By Misty MacDuffee, Corey Peet and Chris Genovali

As the Canadian federal inquiry examining the 2009 Fraser River sockeye salmon collapse in British Columbia kicks into full gear, one might be surprised to learn that at the same time, the Marine Stewardship Council wants to designate this fishery as “eco-certified.”

Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification for the Fraser River sockeye fishery raises serious questions about the process and methodology for MSC certification, especially given the latest Fraser sockeye collapse of some eight million fish. Even the possibility of MSC certification for Fraser
sockeye has led many of BC’s environmental NGO’s to express qualms about the logic and rationale of the MSC, as their judgment in this matter has, thus far, overlooked serious concerns about the status and management of Fraser sockeye.

It is an unfortunate situation as the existence of MSC certification should signify an opportunity to increase the protection of wild salmon on the coast and to work around the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) who have been a major obstacle to achieving that goal.

MSC began in 1997 when the World Wildlife Fund and Unilever – a major seafood buyer – formed a partnership to try to leverage buying power into transformative change for global fisheries and collectively define sustainable, or at least environmentally preferable, fisheries. A collaboration of this type represents a potentially powerful step forward, as conscientious members of industry can work with NGOs to integrate conservation and social justice agendas into fisheries sustainability.

This new approach also changes the role of governments, given their poor track record at managing fish, into a follow-up function that implements policy as it is defined by the collaboration between industry and NGOs. This scenario has the potential to drive substantial change as long as the
environmental NGOs involved fully grasp the conservation science at the local level. It is also key that they never lose sight of the fact that establishing sufficient rigorousness for such a process is of paramount importance to ensuring that their integrity is not squandered for bad tradeoffs.

The Raincoast Conservation Foundation recognizes the value that certification could play in terms of improving fisheries practices. However, we are concerned that MSC relationships between the client (industry) and the certifier are far too close and not independent. Secondly, we are concerned that the MSC criteria sets a low bar and will not result in transformative change. These factors have allowed them to endorse fisheries around the globe that are not sustainable. For example, the stock status of
both Alaskan pollock and New Zealand Hoki have declined under MSC certification. Their criteria also lack sufficient ecosystem considerations. For example, BC salmon fisheries do not consider whales, bears or other wildlife that depend on salmon. In addition, if the Fraser River certification moves forward then Cultus Lake or Sakinaw sockeye would also be certified; this leads us to raise the question, is the MSC actually sanguine about certifying endangered fish populations?

Certification must account for all environmental (and social) issues facing the certified fish in question, even if this means committing to continuous improvement on certain issues, especially as science and conservation objectives evolve. Failure to do so is greenwashing and forces NGOs who are also working on these issues into difficult positions, where they find themselves opposing the MSC instead of supporting it.

As an example, the industry is proposing that MSC give the green stamp of approval to pink and chum salmon runs in the Great Bear Rainforest, the area where Raincoast has been working for over a decade to protect salmon- grizzly systems and other important salmon ecosystem linkages. In the last
several years, however, there has been a disturbing silence at the time of year when these streams should be vibrant with spawning fish and splashing bears. Raincoast believes it to be imperative to account for these types of ecosystem functions when considering a fisheries sustainability.

We suggest that the MSC re-examine both their process and certification standards are determined and pay much more attention to their ecological shortcomings if they want long-term legitimacy from conservation groups. They need a transparent, independent and impartial certification process, as
well as a mechanism for ongoing improvement of criteria that would continually push for the highest fishing standards and truly drive conservation in the world’s oceans. To attain this, they must address the structural flaws in their certification process and commit to incorporating ecosystem objectives for marine and terrestrial environments. Their brand reputation is at stake and they run the risk of turning their theoretical supporters into very real opponents if their approach to these issues is
allowed to continue.

Misty MacDuffee is a biologist with Raincoast Conservation Foundation’s wild salmon program. Ecologist Corey Peet is an aquaculture specialist and Raincoast board member. Chris Genovali is Raincoast’s executive director.

When British Columbia Conservation Officer Andrew Anaka learned that a Bella Coola Valley resident was threatening to “pop” a grizzly bear mother and her three cubs for stealing salmon off his deck, Anaka advised the man to instead remove his salmon. He said the family of bears should only be shot if they were an imminent threat. The resident did not remove the salmon and later shot all four bears.

