sockeye

It looks like the British Columbia sockeye salmon runs are crashing -- at what should be a high point in their cycle, David Karp reports for The Vancouver Sun. The spring runs showed up at a fraction of their forecast abundance. The big question now is whether the much-more-abundant summer runs will follow the same pattern. If so, it poses a serious dilemma: Should fishing be limited even for poverty-stricken first nations that depend on the sockeye as a major protein source?

 Sockeye salmon, which spawn in lakes, have been absent from the Yakima River Basin for 115 years – until recently, when the Yakama Nation Natural Resources Program re-introduced sockeye at Cle Elum Lake, on the eastern slope of the Cascades near Snoqualmie Pass, east of Seattle.  According to a story in the Wenatchee World by David Lester, this marks the third sockeye run re-introduced in the Northwest. The others were on the upper Columbia River and at Lake Wenatchee.

Meanwhile, down on the Snake River, where biologists are struggling to maintain a once-nearly-extinct sockeye run, a federal judge faces a crucial decision about whether to  disable dams that harm salmon while producing about 3 percent of the region’s electricity. A recent commentary in the LA times (http://bit.ly/isB1D) by author Paul Vandevelder argues for letting the Snake flow free again, noting that its dams “do nothing for flood control, irrigate only a handful of big farms and subsidize transportation costs (at the expense of taxpayers and salmon) for wheat farmers in Idaho and eastern Washington.”