Fish Hatcheries Are No Fix and He Tried to Warn Us

Fish Hatcheries Are No Fix and He Tried to Warn Us

Postby Oscar » Wed Dec 21, 2016 3:30 pm

Fish Hatcheries Are No Fix and He Tried to Warn Us

[ https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2016/12/21/F ... ign=211216 ]

Latest in a series quoting BC’s visionary conservationist, Roderick Haig-Brown.

By Andrew Nikiforuk , TheTyee.ca December 20, 2016

Andrew Nikiforuk is an award-winning journalist who has been writing about the energy industry for two decades and is a contributing editor to The Tyee. Find his previous stories here: [ https://thetyee.ca/Bios/Andrew_Nikiforuk/ ]

PHOTO: Haig-Brown, for posterity: ‘The best way of restoring salmon and steelhead runs to their full glory is the hard way — close protection and management of existing stocks, stream rehabilitation and improvement and greatly improved land management.’ Image courtesy of the Museum at Campbell River.

[Editor's note: This series is drawn from Andrew Nikiforuk’s talk “Why Haig-Brown Matters More than Ever,” given last month in Campbell River at the Seventh Annual Haig Brown Memorial Lecture. A PDF is available here: [ https://thetyee.ca/Documents/2016/12/15 ... jJ76aW.pdf ]

Nearly a half-century ago, B.C.’s greatest voice for conservation, Roderick Haig-Brown, wrote prophetically about fish hatcheries. Every year the province releases nearly 300 million hatched fish into the ocean while other Pacific nations such as Japan, Korea and the United States pour about 5.2 billion fish into the ocean.

Politicians have always liked technology because it allowed them to avoid the real problem: the destruction of streams and spawning grounds by machines, logging and dams.

Moreover hatcheries promised to boost lost salmon production with little effort and therefore became a wildlife recovery fashion in the 1970s. But hatcheries, of course, are artificial environments. By crowding 50,000 fish in a concrete pool and feeding them pellets, humans inadvertently waded into the subtleties of fish evolution and changed the fish altogether.

Not surprisingly Haig-Brown was one of the first to express limitations about this miraculous technological fix. He feared that hatcheries would produce, over time, highly specialized breeds and would deplete the natural versatility of the stock.

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[ https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2016/12/21/F ... ign=211216 ]
Oscar
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