Read the full story at  Huffington Post

As the Canadian federal inquiry examining the 2009 Fraser River sockeye salmon collapse in British Columbia kicks into full gear, one might be surprised to learn that at the same time, the Marine Stewardship Council wants to designate this fishery as “eco-certified.”

For the rest of this Raincoast article visit The Huffington Post at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-genovali/would-a-grizzly-bear-cert_b_615947.html

Re: Grizzlies at risk: province; Dwindling bears given threatened status,  The Journal, June 4.

Sustainable Resource Development Minister Mel Knight should be commended for finally listing the province’s grizzly bears as a threatened species and for keeping the trophy hunting ban in place. However, he falls critically short by failing to restrict access to grizzly habitat, as universally recommended by ecologically informed bear biologists.

Significantly reducing incursions into the bear’s habitat by the energy and forestry industries will be required if Alberta’s grizzly population is to recover.

In addition, the article states categorically that there are 17,000 grizzlies in B.C.; this number is speculative and should always be qualified as such. Grizzly population estimates in B.C. have been in dispute for many
years and remain a point of controversy.

Chris Genovali, executive director, Raincoast Conservation, Sidney, B.C.

In one of Nature’s most elegant pas de daux, salmon and bear engage in a delicate dance for survival.  The bear is losing…

We’re searching for solutions to one of the most critical questions facing coastal B.C. today: how to guarantee grizzlies enough salmon to ensure their survival. – Chis Dairmont

Download the pdf story

As Raincoast’s research vessel Achiever pulled into the inlet on British Columbia’s north coast I glassed the port side shoreline with my binoculars, checking for wildlife.  It was that magical time right before dusk when unexpected and unusual things often manifest in the coastal fall alpenglow.

No one else was on deck and I was standing in the observation tower. On the port side of the inlet, at the water line, was a bear. As I focused in I could see this was “not your average bear,” to paraphrase a well-known (cartoon) bruin. Everything about its appearance was distinctive. The coat was a champagne-type colour I had never seen on a coastal bear.

At first I thought it might be a Spirit bear (Ursus americanus kermodei), but as I peered through my binoculars it appeared to have all the physical characteristics of a grizzly, with the dish shaped face, the hump between the shoulders, the size of the feet and length of the claws.  But the perplexing factor was that this bear’s skin colour – the pads on the feet were pink, the fleshy end of the snout was pink, the skin around the eyes was pink – all signs of albinism.

Was I really looking at an albino grizzly?

I called my colleagues to come up on deck from down below.  They all emerged with binoculars in hand and we proceeded to go back and forth speculating on exactly what kind of bear we were observing.  There seemed to be consensus that it was an albino, but whether it was a grizzly or not was discussed and debated at length.

To this day I’m convinced it was Ursus arctos, although in the end I suppose it doesn’t matter – seeing an albino bear of any species is a once in a lifetime experience.  More importantly for me, it was yet another confirmation of the power and mystery of the Great Bear Rainforest in the half-light before sunset.

Did You Know?

Animals can be pure or partial albinos. Pure albinos usually have pink eyes, scales and skin. They’re pink because, without colouration, the blood vessels show through. It’s estimated that at least 300 species of animals in North America have albino individuals.

BC’s Spirit bear is a black bear that has white fur due to a rare genetic trait; it is not an albino, as it typically has a brown nose and eyes.

A new decade has dawned and in a few months yet another year of grizzly bear hunting will commence in British Columbia.The B.C. grizzly bear hunt has been a source of unrelenting controversy. Both sides are stuck in an expert-driven argument in which both camps claim science supports their positions.

It is time that the debate was conducted within the context of ethical considerations, as the present conflict will likely never transcend the deeply entrenched inflexible stances.

In his paper, Environmental Ethics and Trophy Hunting, Alastair Gunn states that “Nowhere in the (scientific) literature, so far as I am aware, is hunting for fun, for the enjoyment of killing, or for the acquisition of trophies defended.”

Many who are outspoken advocates of grizzly hunting do not recognize, or choose not to recognize, that it is a moral matter. They feign that hunting grizzlies is amoral when, in fact, it is not.

They pretend the trivial value of hunting grizzlies somehow outweighs the much greater harm done to the bears.

