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| 11/22 |
| 2008/4/12-19 [Science/Space] UID:49739 Activity:nil |
4/12 End of 150-year-old West Coast Salmon fishery looms:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/12/MNAB104836.DTL
\_ FUD. The fishery was doing fine just recently. Whatever has
happened, this is nothing to indicate this is the start
of a long-term trend. The sardines disappeared from Monterey
also and overfishing was blamed - until they came back. It's
good that a ban was enacted. It shows the fishery is well-managed.
\- end of 240 yr nepalese monarchy looms --jcarter@peanut.org
\_ Overfishing has never been the problem with the salmon industry
on the West Coast - it is one of the most heavily regulated in
the world. The reasons for the decline of the salmon are a lot
more complicated than that - check out the book "Cadillac Desert"
if you're really interested. My dad worked in salmon restoration
for 35 years, so this is a topic I'm wearily familiar with.
--lye
\_ My point is that the fishery didn't suddenly collapse over the
last 6 years because of anything people did or did not do.
It has to be climate-related. The fish will bounce back
when conditions return to more normal as long as they
are not fished out during the recovery.
\_ http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=overfishing-could-take-se
Many world fisheries are close to collapse, or have
already passed that point.
\_"The rivers that drain the Sierra used to flow through the
valleys and into the ocean; millions and millions of gallons
poured through the Golden Gate. First Shasta Dam diverted
water from the Sacramento; then the Friant Dam was built to
take water from the San Joaquin River. All these rivers and
their tributaries were prime salmon runs."
--> FUCK LA.
\_ San Francisco and San Jose get their water from the Sierra
too.
\_ How about the fustercluck that is Hetch Hetchy,
dammed for the benefit of San Francisco:
"Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the
people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier
temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of
man." -- John Muir
It feels a lot better to blame it all on LA, though.
\_ Your lack of knowledge on the subject of water
diversion and the history of water projects in the
West is showing. Please give "Cadillac Desert" a
\_ It is? Please enlighten me, because I know
a lot about the subject and Mr. Mulholland.
try. You won't regret it, it's a great book.
Needless to say, Hetch hetchy doesn't have much to
do with the salmons decline, but it is part of the
\_ It doesn't and I never said it did. However,
let's be real about who is grabbing water
from where. Hetch Hetchy was completely
ruined for the benefit of SF, not LA. If SF
had remained the largest city in CA then
the water would be flowing there instead.
It wasn't going to remain in the rivers as
long as the population grew.
same mentality the led to the destruction of
California rivers. The real water grab by
Los Angeles was in an entirely different place -
Owens Valley. This was fictionalized in the movie
"Chinatown." The municipalities aren't the real
villians, though - the real problem is the
subsidized federal and state projects which give
farmers massive incentives to waste enormous
amounts of water.
--lye
\_ Maybe when people stop growing rice in the
desert for pennies per gallon I'll stop
watering my lawn, but what does this
have to do with salmon decline over the
last 6 years? Nothing. If you feel
something changed (e.g. water flows)
then say so, but I have seen no one
mention anything like that. What I see
are comments about pumps, dams, and so
on: none of which have changed recently
AFAIK. What did change was the amount of
food in the ocean. Occam's Razor is at
work here. We can have a healthy salmon
fishery even with things as messed up as
they are, but sometimes things happen
outside of our control. The ban will
allow the salmon to recover as long as
ocean conditions remain close to normal,
as they are now.
\_ None of this has changed in the last 6 years.
\_ I really wish you were right, but it is sadly much more
stark than that. The resource has been in serious decline
for many long decades, primarly due to habitat destruction
and water diversion. You are correct that there is a
cyclic nature to the population, mosly due to the life
cycle of the fishes. There will be something of an uptick
at some point - but it's just noise in a population graph
that essentially represents a remnant. |
| 11/22 |
|
| www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/12/MNAB104836.DTL The ban on all commercial and sport fishing for chinook salmon in California and most of Oregon this year could be the beginning of the end for a whole way of life. Commercial fishing is an industry that is deep in the heart of life along California's 1,000-mile coast, where fishing ports from Crescent City to Morro Bay have supported generations of fishing families. Now, for the first time since commercial fishing began on the West Coast more than 150 years ago during the Gold Rush era, no boats will be permitted to put to sea to fish for chinook, the fabled king salmon that is the mainstay of the commercial fishery. The ban is only for one year, but it could be a death blow to an industry that has been in decline for years. As recently as 15 years ago, 4,000 small boats fished off the California coast for salmon; "We're looking at the end of it right now," said Hedley Prince, harbormaster at San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf. Once, there were hundreds of boats based in San Francisco; they supported whole families and a whole immigrant community, mostly Italians based in North Beach. "It could be more like a museum than a fishing port," Prince says. "We are going to lose all the fishing fleet if we don't get federal help," said Larry Collins, who ranges the whole coast in his boat out of San Francisco. "I have been fishing all my working life," said Duncan MacLean, whose boat, the 43-foot-long Barbara Faye - named for his daughter - is based at Half Moon Bay. "I've got a lot of talent," he said, "but I don't have a lot of marketable skills. The money is in the salmon fishing The trouble is that skippers like MacLean count on salmon for 70 percent of their fishing income. There are other fisheries on the coast - crab, rockfish, herring - but the money to make the business pay is in the salmon. Wild salmon, caught on hook-and-line rigs on small boats, is "the king of fish," according to David Montgomery, a professor at the University of Washington who has written a book on the fish. California and Oregon fishermen have been able to market wild salmon as a niche product, as distinct from farmed fish. The difference, they point out, is that salmon swim free in the ocean; fishermen swear the wild product is a superior fish, the way grass-fed beef is better than beef from a feedlot. "Farm fish live in pens," said Rich Fitzpatrick, who works out of Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. The ban on fishing, even for