Comment
Against the flow; fisheries mismanagement on the Skeena River
Responding to a prompt embedded in the core of its being, a steelhead leaves its hunting grounds in the north Pacific and begins the last leg of a peregrination that began hundreds of miles inland and three years earlier. It’s been a perilous journey from fry to juvenile to adult, dodging the beaks of birds and the maws of bigger fish. But the steelhead survived, feeding voraciously until it was 34 inches long and weighed 13 pounds.
Following the primordial pulse of a natural global positioning system honed by thousands of years of evolution, it slips through coastal waters toward another threat to its survival. As it nears the coast the fish is joined by great schools of migrating salmon—sockeye, chum, pink, and coho—all responding to the same siren call.
The Alaskan fleets are working the waters off Noyes Island and Tree Point. Hundreds of fish are taken in their nets. The steelhead escapes the Alaskan twine and a week later runs the gauntlet again as it swims past the mouth of the Nass River where the Department of Fisheries and Oceans has granted an opening to the Canadian gillnet fleet.
Two weeks later the steelhead enters Chatham Sound, nearing the approaches to the Skeena River. Topside, a fisher is paying out his net into the shallow waters near the river mouth. Fish are concentrated there, makeing it a productive place to fish. It’s also a place where summer steelhead are more easily intercepted.
The fisher doesn’t want steelhead. He wants sockeye—the money fish. To him, steelhead and coho are a pain in the ass. The dwindling number of the latter led to total fishing closures in past seasons and the former are the reason he has been forced to adopt conservation measures which he knows don’t work.
The fisher is paying out a gillnet. It is a product of evolution too. The first gillnetters were First Nations who wove nets of cedar bark, then hung stones from the bottom of their handiwork and attached wood to the top so that the mesh panels would hang vertically in the water.
Quick to recognize how deadly these were, and caring nothing about the collateral damage, white North American fishers embraced gillnetting. By the late 1800s the technology had expanded to Europe and Japan. In 1931, Laurie Jarelainen created the first powered drum to haul in the nets. Later, war-driven technology—depth sounders and radar—made gillnetting even more deadly.
The gillnet is woven from monofilament nylon dyed so that fish can’t see it. The net is 23 feet deep, and 1200 feet from the first cork that hits the water to the last cork needed to suspend it—a little longer than three football fields.
Fighting the odds
The steelhead hits the net moments after it’s fully extended. The mesh slides over its head and lodges behind its gill plate in the delicate membrane that acts as its lungs. The fish fights for its freedom with all the raw power that makes sport fishers prize the species.
There is a splash. The fisher sees a disturbance near the end of his cork line. He curses; he can tell by the commotion that it’s a steelhead. He knows this because steelhead fight harder and longer than salmon. To increase its chances of survival he could pull in the net immediately, but he won’t until he believes it’s caught enough fish.
When the moment comes, he pulls it aboard and pulls fish from the net. After twisting a dozen sockeye from it, he reaches the steelhead. He pries it free and tosses it in the recovery box.
He’s one of the few gillnetters who have a workable blue box with water flowing through it. All skippers are supposed to use them; they’re also supposed to use shorter nets and make shorter sets. But the enforcement presence on the fishing grounds is nearly non-existent, so there has been little buy-in on the part of gillnetters. The effectiveness of the boxes, and other so-called “selective fishing” techniques, is questionable anyway.
The fisher makes another set. He looks in the recovery box. The steelhead is upright. He waits a while, then pitches it over the side. There is no guarantee that the fish won’t die from the trauma it has just endured. The fisher knows this. He also knows that his is not the only boat on the grounds. On this particular day there are 250 others, each with 1200 feet of net—or more than 90 kilometres of net if they were all tied end-to-end. But the netting configuration of the fleet is not a line, but a labyrinth made by boats all jockeying for the most productive spot.
The steelhead, dazed after its first encounter, must still find its way through this maze. Skeena fish have been running this gauntlet for over a century. Steelhead are a hardy species, but to think that they can stand being gilled in one or more nets, then swim upstream and survive long enough to spawn six or eight months after that, is pure fantasy.
Clearly, the only way a Skeena-bound steelhead can withstand the killing force of the various fleets it must pass—as well as additional pressure it faces from sport and native fisheries once it’s in the river—is by having a population sizeable enough to survive the attrition.
A management nightmare
Any mixed-stock fishery is a management challenge, but managing the Skeena’s fishery is a nightmare.
During the techno-fix era of the 1960s, the DFO built spawning channels in the Babine Lake tributaries of Pinkut Creek and Fulton River, thereby creating two mega-races of sockeye. The construction of those channels was a grand government subsidy to the commercial fishing industry—but a huge ecological disaster. By enhancing the stocks of two Babine streams, the DFO greatly aggravated a mixed-stock interception problem that persists to this day.
For decades, more boats caught more sockeye. But since a Kitwanga River sockeye or a Morice River sockeye is indistinguishable from a Pinkut or Fulton sockeye, all were—and are—subject to the same harvest rate. The unenhanced wild sockeye runs were fished down year after year. This goes a long way to explain why a shadow run of only about a thousand sockeye—the remnant of a run estimated to have been between 25,000 and 75,000 fish—returns to the Kitwanga River these days. And why the sockeye of the upper Morice drainage, and other unenhanced streams, are dramatically reduced.
Coho, chinook, and steelhead paid the same price for having migratory times that overlap that of Big Sockeye. After over a century of heavy exploitation at the hands of an industry that has really only paid lip service to selective fishing methods, the Skeena fishery has become increasingly less biologically diverse and less sustainable.
In 2006, despite evidence that steelhead returns were low, DFOs North Coast Division gave the commercial fleet more fishing time.