In Ethics and the Environment, Dale Jamieson writes of the problematic nature of deciding to “choose amoralism and opt out of morality. The very ties that bind us to a society entangle us in a morality. Morality is ubiquitous; amoralists are rare.”

The compulsion to kill these intelligent, powerful and beautiful animals in order to “bag a trophy,” as opposed to simply observing and fully experiencing an encounter of two inextricably linked species, is something poll after poll has shown the average British Columbian cannot fathom.

Doug and Andrea Peacock address the human-bear connection in their book The Essential Grizzly:

“The concurrent colonization of North America by brown bears and humans is a remarkable story. Both men and grizzlies . . . lived together for thousands of years, and perhaps travelled the same route south to the continental United States. Genetic evidence indicates a single invasion for both grizzlies and humans . . . ”

Grizzly bears are primarily shot and killed for gratuitous reasons. They are targeted by trophy hunters and guide outfitters for entertainment or for profit, with approval by government authorities who sanction this activity as a legitimate management tool.

Michael Nelson and Kelly Millenbah have stated in their recent paper The Ethics of Hunting that “To the degree the wildlife community begins to take philosophy and ethics more seriously, both as a realm of expertise that can be acquired and as a critical dimension of wildlife conservation, many elements of wildlife conservation and management would look different.”

Imagine a scenario in which wildlife managers and the politicians they must answer to were required to incorporate ethical considerations into the decision-making process for the grizzly hunt.

The debate would no longer be limited to metrics such as population estimates, kill quotas, harvest-able surpluses and other strictly mechanistic arguments which lend themselves to endless stalemates.

According to Paul Paquet, a former member of the B.C. government’s grizzly bear scientific panel, the fact that we can hunt grizzly bears does not mean that we ought to hunt them.

Further, while science provides information, it does not give us permission to do things. In other words, the statistics that have been generated ostensibly to inform, but in actual practice to justify, the trophy hunting of grizzlies do not contain an intrinsic approval to do so.

Unfortunately, B.C. is saddled with a policy framework for wildlife conservation and management in which ethical considerations simply do not exist.

Large carnivores, in particular grizzly bears, pose a threat not so much to human “life and property” rather to human self-conceptualization. They challenge our imagined “rightful place” in the world, primarily our hegemony over nature and its non-human inhabitants.

It is this mindset that blocks us from extending ethical considerations to grizzlies, for instance, both in the way we govern our society’s interactions with such animals and in how we wield power over bears given our technologically based supremacy (high-powered hunting rifles, jet boats, helicopters).

To evolve B.C.’s relationship with large carnivores, we could start by placing greater emphasis on examining the ethics and morality of the very concept of hunting for recreation and entertainment, as opposed to elevating trivial values like trophy hunting grizzlies above the welfare of the bears themselves.

— Chris Genovali is the executive director of Raincoast Conservation.

A disturbing number of grizzly bears are being shot as ‘control kills’ in BC’s Bella Coola valley. Most of these kills are as a result of humans who don’t secure bear attractants. Despite this, virtually no enforcement action is being taken against individuals responsible for the needless deaths of these bears.

Raincoast is calling on the BC government to reform the Wildlife Act so that provisions addressing bear attractants are more stringent and enforceable. We are also calling on the government to provide sufficient funding for Bear Smart/Bear Aware education in the Bella Coola valley.  More details are in the letter.

Go here to send a letter to Environment Minister Barry Penner to express your concerns about their approach to grizzly bear management.

Your support makes this work possible! Click here to support the Raincoast Conservation Foundation.

By Chris Genovali, Special to the Victoria  Times Colonist,
January 21, 2010

A new decade has dawned and in a few months yet another year of grizzly bear hunting will commence in British Columbia.  The B.C. grizzly bear hunt has been a source of unrelenting controversy. Both sides are stuck in a continual expert-driven argument in which both camps claim science supports their positions.

It is time that the debate was conducted within the context of ethical considerations, as the present conflict will likely never transcend the deeply entrenched inflexible stances.

In his paper, Environmental Ethics and Trophy Hunting, Alastair Gunn states that “Nowhere in the [scientific] literature, so far as I am aware, is hunting for fun, for the enjoyment of killing, or for the acquisition of trophies defended.”

Many who are outspoken advocates of grizzly hunting do not recognize, or choose not to recognize, that it is a moral matter. They feign that hunting grizzlies is amoral when, in fact, it is not. They pretend the trivial value of hunting grizzlies somehow outweighs the much greater harm done to the bears.

