Citing concerns they might weaken the salmon population federal fisheries officials have again denied a New Brunswick company permission to release thousands of hatchery-raised adult salmon into the Miramichi River.
Department of Fisheries and Oceans scientists and a non-profit company called CAST have been at odds since 2017 over the merits of the restocking plan, which got underway with the capture of several thousand three-year-old salmon smolts that were then raised to adulthood in large tanks in a hatchery.
LINK (via: CBC News)
More band-aids from well-heeled sporting gents wanting to get their strings pulled again by fish on what was once a world-famous salmon river. This time not by killing some newly designated fish-eating offenders (where does the killing stop – kingfishers…?), but by filling the fishy hole left in once heavily run rivers by, er, inconvenient (and to some, of course, entirely Commie Plot fictional) things like climate change and rising sea temperatures and acidity (all of which are now hammering post-Ice Age salmonids).
We have the same Sport Sorts here in Britain – mere “I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in” Lonely Hearts types badly missing “Their” once dependable fish. But there is more to be fixed, now, than mere holes in a rivers’ runs of fish, fellas, I have long told such sorts, not exactly to universal approval and acclaim!
This from a guy who, after leaving school several decades back, spent several months working on an Atlantic salmon smolt-producing hatchery that had been hastily set up by the local River Authority to put fish salmon back into an until very recently (then), great Wessex salmon river, the Hampshire Avon, a river that was still regularly producing 40-pound Atlantic salmon right through the 1960s.
The hatchery smolt stocking didn’t work back then, in the 1970s. And as for now, with a fast-melting Arctic, increasingly acidic seas and a British climate that sees river temperatures going juvenile fish-unfriendly stratospheric in our increasingly boiling hot summers and ridiculously mild winters….
Yet some will continue to maintain, publicly, vociferously and pugnaciously, that you can we can stock our way out of a (possibly, largely self-inflicted) crisis.
Oh well.