Spring chinook
March 14th, 2008
Man, I was getting ready for the season, but maybe I shouldn’t:
Biologists are stunned by the failing returns to the Sacramento River, typically one of the healthiest and most abundant stocks on the West Coast. The Pacific Fishery Management Council predicts that numbers of Sacramento River fall chinook will fall to an all-time low this year, about 22 percent of the long-term average.
Update: The New York Times is on the case:
The Chinook salmon that swim upstream to spawn in the fall, the most robust run in the Sacramento River, have disappeared. The almost complete collapse of the richest and most dependable source of Chinook salmon south of Alaska left gloomy fisheries experts struggling for reliable explanations — and coming up dry.
[…]Fishermen think the Sacramento River was mismanaged in 2005, when this year’s fish first migrated downriver. Perhaps, they say, federal and state water managers drained too much water or drained at the wrong time to serve the state’s powerful agricultural interests and cities in arid Southern California. The fishermen think the fish were left susceptible to disease, or to predators, or to being sucked into diversion pumps and left to die in irrigation canals.
Here you can follow spring chinook fish counts at Willamette Falls. The projected run for this year is 34,000 fish which would be up from the 22,818 run last year, but way down from the 95,968 run in 2004.
Related posts: The Feds successfully bribe tribes to back off Columbia river complaints, "Animal rights" versus biodiversity, Endangered species? No.
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