In Ethics and the Environment, Dale Jamieson writes of the problematic nature of deciding to “choose amoralism and opt out of morality. The very ties that bind us to a society entangle us in a morality. Morality is ubiquitous; amoralists are rare.”

The compulsion to kill these intelligent, powerful and beautiful animals in order to “bag a trophy,” as opposed to simply observing and fully experiencing an encounter of two inextricably linked species, is something poll after poll has shown the average British Columbian cannot fathom.

Doug and Andrea Peacock address the human-bear connection in their book The Essential Grizzly:

“The concurrent colonization of North America by brown bears and humans is a remarkable story. Both men and grizzlies … lived together for thousands of years, and perhaps travelled the same route south to the continental United States. Genetic evidence indicates a single invasion for both grizzlies and humans….”

Grizzly bears are primarily shot and killed for gratuitous reasons. They are targeted by trophy hunters and guide outfitters for entertainment or for profit, with approval by government authorities who sanction this activity as a legitimate management tool.

Michael Nelson and Kelly Millenbah have stated in their recent paper The Ethics of Hunting that “To the degree the wildlife community begins to take philosophy and ethics more seriously, both as a realm of expertise that can be acquired and as a critical dimension of wildlife conservation, many elements of wildlife conservation and management would look different.”

Imagine a scenario in which wildlife managers and the politicians they must answer to were required to incorporate ethical considerations into the decision-making process for the grizzly hunt.

The debate would no longer be limited to metrics such as population estimates, kill quotas, harvestable surpluses and other strictly mechanistic arguments which lend themselves to endless stalemates.

According to Paul Paquet, a former member of the B.C. government’s grizzly bear scientific panel, the fact that we can hunt grizzly bears does not mean that we ought to hunt them.

Further, while science provides information, it does not give us permission to do things. In other words, the statistics that have been generated ostensibly to inform, but in actual practice to justify, the trophy hunting of grizzlies do not contain an intrinsic approval to do so.

Unfortunately, B.C. is saddled with a policy framework for wildlife conservation and management in which ethical considerations simply do not exist.

Large carnivores, in particular grizzly bears, pose a threat not so much to human “life and property,” rather to human self-conceptualization. They challenge our imagined “rightful place” in the world, primarily our hegemony over nature and its non-human inhabitants.

It is this mindset that blocks us from extending ethical considerations to grizzlies, for instance, both in the way we govern our society’s interactions with such animals and in how we wield power over bears given our technologically based supremacy (high-powered hunting rifles, jet boats, helicopters).

To evolve B.C.’s relationship with large carnivores, we could start by placing greater emphasis on examining the ethics and morality of the very concept of hunting for recreation and entertainment, as opposed to elevating trivial values like trophy hunting grizzlies above the welfare of the bears themselves.

Chris Genovali is the executive director of Raincoast Conservation.

Scientists are collecting hairs from live bears to prevent population declines as a result of declines in a principal food source: salmon

For most of May, Chris Darimont, an environmental scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, poured liters of fermented cattle blood mixed with pureed rotten fish guts on 3,000 square kilometers of British Columbia’s coastal wilderness.

Darimont’s potent cocktail, dubbed “stink sauce” by his field crew, is key to a new study that examines the relationships among salmon and coastal grizzlies by mining their hair for unprecedented data on their diet and health.

For a 180-kilogram male grizzly, the stink sauce is akin to the call of the Pied Piper—it’s irresistible. And as the bear comes in for a whiff, the barbed wire circumventing the lure snags its hair. “We’re luring them in for a sniff of something and in return we’re taking their hair,” Darimont explains. “It’s sort of like forensic ecology.”

In the short term the study’s goals are to rapidly assess the health of coastal carnivore populations with respect to the salmon on which they depend, says Darimont, who moonlights as a research scientist for the Sidney, British Columbia–based Raincoast Conservation Foundation (RCF), which is spearheading and largely funding the five-year study.

Humans aren’t the only ones affected by poor salmon runs. The abysmal sockeye run on British Columbia’s Fraser River this summer was such big news it precipitated a federal inquiry into the fish’s disappearance. Pink and chum salmon runs along province’s central coast haven’t been doing so hot in recent years either, which raises questions about the long-term welfare of
coastal grizzlies that feast on them.

