Jerry - Here is a more readable version...

B.C. salmon: something\'s not fishy

Vancouver Island's rivers no longer leap with steelhead. Populations are dwindling to record lows, prompting worries of extinction, says MARK HUME

By MARK HUME - Tuesday, March 23, 2004

Something dreadful is happening to the rivers on Vancouver Island. Pool by pool, riffle by riffle, they are dying.

To a casual passerby, glancing down from one of the slick new bridges on the Island Highway, nothing seems amiss. Rivers like the Cowichan, Nanaimo, Little Qualicum, Englishman, Trent and Tsable look just as beautiful as ever, running from under the mossy, green forests to the blue waters of Georgia Strait.

Mike McCulloch knows better.

Mr. McCulloch, a fisheries technician with the B.C. Conservation Foundation, helps organize small teams of swimmers that are responsible for taking an unusual annual census. They pull on wet suits against the bone-numbing cold, and snorkel the rivers that flow out of Vancouver Island's rugged mountains. They are looking for an increasingly rare species of salmon known as steelhead. They aren't finding many.

The Gold River, on Vancouver Island's West Coast, historically had runs of as many as 5,000 steelhead.

Last year, swimmers counted 900; this year they found 35.

"The magnitude of decline is overwhelming," said Mr. McCulloch. There are worse statistics. In the little Trent River, which should have 100 steelhead, the snorkel team found only two. Both females.

In Goldstream, a small river just outside Victoria that spills from one dappled pool to another, there should be several hundred steelhead waiting to spawn. The swimmers found none.

The trend is repeated in river after river. The fish population data, compiled by swimmers who peer under banks and dive into the gloomy darkness of deep pools, is mathematically plotting the path to extinction.

"When you get down to one or two fish in a stream we call it quasi-extinction," Mr. McCulloch said. "At zero, it is termed extirpation, meaning the species is extinct locally."

Steelhead rivers on Vancouver Island have been in trouble for several years, but never have the numbers been so low. "It's a situation that's getting quite desperate," Mr. McCulloch said. "We're only a life cycle away from a spiral into oblivion."

Steelhead aren't like other salmon on the Pacific Coast. They are believed to be the progenitor species, the fish that spawned all the other kinds of salmon.

There are six species of wild Pacific salmon, each filling its own niche in the ecosystem. Some, like pinks, are small but prolific. Others, like chinook, are fewer in number but grow to immense sizes. But only one, the steelhead, survives spawning. The irony is that, for reasons not fully understood, steelhead, the survivors, are now dying out as a species.

Mr. McCulloch said habitat destruction is part of the problem. Vancouver Island watersheds have been logged and many rivers run through heavily urbanized areas. Some watersheds are dammed. Poor ocean survival, due to a shift in temperatures, is a major factor affecting all salmon species. Steelhead, which have been tracked all the way to the coast of Russia in their Pacific migrations, have been the hardest hit. Because they live longer in their freshwater phase, they have also suffered the most in the rivers.

The B.C. Conservation Foundation, a non-profit group, is working jointly with the provincial Ministry of Land, Water and Air Protection to restore Vancouver Island steelhead. One plan, not yet funded, is to fertilize 15 rivers where nutrient levels are low because of declining salmon runs.

When salmon die after spawning, their bodies decompose, enriching the watersheds and stimulating the growth of aquatic insects, which feed young fish. But overfishing and habitat problems have robbed many rivers of the massive salmon runs they once had, stripping the streams of nutrients. Steelhead usually live for two years in freshwater before heading to the ocean. If they are underfed, they will be too small to survive when they run to the sea. Mr. McCulloch has been scrounging dead salmon from federal salmon hatcheries and placing them in rivers as fertilizer, hoping to stimulate the growth of baby steelhead. From the dead bodies of one species they hope to revive another. In one experimental program, artificial fertilization saved the Keogh River, where steelhead runs are stable and salmon stocks are increasing.

Mr. McCulloch calls the Keogh "a beacon" in the darkness, but the restoration project can't be copied without more money. The foundation and government fisheries agencies need $4-million a year in excess of their core funding, about double what they have. BC Hydro and some forest companies are helping with corporate donations, but the federal government, which has $1-billion to help beef farmers, which squanders millions on sponsorship scandals and which dithers over endangered-species legislation, seems oblivious to the steelhead crisis.

"There are too many rivers in trouble and not enough money," Mr. McCulloch said.

Meanwhile, in the Trent, two females wait alone -- the last hope for a river.