The Skeena sockeye fishery is dominated by enhanced Babine stocks (Pinkut and Fulton) dating from the 1960s. While there are upto 50 runs they have been completely buried below the enhanced stock.
At one level it looks like this is an unmitigated success story of human ingenuity--- the increase is due to the spawning channels built in the 60s with the view that Babine Lake was underutilized by salmon fry.
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Another view would be that the enhancement was plain luck. Ocean conditions changed in the late 1970s and the Babine stocks suddenly took off. In support of this other channels did not work in southern BC and the unenhanced Alaskan Bristol Bay fishery has a similar increase timing. |
A Gitskan Biologist Mike Morell has argued (in Co-operative Management of Local Fisheries ) that the heavy industrial style fishing on the enhanced Babine run has devastated weaker stocks of Springs and sockeye (and now coho). He further argues the Gitskan position that the best way to manage a mixed stock fishery is not at the Skeena mouth but at the home streams as was done for millennia by 1st Nations.
Commercial fishers down river counter that the highest economic value of fish is before they begin to make the physiological changes preparatory to spawning .
Below I use the Babine river escapement data to argue that the trend is towards extinction for all non-enhanced stocks. And the present fishery must become more selective. If not disaster awaits when ocean conditions change again and the enhanced Babine run declines. (It is like putting al your eggs in one basket)
DFO has seen that getting the maximum sustained yield for one stock devastates weaker runs which can not sustain the pressure-- one could interpret the following data as showing that a lesson has been learned for non-Babine stocks of sockeye
Thus some of the weaker runs have come back in the 90's. Nothing is ever clear cut in life (biology).
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