Government helicopter surveys conducted this fall along the Kimsquit River area north of Bella Coola, British Columbia, tallied below-average numbers of grizzly adults and cubs. This suggests poor salmon returns of prior years might be taking their toll on the bears, starving them of their primary prehibernation food source. “The science of it says you’re going to have a density of bears and productivity of the population proportional to the salmon base,” says Barrie Gilbert, a retired wildlife biologist from Utah State University in Logan.

Coastal grizzlies are a different beast altogether from their smaller interior cousins. The more salmon a male eats, the larger his skull grows; the more fish a female eats, the earlier she’ll reach reproductive maturity—and the more cubs she’ll have each year.

The population density of grizzly bears in Alaska’s salmon-rich areas runs 10 to 20 times higher than those in the sans-salmon interior of the state. The more fish in an ecosystem, the more grizzly bears that can be supported. Remove the salmon from an ecosystem and grizzly numbers drop, which is what happened over the short term when Owikeno Lake’s salmon stock went AWOL in coastal British Columbia in the late ’90s. “There are very few biologists who will argue that salmon aren’t a key limiting factor to grizzly bear numbers on the coast,” says Garth Mowat, a senior wildlife biologist with the British Columbia Ministry of Environment.

Grizzlies also act as nutrient conveyor belts, dispersing the nitrogen- and phosphorus-rich salmon carcasses across the forest floor like fertilizer. “As we lose either bears or salmon or both along the coast of British Columbia, then we’re also affecting the health of the forests,” Gilbert
says.

Stink sauce and the blood shed

But back to the juicy stuff: stink sauce, which is stored in a custom-built “blood shed”.

After the nearby barbed wire snags coarse guard hairs from the bear’s outer coat, the fur’s DNA is sequenced to divulge the number of individuals, their species and gender. “With those data alone we can track bear numbers over time… and see how they fluctuate with salmon numbers over time,” Darimont says.

Next, he and his colleagues will run stable isotope analyses on the hair to estimate of just how much salmon the bear consumed during the previous year’s salmon run. Finally, information on the bears’ hormonal states is extracted from the samples: Cortisol gives a picture of stress levels,
thyroxin provides an index of protein depravation or starvation, and sex hormones provide insight as to whether a female had cubs in the past year—all this from a clump of hair.

Darimont and his co-workers collected 550 hair samples this year from their study area near the town of Bella Bella, which lies halfway up British Columbia’s coast. The genetic work will roll in later this month, and the hormone work should take another three months. Together, this should provide the RCF with enough data to publish a “rapid but tentative” assessment.

“We’re hoping that we’ll get some very fine-scale intimate insight into the relationship between grizzly bear populations and health and salmon consumption,” Darimont says. “It’s the first work of its kind.”

By learning more about the relationships among salmon abundance and bear population dynamics, Darimont hopes to be able to determine whether there is a threshold of the spawning salmon biomass that would prevent the coastal grizzly bear population from declining. His data set could also help map out the consequences on bear numbers from human salmon harvesting—20 percent more or less, for example.

And things are starting to look up for grizzlies and at least one of their major food sources in the area. John Reynolds, a conservation biologist at Simon Fraser University near Vancouver, reports that the pink salmon have come back with a vengeance this year, on the heels of record lows in 2007 and 2008: “The grizzlies, of course, can eat the pinks, so it’s not all doom and gloom right now.”

Caption: WHERE’S THE FAT? Grizzlies aren’t as much interested in the protein in salmon as the fat, which fuels their high-energy winter hibernation.

2008 ranked as one of the worst years for salmon returns on British Columbia’s central coast and the ‘silent fall’ I experienced there last year, while not surprising given the lack of fish, was disturbing nonetheless…

The silence along the river was almost deafening. No bears, or even birds, appeared along the banks. The reason soon became obvious: not a single salmon was to be seen in the glacial-fed water. Not a single salmon carcass lay on the ground, not in the estuary or the forest. There was no sign of predation and no sign of decomposition.

The usual sounds of fall in this coastal rainforest valley were agonizingly muted. The thrashing of salmon swimming upstream, the splashing of grizzlies pouncing on fish in the shallows, the cacophony of multiple bird species scavenging the bears’ leftovers—all were virtually nonexistent. And not a whiff of the fetid odor of dead and decaying salmon I have come to associate with this time of year was evident. The unnatural quiet sent a chill up my spine.

