Tag Archives: Fraser River salmon
Permanent fish-passage solutions considered at Big Bar landslide
As most salmon are now moving past the Big Bar landslide on their own effort, crews are looking ahead to provide permanent fish passage in time for important early-spring migrations. In a progress update Sept. 29, Fisheries and Oceans Canada officials said roughly 151,000 salmon have now been detected with acoustic sonar north of the site, 8,270 of which relied on the Whooshh Passage Portal. >click to read< 11:56
The Deadly Gauntlet Fraser Salmon Must Travel to Come Home
The rockslide at Big Bar just north of Lillooet was a natural disaster that blocked the Fraser last summer, making it impossible for many returning salmon to return to their natal spawning streams. Of the five million sockeye expected to return for example, only about 300,000 made it to their spawning grounds. The only upside of the disaster is that it’s shining a new light on what we call the Gauntlet: the tortuous path that all six species of Pacific salmon must run every year as they return from their migrations on the high seas to fresh water streams across the 21 million-hectare Fraser River watershed. The rockslide was an act of nature that with engineering expertise and brute force can eventually be fixed. But as the Gauntlet illustrates, what will prove much harder is to save Fraser salmon from the trajectory of decline they were already on before the rockslide happened. >click to read< 21:26
Fraser River salmon have a ‘gauntlet to get through’ as they return to spawn, biologists say
There seems to be a never-ending stream of obstacles facing the Fraser River salmon returning to spawn this year as well as the young preparing to make their own ocean-going journey. On top of warm water, habitat degradation and fishing pressure came the “near misses” of the last week. Last Friday, fire crews fought back a blaze on board a scrap metal barge in the Fraser in Surrey, B.C. Then on Tuesday, authorities sprang into action to contain a spill and remove a tug boat that had flipped and sank in the Fraser River near Deering Island in South Vancouver the night before. >click to read<13:51
