‘It’s an all-you-can-eat buffet’: striped bass in a Canadian river are gobbling up all the salmon. Is a mass cull the answer? | Fish

SThe 19th century, the Atlantic salmon of Miramichi attracted politicians, celebrities and fishermen rich in all of North America and Europe to fishing camps along the banks of the river, its branches not not producing more fish than almost any other river on the continent. In 2010, fishing was estimated at $ 16 million CA (8.6 million pounds sterling) and provided hundreds of jobs.

Rip Cunningham goes from the US Massachusetts state to the Canadian Province of New Brunswick to fish since the 1970s. When he started, he sat on the bridge of the Black Brook Salmon Club, on one of the tributaries of the Miramachi, looking at the water boiling with the saves and the salmon rollers.

“It was an incredible experience, just because you saw the number of lives there were in the river,” he said.

Sitting on this same bridge 55 years later, Cunningham is thinking about the quantity of things that have changed. Miramichi salmon has decreased by 86% since 2012 and with those that decrease, the lodge reservations are halved.

For some, this decline can be attributed to a culprit: the striped bar. As the Miramichi salmon has decreased, the number of striped bars was on a reverse trajectory. The researchers believe that there could now be half a million striped bar – predators who engulf the young salmon while migrating from their birthplace in the Miramichi to the Atlantic Ocean. As a result, fishermen and conservation groups say that the only hope for salmon is to kill hundreds of thousands of bass.

However, there is a wrinkle in this proposal. The striped bar is also from Miramichi, having coexisted with salmon during millennia. Thirty years ago, commercial fishing almost led the striped bar to extinction; In the 1990s, they had less than 5,000. Since then, the closure of peaches helped the bass to recover spectacular.

This recovery now opposes two fish – and their supporters – against each other, in an ecosystem under the increasing pressure of climate change.

On the side of the salmon are groups that say that 500,000 low breeders in the Miramichi estuary makes almost impossible for the young salmon to get out of the river. “It’s an AL, you can eat buffet,” says Cunningham.

Save the Miramichi salmon, a conservation group to which Cunninghambelongs, wants the number of striped bars to be reduced to 100,000 reproductive fish, which would require hundreds of thousands of bass from the river.

This year, Cunningham and five other books, which offer fishing trips, lodge owners and line fishermen brought legal action against the Canadian government, alleging that fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) had failed to guarantee a balanced ecosystem by allowing the salmon to decrease as the striped bar was fulfilled.

“If we fail, we fail,” admits Cunningham, but adds: “This river has mean so much for us for so long that we did not mean:” We will get away from that. “”

Pervor Avery, a biologist who is looking for the striped bar at Acadia University in Nova Scotia. He says that new moves, combined with increasing recreational fishing, could cause the population of striped bar. “The population will decrease,” he says, “and it will be hailstop.” “

The population of quickly exhausting salmon has consequences for the north shore Mi’kmaq, the local indigenous community that has been on salmon for thousands of years. Now there is so few salmon that even the subsistence fisheries protected by the Constitution have extinguished.

Ethan Augustine, the main biologist of the resource management department of the Côte-Nord tribes council, said that when he grew up, he heard stories from his father about his awakening by selling salmon swimming upstream.

“We have been taking the stewardship of this land for thousands of years,” he said. “It is only lately that [salmon] fell. So we would like to try to bring it back. »»

As part of a strategy called PLAMU first (Puma Meaning of the Atlantic salmon in Mi’kmaq), the Council, which represents the communities of Mi’kmaq in the north of New Brunswick, also wants to see the reduced bass, although Augustin says that they do not want this reduction to be drastic, in particular because the fishing at the bar with commercial stripes is led by a Mi’kmaq community.

“I don’t want to see a species destroyed for the proliferation of others,” he said. “We want both.”

Augustin is part of a coalition of researchers and ecologists who collected major salmon from traps in the Miramichi during the migration from spring to sea, to label them and to cook part of these fish marked at one hour downstream. The work is designed to test whether the bypass of Frai land can improve the survival of juveniles.

Atlantic salmon needs cold water to survive; When temperatures exceed 30 ° C (86F) – as is now common in summer – they die from heat. The need for more cold water pools, as well as other measures, is why the Mi’Kmaq council also requires 40 million dollars in federal funding over five years for their strategy.

The MPO indicates that it is considering the proposal of the council, but in the meantime, it had noted the commercial quota of the striped bar from 50,000 to 175,000 tonnes – much higher than the level requested by Mi’kmaq.

By considerably increasing the eliminations of the striped bar, Avery affirms that the decisions of the MPO are not based on science and believes that the body of fishing bends to the pressure of salmon environmentalists. “I predict [salmon groups] will get their wish, ”he says.

In a press release, the MPO said it had taken measures to manage the population of the striped bar with caution, including progressive increases in native and recreational fisheries, and that it was looking for the drop in salmon, noting that the populations “remain critical due to a range of complex environmental factors”. He also said that recent studies on Miramichi predators did not show a conclusive way that the reduction of the striped bar would lead to the recovery of salmon.

Avery says that there are research that suggests that smolts are only a tiny proportion of bass -waged bass regimes, and that Atlantic salmon everywhere is under pressure from unregulated fishing and increasing water temperatures due to climate change, which makes it difficult to disentangle the effect of predation. Meanwhile, the bass, as a temperate species, can better resist these changes, which makes it difficult to unravel the effect of predation.

“We throw something under the bus for another,” he suggests. “The striped bar is the species best suited to the current environment we have, so why would we want to alter this?”

Tommi Linnansaari, Research President on the Atlantic salmon at the University of New Brunswick, says that there are two ways to balance. One is to reduce the striped bar to a low level, because the salmon conservation groups recommend. The other implies increasing the number of salmon with hatching fish and moderately reducing the number of bass, then allowing the two populations to increase together.

Anyway, involves leading the river with a heavier hand – a kind of “interference in the wild” which rarely happens, he admits. “But I wonder if the case of Miramichi is the one where we have to put the” patient “on a machine and keep it artificially alive?”

In the meantime, silence settles on the river. Scan an empty bank, Lanny Burke, which has been a fishing guide on the Miramachi for almost half a century, recalls an era when the salmon was so abundant that they looked like horses that are upstream. He says he would like to hear this again, but fear that it is too late. The number of salmon falling at the current level, he thinks that it is almost impossible to bring them back.

Whatever means for the future, he says, Themiamichi will not be the same. “Without salmon, it’s just another river.”