While it appears salmon returns, pink runs in particular, on the central coast are much improved in 2009, grizzly bear sightings have remained inconsistent.

The ability of grizzlies to get their quotas for salmon is really a matter of competition and the odds are stacked against the bears.  As fishermen, humans engage in what ecologists call ‘exploitative competition,’ capturing salmon en route to spawning grounds before they reach awaiting carnivores.

In a recent opinion piece for the Times Colonist, Raincoast biologists Chris Darimont and Misty MacDuffee stated that “referenced against past and current declines in salmon runs, we suspect coastal grizzlies receive a fraction of the salmon they used to, which ultimately manifests in
population declines.  Not by ‘die-offs’ as some have speculated, but through repeated years of low birth rates.  Grizzlies are omnivorous and can persist even without salmon, but they have far fewer offspring.”

Fisheries managers have always assumed that salmon exist exclusively for human consumption. Consequently, runs are only protected from harvest when they are overfished or endangered.  But how does status quo fisheries management serve the terrestrial ecosystems that salmon nourish? Not well.

As Darimont and MacDuffee explain: “Put yourself in the paws of bears.  Imagine if your big annual paycheque was reduced by four fifths.  Then imagine the effect on the coastal food web economy.  The nutrient subsidy used by the forest from the salmon carcasses, is also greatly diminished. As such, ‘protected areas’ that host highly exploited salmon runs are not really protected if a major ecological process is being compromised. Of course, it’s not just fishing nets that rob bears of this yearly bonanza.  Fish farms, climate change, habitat loss, fresh water withdrawals and changing ocean conditions all influence salmon abundance.”

So how much salmon do the bears really need? Raincoast scientists are directly addressing this question.  In hair collected from (harm-free) fur snagging stations, DNA and isotopes are used to track bear numbers, estimate how much salmon coastal grizzlies are eating and elucidate the relationship between the amount of salmon and the number of bears.  Like CSI sleuths, Raincoast is also assessing hormone levels in the hair to provide information about potential stress, reproductive activity and protein deprivation bears might show in response to poor salmon returns.  From this knowledge emerges an informed basis for action.
Chris Genovali is the Executive Director of the Raincoast Conservation Foundation
___________________________________________________________

Did You Know?

The presence of salmon determines the size, fecundity and population density
of coastal grizzly bears.
Reproductive success for female grizzlies is directly related to their body
mass in the fall.

How do salmon declines affect coastal bears? And how much salmon is required to sustain wildlife? These are questions that many people are asking in light of headlines about missing sockeye and salmon runs that fail to return as expected.

If you were a coastal grizzly, the presence of salmon would determine many things. For instance: how big you get, whether you can successfully raise children, and the number of bears in your neck of the woods (ie: size, reproductive success, and population density) are all related to salmon abundance. From the grizzly’s perspective, its ability to get enough salmon is really a matter of competition and, increasingly, the odds are stacked against the bears.

As fishermen, humans engage in what ecologists call ‘exploitative competition’—we capture salmon en route to spawning grounds before they reach the waiting carnivores. Referenced against past and current declines in salmon runs, we suspect coastal grizzlies are receiving a fraction of the salmon they used to, which ultimately manifests in population declines. Not by ‘die-offs’ as some have speculated, but through repeated years of low birth rates. Grizzlies are omnivorous and can persist even without salmon,
but they have far fewer offspring.

With both actual (Fraser River sockeye) and potential (runs in the Great Bear Rainforest) salmon calamities serving as catalysts, we believe it’s time for fisheries to start considering wildlife in their salmon management plans. We also believe it is time to establish truly protected salmon runs—runs that would be managed solely for their importance to wildlife and ecosystems. This would allow salmon to return to spawning grounds without encountering the nets of the Pacific salmon fleet. And those fish would then spawn in rivers that flow naturally without their watersheds logged, developed or otherwise impaired.

This concept of unfished salmon runs that lead to fully protected freshwater habitats is a bold and ambitious proposal that runs contrary to the philosophical underpinnings of salmon management. After all, fisheries managers have always assumed that salmon exist exclusively for human consumption.

