© Tavish Campbell
Department of Wild Salmon – Overview
Wild salmon are a highly successful fish with an enormous capacity to thrive and feed the world around them. Their extraordinary ability to rapid-evolve helps them adapt readily to change.
There are three types of salmon on British Columbia’s coast – wild, hatchery and farmed. Unlike the other two, wild salmon do not require human infrastructure, commercial feed, fuel or money to thrive and reproduce. They only require that humans learn how to live with them.
Wild salmon offer the greatest potential benefits to society and the planet.
Letting salmon do what they do best
To restore wild salmon populations, the most important thing we can do is get out of their way where they most need us to. The Department of Wild Salmon is a blueprint for restoring wild BC salmon.
- We must allow wild salmon to breed naturally
Fish hatcheries have failed to restore wild salmon. That’s because when humans choose which fish to pair up to produce the eggs, we make mistakes. Nature does a much better job.
In the wild, spawning male salmon put on a magnificent display – growing enormous humps, teeth and brilliant colours. By reading the information the males display, the females mysteriously know how to choose the best mate to shape the next generation.
This is how wild salmon naturally evolve to fit their rivers. A Chilko Lake sockeye, for example, is a long, slim fish adapted to make the long journey into that lake. The Adams River sockeye, on the other hand, is a heavy, deep-bodied fish suited to battling strong currents.
- We need to understand and remove the threats facing wild salmon.
Whether it’s chemical pollution, dams, habitat loss, disease or other impacts, the Department of Wild Salmon will introduce genomic profiling to pinpoint the problem. This will remove the guesswork from determining what is harming wild salmon and allow the fish to guide us.
Rebuilding wild salmon, communities and economies
The Department of Wild Salmon aims to:
- Align First Nations fishery groups, Streamkeepers and locally-engaged people with government and university labs to create a resilient network of experts that does not rely on a single funding source.
- Place the fate of wild salmon in the hands of the people living among them. Do so by using local people to gather the data and bring the information directly back to the communities so that they can respond.
- Repopulate our coast with salmon that are self-sustaining and don’t require hatcheries that are dependent on government-funding.
- Restore wild salmon stocks, ensuring an enormous and positive impact on BC’s ecology, economy and food security.
Approach
Using a skilled and existing local workforce, the Department of Wild Salmon will provide the highest-quality data to labs to capture the pulse of wild salmon health coastwide.
- Field teams with local knowledge will synchronize methods of taking environmental measurements, counting and sampling of salmon. Good data is needed to ensure good research results.
- The Department of Fisheries and Ocean’s molecular genetics lab will provide genomic profiling to detect the stressors recorded in the immune system of the fish. This will tell us whether salmon are struggling with high water temperature, viruses, starvation, chemical exposure, etc.
- Lab results and environment data collected by the field crews will be sent to mathematical modelers to decipher trends in, and relationships between, environmental factors, information stored in the salmon’s immune system and wild salmon returns.
- Field and lab teams will share the challenges they face. They will spend time in one another’s working environment to exchange information and collaborate on streamlining and improving data collection that will produce the most accurate and powerful results possible.