Post by Lady Trapper on Jan 16, 2007 10:21:02 GMT -5
Carl Purcell caught his first salmon in the Stewiacke River nearly 40 years ago.
It was his favourite spot to cast a line before regulators banned salmon fishing 15 years ago in all the rivers feeding into the inner Bay of Fundy.
"I’d probably catch 20 or 30 fish a year in that river," said Mr. Purcell, Nova Scotia Salmon Association president.
The 67-year-old Dartmouth man now suspects less than half a dozen salmon return to the Stewiacke River every year. But when asked Wednesday if he thinks people will ever fish salmon in the area again, Mr. Purcell had a surprising answer.
"For the first time, I’m going to say yes," he said emphatically, pointing to changes in fish-farming practices as the reason behind the anticipated recovery.
A turnaround may take 15 years, Mr. Purcell said. "I won’t see it."
What he has witnessed is a catastrophic decline in salmon numbers over the past quarter century.
"In the early 1980s, there was over 40,000 wild Atlantic salmon in 32 different rivers in the inner Bay of Fundy between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia," he said.
Experts now estimate less than 100 salmon live in those rivers.
"The stocks are so depleted that the only way they can be saved at present is through a live gene-bank program," Mr. Purcell said.
That involves growing wild fish in hatcheries, then putting them back in rivers.
Salmon are born in rivers and then go to sea. If they survive, the fish normally return to those same rivers to spawn.
The bulk of Nova Scotia’s 75 salmon rivers are closed to angling because there are too few spawners.
Cape Breton’s Margaree River has a healthy salmon population, as do about a dozen rivers feeding into Northumberland Strait, Mr. Purcell said.
While acid rain is responsible for destroying salmon populations on 57 rivers along the province’s Atlantic coast, it has not hurt the Bay of Fundy, he said. "Those rivers are very healthy. They have a good pH."
Armchair anglers have all sorts of theories about what happens to Bay of Fundy salmon when they go to sea.
They include farmed salmon escaping and spreading disease to their wild counterparts, being eaten by hungry seals or sharks and falling prey to falling ocean temperatures.
"I’m not convinced that there is a single smoking gun," said Lewis Hinks, Nova Scotia’s regional director of the Atlantic Salmon Federation.
Experts don’t know what kills salmon when they go to sea, he said.
"For the lack of a better term, they get whacked with something and we don’t know what that something is," Mr. Hinks said. "There was a conference a number of years ago where something like 52 theories were brought out."