one year, "will damage the whole marketing infrastructure for an entire industry we've built up," MacLean says. Crab fishing is costly, needs a lot of gear Why don't fishermen go for other fish? The season is at its peak right at the opening, in mid-November, and then declines rapidly. A few salmon boats could fish in Alaska, but a permit is needed for that fishery. MacLean says a permit would cost $60,000 - too much for small-boat fishermen. Rockfish are endangered, too, and fishermen say the rockfish fishery is bound by regulations as to the amount of catch. Herring, which spawn in San Francisco and Tomales bays in December and January, require special boats and nets. Herring roe have a good market in Japan, where it is regarded as a delicacy. But for some reason, the bottom has dropped out of the herring market. Prince said the herring that did come to San Francisco Bay to spawn were mixed up with sardines. "Last season we had only 12 herring boats," said Prince, the San Francisco harbormaster. "A dozen years ago, there were so many herring boats you could walk across the harbor on them and never touch water." It's tourists who feed Cannery Row now The coming and going of fish is a bit of a mystery. John Steinbeck wrote about sardines and life in the Monterey canneries in "Cannery Row." The fish disappeared over a couple of years, and Cannery Row is now a tourist attraction, where restaurants offer "catch of the day," mostly farmed or frozen fish. There seems to be no great mystery about the collapse of the salmon fishery. "Salmon are trapped between human population growth, economic development, degradation of environmental quality and the politics of public policy," Montgomery wrote. There are a lot of reasons the population of salmon returning to their spawning grounds on the Sacramento River and its tributaries dropped from 800,000 six years ago to 68,000 last year. some say global warming has made the ocean too warm for the fish, and you can find fishermen who think the fishery has been mismanaged. Maybe, as Fitzpatrick thinks, the fry from fish hatcheries were dumped in the bay from pipes, and, stunned, were eaten by predators. Over the last 60 or 70 years, California has diverted most of the flow of its water from the Central Valley to farms and Southern California. The rivers that drain the Sierra used to flow through the valleys and into the ocean; millions and millions of gallons poured through the Golden Gate. then the Friant Dam was built to take water from the San Joaquin River. All these rivers and their tributaries were prime salmon runs. "You know there was a million fish run on the San Joaquin River before the water was diverted?" Los Banos is near what is now Interstate 5 The San Joaquin River near there is now almost dry; Then the state built the California Water Project, diverting the flows of the Sacramento and Feather rivers. One result was the collapse of the delta smelt, a small fish that is thought to be the bellwether of the health of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. All the salmon, returning to spawn or swimming downstream to the ocean, must pass through the delta. Whatever the reason, the salmon and the fishermen are in big trouble. "I always wanted to be a fisherman since I was a kid," said Fitzpatrick. "I worked on other boats, on Frank Damato's boat, until I could get my own boat. "It took me a long time to get accepted on the wharf," he said. "The old guys were all Italian, and I was only half Italian. His boat is called Josephine and is 40 feet long, built of wood by the long-vanished Pasquanucci Boat Works in Sausalito. I'm not educated, though I know how to handle boats and men. Al Baccari, who wrote a book on Fisherman's Wharf, said: "It's a tragedy." California fishery's main seasons Crab: Early November through spring. Herring: December, January and February - when they show up. |
| www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=overfishing-could-take-se Review it on NewsTrust November 2, 2006 spacer Overfishing Could Take Seafood Off the Menu by 2048 TEXT SIZE: Decrease font Enlarge font By David Biello deep sea catch of orange roughy STEPHEN MCGOWAN/MARINE PHOTOBANK In 1994, seafood may have peaked. And if that trend is not reversed, total collapse of all world fisheries should hit around 2048. "Unless we fundamentally change the way we manage all the oceans species together, as working ecosystems, then this century is the last century of wild seafood," notes marine biologist Stephen Palumbi of Stanford University. Marine biologist Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, gathered a team of 14 ecologists and economists, including Palumbi, to analyze global trends in fisheries. In addition to data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization stretching back to 1950, the researchers examined 32 controlled experiments in various marine ecosystems, observations from 48 marine protected areas, and historical data on 12 coastal fisheries for the last 1,000 years. The latter study shows that among commercially important species alone, 91 percent have seen their abundance halved, 38 percent have nearly disappeared and 7 percent have gone extinct with most of this reduction happening since 1800. "We see an accelerating decline in coastal species over the last 1,000 years, resulting in the loss of biological filter capacity, nursery habitats and healthy fisheries," notes team member Heike Latze, also of Dalhousie. And across all scales, from very small controlled studies of marine plots to those of entire ocean basins, maintaining biodiversity--the number of extant species across all forms of marine life--appeared key to preserving fisheries, water filtering and other so-called ecosystem services, though the correlation is not entirely clear. "Species are important not only for providing direct benefits in terms of fisheries but also providing natural infrastructure that supports fisheries," explains team member Emmett Duffy of the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences. "Even the bugs and weeds make clear, measurable contributions to productive ecosystems." Although the trend is grim, the study of protected areas offers some hope that marine ecosystems can rebound, according to the paper presenting the analysis in the November 3 issue of Science. The 48 studied showed an overall increase of 23 percent in species diversity and a fourfold increase in available catch. It's something that is do-able, it's just something that requires a big chunk of political will to do it," Worm observes. "We have a 1,000-, probably 10,000-year habit of taking the oceans for granted and moving from one species to the next, or replacing it with a technological fix like aquaculture. To me, the major roadblock is we have to change our perception of what the ocean is." Should we fail, we may lose the ocean's bounty entirely. Order Back Issues Scientific American Newsletters Get the latest science news delivered to your inbox in a few easy steps. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. |