Dear Editor,
After years of involvement with our salmon resource problem, I’ve come to the conclusion that we and DFO have been looking through the wrong end of our salmon telescope and that may be why our salmon picture keeps getting smaller and smaller.
In my time, our provincial salmon picture for anglers has shrunk from six fish a day, no season limit, to maybe six fish a season.
I use that alone as my measure of our salmon conservation success, or otherwise. And I believe that that surely justifies a wake-up call to all levels of our salmon management that we may have been looking at, and treating, the wrong salmon problems here.
I wonder would there be a turnaround in our faltering salmon recovery if we changed our conservation focus from adult salmon conservation to juvenile salmon conservation.
After assessing our lack of success with our salmon recovery from our present adult salmon conservation efforts, we might be wise to look for problems further back in our salmon’s lifecycle.
Could more be done to maintain or increase egg deposits? Could outbound juvenile salmon in the smolt stage be having some problem?
With all the federal and provincial money we have invested in fisheries science, we haven’t even clearly identified, let alone rectified, our salmon problem.
Arthur Elkins
Flatrock