According to fisheries scientist Dr. Carl Walters, letting a large fleet fish for a short time is not good—but having a small fleet fish day in day out is the worst possible scenario. In 2006, 250 fishers fished weeks on end, including 11 straight days during the peak migration time for summer steelhead. There were no fisheries officers on the fishing grounds during the entire season, except for two days, and a DFO internal document shows that compliance with selective fishing techniques was poor.
In 2005, DFO published a policy paper entitled Wild Salmon Policy. “The health of Pacific salmon,” it states, “depends not only on their abundance but also on their biological diversity… Protecting diversity is the most prudent policy for the future continuance of wild salmon as well as the ecological processes that depend on them.”
With complete disregard for this ideal, DFO continued to manage the fishery in response to just one run of fish: the Babine Sockeye. But no one should be surprised: this is the same government department that was charged with the wellbeing of the East Coast’s cod populations.
For more than a century DFO’s actions have shown it to be the servant of the commercial fishing industry, at the expense of all other interests.
To make matters worse, the commercial fishing industry couldn’t stay afloat without government subsidies. On average, a gillnet skipper made $15,000 in 2006. Without a special deal under Canadian Employment Insurance, most fishers couldn’t survive. Canadians embrace the social safety net, but the idea that taxpayers are paying people to wipe out a resource is viewed by many as downright stupid.
Sportfishing guides are quick to point out that the steelhead that is thrown overboard dead might have earned $250 for each time it was caught and released—had it been allowed to reach its home river to spawn.
The market fishery at the mouth of the Skeena is a relic of the century before last, and is desperately in need of radical change. How can this change be effected?
A successful fishery
The Skeena fishery was intensively—and successfully—managed before the appearance of Europeans. Understanding and emulating the underlying principles of that fishery will enable us to go back to the future.
First Nations saw things in cycles. They understood that salmon were at the hub of a living wheel, essential for the wellbeing of all things, and for sustaining commerce and culture. The Tsimshians of the coast and the canyons, the Gitxsan and the Wet’suwet’en farther upriver, and the Ned’u’ten Nations of the Babine all conducted and managed fisheries more complex, more sensitive to the needs of fish and the environment, and many times more successful than the dazed and confused fishery operating in Skeena today.
The managerial structure of the First Nations fishery was part of their societal weave. The laws governing the resource had taken shape over thousands of years of practice. As a result, self-enforcing fishing laws and regulations were part of community values.
The management of the large native fisheries was hierarchical. Hereditary chiefs were responsible for the managerial tasks that included the allocation of access, control and timing of harvesting techniques, determination of site ownership, and egalitarian distribution of fish.
The day-to-day operation of the fisheries was delegated to individual chiefs or sub-chiefs of various houses. Waste was strictly forbidden, a prohibition that surfaces again and again in their stories. The size and structure of the smokehouses, and the time taken to dry and smoke the fish, ensured that salmon were killed at a sustainable rate.
Live-capture methods predominated. In canyons and on rock outcrops, aboriginal fishers used large woven baskets and wooden strip traps to take salmon pressed close to the rock walls by strong currents. At a few locations in the main-stem Skeena, but mostly in its tributaries, weirs were used to herd fish into traps.
When the daily quota had been taken, the fishers removed the traps from the water, allowing the fish to continue upstream. The live-capture gear made it easy to fish selectively, with optimal utilization and escapement on a stock-by-stock basis. As such they had the flexibility to adapt to changing natural conditions.
Native fishery gutted
In 1877 the first commercial cannery appeared on the Skeena to serve a growing Euro-Canadian fleet that had burgeoned to 870 boats. By 1907 the canneries had metastasized and the fleet had mechanized. There were 14 canneries in all. That year alone they processed more than 7 million pounds of fish flesh.
Wanting a larger share of fish and a steady supply of cannery workers, the cannery operators launched a successful campaign that persuaded a compliant government to pass legislation enabling the former Department of Marine and Fisheries to eviscerate the First Nations fishery.
The campaign stuck a knife in the heart of First Nations economy and culture. Weirs and traps were banned, and fishing stations were removed despite laws dating back to BC’s first factor, James Douglas, that guaranteed native title to their fisheries.
In a great multilayered tragedy whose long-term effects are still playing out, a sustainable fishery that had evolved to fit the mighty Skeena was destroyed. It was replaced by a subsidized commercial fishery that can’t support its labor force, is a conduit for transferring public funds into private hands, and continues to wreak havoc on salmon because it operates according to 19th
Century principles
The key to the success of the aboriginal fisheries was selectivity. Selective harvest techniques—like in-river beach seining, fish wheels and dip-netting—have been used successfully on the Skeena and Nass Rivers. There is no reason why government money couldn’t be used to construct weirs and fish traps for inland freshwater fisheries.
To trigger a sea change in the commercial fishery would require the realization on the part of the managing agency that it is the boss, and that it should obey its mandate and put the welfare of salmon over all else. It would require the passage of a law making illegal any fishing method that results in the interception and injury of non-target species.
It has been shown that modified nets—that tangle rather than gill—can meet this test. The passage of this law would hasten adoption of these nets by other fishers, and possibly stimulate development of other sensitive models of net.
The principle of bio-diversity recognizes that things work best with all their parts. The Skeena salmon resource still has most of its parts—but all of them are in decline. The situation is even worse on the Fraser. DFO’s Wild Salmon Policy demonstrates that there is a willingness to change within Fisheries and Oceans Canada, but nothing is likely to happen until the Federal Fisheries minister and prominent members of Cabinet push for it.
Without this kind of change, Canada’s Pacific salmon will go the way of Atlantic cod.
By: Mike Bland
26 October 2007
By: Randy Partipilo
14 November 2007