After Years Of Limits Led By First Nations, Skeena River Red Salmon #s Jump 50% This Year
After nearly two decades of closing the Skeena watershed sockeye food fishery or limiting the catch, the Wet’suwet’en First Nation is finally seeing promising returns. “Almost everybody that wanted sockeye this year got some at least,” Walter Joseph, fisheries manager with the Office of the Wet’suwet’en, said in an interview. “I wouldn’t say it met people’s needs, but we did distribute more fish than we have in many years.”
The sockeye runs in the Morice-Nanika system upriver from Witset, a Wet’suwet’en community north of Smithers, B.C., dropped to 8,000 fish in the mid-1990s, Joseph said. In the first half of the 20th century, 10 times that many fish — an average of around 80,000 — would reach the watershed, according to Michael Price, a fisheries biologist working with the Office of the Wet’suwet’en. Between 2010 and 2017, the average return was 16,000, Price said.
The final counts are not in, but Joseph estimates around 25,000 fish reached the Morice-Nanika system this year — that’s a more than 50 per cent increase since 2017. Ideally, Wet’suwet’en food fishers would take 8,000 fish, but most years they’ve been catching fewer than 1,000. This year, they caught almost 2,000.
The higher returns this year are the result of sacrifices made by the Wet’suwet’en and other nations as well as collaborative conservation efforts by First Nations, conservation groups and Fisheries and Oceans Canada. By closing the fishery or limiting the catch, the Wet’suwet’en sacrificed their social, cultural and food needs to give the fish time to recover from the combined pressures of overfishing, loss of habitat, competition from other species of salmon introduced by hatcheries and climate change.
EDIT
https://thenarwhal.ca/bc-skeena-sockeye-returns-2020/
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