BC’s scenic coastline and ocean represent a treasure trove of resources and opportunities. Yet many of our marine resources have been hugely overexploited, leading to diminished economic opportunities for coastal communities. Over-fishing, foreshore development, shipping, effluent from land-based industries and open-net salmon farms have severely jeopardized BC’s unique marine ecology.

Fishing down the marine food web

In 2005 government biologists (Worm et. al.) determined that some 90% of the ocean's big fish were gone, caught to satisfy our appetites. This is a stunning destabilization of ecological pyramids and inversion of normal predator effects, where the large and healthy escape and the small and ailing are caught. In the process, industrialized fisheries not only deplete the lifeblood of the ocean but also take away the means of survival from aboriginal communities and subsistence fishermen in the developing world.

After the large fish at the top of the food web are gone, fisheries go after smaller fish and invertebrates while their trawling destroys the plants and animals on the sea floor. Concept: D.Pauly. Art: A.Atanasio.

Over the past 10 years more than $500 million dollars has been  spent on a Census of Marine Life, to determine how the future of the ocean will likely look.  The first step was to assess, by all possible means, how the oceans were in the past.  Why?  It’s because of what BC fisheries biologist Daniel Pauley calls the “shifting baseline.”  This refers to the fact that we have lost any recollection of how the healthy ocean actually was, most especially in terms of the original higher abundance, greater diversity and wider distribution of fish.

The case of the vanishing sockeye

BC sockeye are complex and challenging to understand.  They are genetically highly diverse and their evolutionary future clearly depends on maintaining this diversity in the face of multiple pressures.  A 2006 Sierra Club study documented sockeye population declines, identified the probable causes and recommended response strategies.

Of 130 known sockeye runs, fully 25% were so depressed as to warrant endangered species assessment, 35% were of completely unknown status, 16% had decreased, 18% were stable and only 6%, a mere 8 stocks, were known to have increased in recent times. Things have only changed for the worse, and most especially for the decimated return of the Fraser runs this past year - only one million fish returned to spawn out of an expected ten million. 

In fact the Fraser’s great sockeye runs have yet to recover from overfishing and habitat destruction that occurred prior to the 1920s. In recent years, B.C.’s remaining sockeye stocks have undergone troubling declines.

Rivers and Smith’s Inlet sockeye – which once ranked with the Skeena and Fraser sockeye runs, in some years – have crashed, for reasons that continue to perplex salmon scientists. The Central Coast sockeye crashes appear to mirror an overall, across-the-board decline in the abundance of salmon throughout the Central Coast area – ironically, the least populated and most “pristine” area throughout the range of salmon in British Columbia.