British Columbia's salmon: Socked

November 19, 2009 The Economist A MYSTERIOUS decline in the numbers of spawning salmon has become one of the rites of autumn in British Columbia, bringing worries of financial and job losses, threats of extinction and a perplexing lack of answers. This season only 1.7m of the 10.4m sockeye salmon that were forecast to return to the Fraser river in fact made it—a 50-year low. That prompted Stephen Harper, Canada’s prime minister, to ask Bruce Cohen, a justice of British Columbia’s Supreme Court, to hold an inquiry into the causes of the sockeye’s decline. Applause was muted. Four other federal inquiries held over the past three decades have failed to halt the decline. Many British Columbians fear that the province’s rich salmon fishery, worth about C$500m ($475m), could disappear like that for Atlantic cod. Of the five species of wild salmon involved, two (pink and chum) remain relatively abundant. But stocks of coho, chinook and sockeye are down by more than 70% since the early 1990s. Chinooks on the Thompson river are officially listed as endangered. Hardest hit are Fraser sockeye, once the most valuable fishery. Two groups of sockeye that spawn in lakes near Vancouver are also listed as endangered.

See the full story in The Economist

Read background on the Judicial Inquiry and collapse of the Fraser River sockeye.