Consequently, runs are only protected from harvest when they are overfished or endangered. Even salmon runs that spawn in protected watersheds and parks are subjected to exploitation by commercial fisheries at levels as high as 80%. Often, these parks were created to protect species such as grizzlies, black bears and wolves. But how does status quo fisheries management serve the terrestrial ecosystems that salmon nourish?

Not well. Put yourself in the paws of bears. Imagine if your annual paycheque was reduced by four-fifths. Then imagine the effect on the coastal food web economy. The nutrient subsidy used by the forest from the salmon carcasses, is also greatly diminished. As such, ‘protected areas’ that host highly exploited salmon runs are not really protected if a major ecological process is being compromised.

Of course, it is not just fishing nets that rob bears and other coastal life of this yearly bonanza. Fish farms, climate change, habitat loss, fresh water withdrawals, changing ocean conditions, and more, all influence salmon abundance. Many of these impacts are hard to predict, are indirectly related to salmon abundance, or require complex solutions. As eminent US fisheries scientist Dr Robert Lackey has stated, ‘our collective actions—from the rules of commerce to philosophies of growth and development—are not fish-friendly and tend to put relentless downward pressure on salmon numbers.’ In contrast to combating other threats, reducing or eliminating exploitation—on at least some runs—is straightforward and would have an immediate and direct positive effect on coastal ecosystems.

But how much salmon do the bears really need? Raincoast scientists are directly addressing this question. In hair collected from (harm-free) fur-snagging stations, DNA and isotopes are used to track bear numbers, estimate how much salmon coastal grizzlies are eating and elucidate the relationship between the amount of salmon and the number of bears.

We also assess hormone levels in the hair to give us information about potential stress, reproductive activity and protein deprivation bears might show in response to poor salmon returns. From this knowledge emerges an informed basis for action.

Current thinking in conservation science indicates that salmon management needs to include the bears, wolves and other wildlife that have an evolutionary reliance on the annual pulse of nutrients and energy delivered via spawning salmon.  But for elected officials to listen to scientists, the public needs to join the call. It’s time to share the harvest.

Chris Darimont is a Research Scientist at the University of California-Santa Cruz and the Raincoast Conservation Foundation.  Misty MacDuffee is a biologist with the Raincoast Conservation Foundation and lives on Pender Island.

By Chris Darimont and Misty MacDuffee
Times Colonist

The headlines blare across local, regional, and national media: Nine million Fraser River sockeye salmon missing. At the same time, questions have arisen concerning the status of other Pacific salmon runs on B.C.’s central and north coast, a region known as the Great Bear Rainforest.  Many have asked how these potential declines are affecting coastal bears, which depend on salmon for sustenance.

With both acknowledged and possible calamities as compelling and urgent catalysts, Raincoast Conservation Foundation is advocating for British Columbia’s first fully protected salmon runs. This means creation of safe havens or sanctuaries that protect salmon from marine fisheries on their ocean migration routes and also protect their freshwater spawning habitat.

This bold and ambitious proposal runs contrary to the historical philosophical underpinnings of salmon management.

After all, fisheries managers have always assumed that salmon exist exclusively for human consumption. Consequently, runs are only protected from harvest when they are endangered. But how has such status quo management served salmon and the terrestrial ecosystems they nourish?

Not well. Even runs that spawn in protected areas are subject to exploitation by fisheries at levels as high as 80 per cent. Put yourself in the paws of bears. Imagine if your annual paycheque was reduced by four-fifths.

Then imagine the effect on the coastal food web economy. The subsidy presented to the forest and its inhabitants by bears, which leave portions of salmon carcasses behind, is also greatly diminished. Accordingly, we believe that protected areas that host highly exploited salmon runs are not truly protected, because a major ecological process is compromised.

Of course, it’s not just fishing nets that rob bears and other coastal life of this bonanza. Fish farms, climate change, habitat loss, fresh water withdrawals, changing ocean conditions and more all influence salmon abundance.

Many of these impacts are hard to predict, are indirectly related to salmon abundance or require complex solutions.

As eminent U.S. fisheries scientist Robert Lackey has stated, ‘our collective actions — from the rules of commerce to philosophies of growth and development — are not fish-friendly and tend to put relentless downward pressure on salmon numbers.’

In contrast to combating other threats, reducing or eliminating exploitation– on at least some runs — is straightforward and would have an immediate and direct positive effect on coastal ecosystems.

