water trawl fishery and the bottom-trawl fishery on the West Coast the by-catch has reached almost 20,000 king salmon in one year. That was a couple of years ago. The reported by-catch about the same time in the Bering Sea was 122,000 king salmon. These are REPORTED numbers. An ex-Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game employee confirmed what a Greenpeace campaigner told me, that the total salmon by-catch for the year was nearly 400,000, of all species.
Is it any wonder the runs are failing along the entire Pacific Rim. If there is any justice, the trawlers are fishing out their target species too. Does this sound 'sustainable'? Not by the original definition when the World Health Organization coined the term. The government might as well call gold mining and putting arsnic in the salmon streams 'sustainable', because it sustains a few miners and jewelers for a short time.
Fifth-graders in Oregon used to be able to hatch salmon, but the Oregon Dept. of Fish and Game put a stop to it. The runs kept falling. Looks to me like somebody in this picture thinks they are smarter than a fifth-grader.
The collapse of our marine ecosystems, which includes ten thousand miles of anadromous streams in Oregon and Washington alone, are the result of unsustainable fishing practices. And of course using gold dredges in the middle of some big spawning rivers, building dams galore, and cutting down the shade trees didn't help. Like the financial industry which spent billions of dollars influencing our very own representatives to stab us in the back, the big trawl companies spend scores of millions doing the same thing. The spending continues unabated, at least in the fishing industry.
Some people are flabbergasted as to how the salmon runs could get so poor, all the way from the Sacramento River to Norton Sound in the Bering Straits. A bunch of people are mad as hell and aren't going to take it anymore, and are joining conservation groups by the truck load. But what can you do when the Deputy muckety-muck of the Oregon Dept. of Fish and Wildlife says that the estuaries won't support any more smolt?
Are the runs now even close to what they were a hundred years ago, or 150 years ago? Not by a long shot; maybe at about 5%. So why is ODFW saying in effect "don't bother building up the runs"? Is it because one astute Legislator wants the public involved by way of a hatch-box program, because you can't wait on bureaucrats? Gosh, if the runs came back, it might make them look foolish!
I've not heard of such a good notion as the hatch-box idea in a long time. The contraption is only about a foot long, made of hard plastic with a lot of little holes. Holes too small for the chinook eggs to go through, buy big enough for the little alevins to wiggle through once hatched. Get eggs from someone who knows what they are doing, fill up the trays, bolt the box back together, tie an anchor on it and chuck it in a creek. You have no lack of creeks and rivers to put them in; places that used to have spawning salmon, but don't now.
The beauty of it is that Mrs. Higgins' fifth grade class can adopt a hole on some creek to restore the run in, and henceforth take an interest in the ecology of that creek. Maybe those kids would even learn to not be afraid of walking in the woods. How else are you going to create a sensitivity for stream, river, and marine ecosystem health?
What you get without some sort of education is highway departments putting in steel culverts that block salmon passage, fishermen who troll in the summer and drive a Cat up fish creeks in the winter, County Commissioners who allow gold dredging in the middle of salmon streams and rivers(STILL!!!), non-selective commercial fishing methods where not appropriate.(Not that any non-selective methods are appropriate, but I'm being politically correct here because I have relatives who are commercial fishermen in Alaska. Alaska also has many fisheries where there is no by-catch to speak of.)
Lets put some numbers on chinook by-catch in the trawl fisheries. In the whiting mid-water trawl fishery and the bottom-trawl fishery on the West Coast the by-catch has reached almost 20,000 king salmon in one year. That was a couple of years ago. The reported by-catch about the same time in the Bering Sea was 122,000 king salmon. These are REPORTED numbers. An ex-Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game employee confirmed what a Greenpeace campaigner told me, that the total salmon by-catch for the year was nearly 400,000, of all species.
Is it any wonder the runs are failing along the entire Pacific Rim. If there is any justice, the trawlers are fishing out their target species too. Does this sound 'sustainable'? Not by the original definition when the World Health Organization coined the term. The government might as well call gold mining and putting arsnic in the salmon streams 'sustainable', because it sustains a few miners and jewelers for a short time.
Fifth-graders in Oregon used to be able to hatch salmon, but the Oregon Dept. of Fish and Game put a stop to it. The runs kept falling. Looks to me like somebody in this picture thinks they are smarter than a fifth-grader.
posted by Alaskacafe at 9:42 AM