The best thinking in conservation science confirms that sustainable salmon management must include consideration for terrestrial organisms that have co-evolved with, depend on and help sustain salmon.

Indeed, Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s new wild salmon policy provides an important conservation opportunity as it identifies the need for management to transcend salmon production alone, explicitly seeking information on how much salmon is required to sustain key terrestrial species.

Research being conducted by Raincoast’s scientists, in conjunction with major universities, directly addresses this question for an important group of terrestrial salmon users — the large carnivores.

It is a matter of competition, and the odds are stacked against carnivores in these coastal “salmon forests.” Simply put, commercial, recreational and subsistence fishermen engage in what ecologists call exploitative competition — they capture salmon en route to spawning grounds before they even become available to awaiting carnivores.

As a result, we suspect that grizzly bears, in particular, receive a fraction of the salmon they are used to, which ultimately results in population declines. Not by die-offs as others have speculated, but through repeated years of low birth rates. Grizzlies are omnivorous and can persist even without salmon, but they have far fewer offspring.

Our current research — all conducted from non-invasively sampled bear hair– provides timely insight into these concerns. We are estimating how much salmon coastal grizzlies are consuming, tracking bear numbers and determining the relationship between salmon and bear numbers. Hormonal assays give us information about potential stress, reproductive activity and protein deprivation bears might show in response to poor salmon returns.

From such knowledge emerges a solid basis for action. Experience tells us that only carefully gathered information and prudent inference can provide the arguments that form the foundation for lasting changes to management of coastal systems.

Chris Darimont is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California -Santa Cruz and  Misty MacDuffee is a biologist with the Raincoast Conservation Foundation.

How do salmon declines affect coastal bears? And how much salmon biomass is required to sustain terrestrial species?

These are questions many people are asking in light of the increasing number of salmon runs that fail to return as expected to fall spawning streams.Raincoast scientists directly address this question with the Salmon Carnivore Program. Referenced against a backdrop of historical and contemporary declines in coastal salmon runs, we suspect that bears and wolves now receive a fraction of the salmon they once did.

Using hair collected from (non-invasive) fur snagging stations, we use DNA and isotopes to track bear numbers, estimate how much salmon coastal grizzlies are consuming and elucidate the relationship between salmon and bear numbers. We use hormonal assays to give us information about potential stress, reproductive activity and protein deprivation bears might show in response to poor salmon returns.

Current thinking in conservation science instructs salmon management to include the bears, wolves and other wildlife that have an evolutionary reliance on the annual pulse of nutrients and energy delivered via spawning salmon. Even the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s Wild Salmon Policy recognizes the need for management to transcend salmon ‘production’ alone and consider the needs of terrestrial species.

For this policy to be meaningful however, it requires fisheries managers to consider bears and wildlife by lowering catches and allowing more salmon to reach the rivers to spawn.  Currently, humans engage in what ecologists call ‘exploitative competition’ – we capture salmon en route to spawning grounds before they can reach awaiting carnivores.  Even salmon runs that spawn in protected watersheds and parks are subjected to exploitation by commercial fisheries at levels as high as 80 percent. Often, these parks were created to protect species such as grizzlies, black bears and wolves.   As such, we suspect that grizzly bears in particular, receive a fraction of the salmon they are used to, which ultimately manifests in population declines. Not by ‘die-offs’ as some have speculated, but through repeated years of low birth rates.

In some areas, we also believe it is time to establish truly protected salmon runs – runs that would be managed solely for their importance to wildlife and ecosystems. This would allow salmon to return to spawning grounds without encountering the nets of the Pacific salmon fleet. And those fish would then spawn in rivers that flow naturally without their watersheds logged, developed or otherwise impaired.

Of course, it is not just fishing nets that rob bears and other wildlife of their energy needs.  Fish farms, climate change, habitat loss, fresh water withdrawals, changing ocean conditions and processes, and more all influence salmon abundance.  Many of these impacts are hard to predict, are indirectly related to salmon abundance, or require complex solutions.   In contrast, reducing or eliminating exploitation – on at least some runs – is straightforward and would have an immediate and direct positive effect on coastal wildlife.

To read the letter click here

For more of Raincoasts concerns about low numbers of salmon and bears on the BC coast click here.