Fish decline is not nature’s fault

Kevin Dubovsky Albemarle County
Published: May 27, 2008

Upon reading the May 4 article “West Coast fishery fails again” in the Business section of The Daily Progress, I could not but be distraught — or outraged; I still haven’t decided which — that this article almost blames nature itself for the declining chinook salmon population in the Pacific Northwest. If only it was that easy.

There are two assumptions in the article that I wish to address, having mainly to do with the captions below each of the two pictures. My main problem is that the picture of the sea lion, which is consuming salmon as part of the natural process and due to basic survival, is depicted as being a major contributor to this drastic chinook population decline. In order to counteract this “detriment,” state agents have begun to remove sea lions from their natural habitat.

A sea lion may consume be-tween 212 and 2,094 salmon per year. While this may seem like a significant amount, just think about how many more are consumed from commercial fishing.

The caption below the picture of the Shasta Dam in California was almost as frustrating as the one about the sea lion. The article basically ignores that fact that dams account for 99 percent of migratory salmon deaths, ac-cording to several environmental organizations. Instead, the article states that re-search in California indicates that dams could infuse cold water to help the eventual and hypothetical rebound of the salmon population.

We won’t even ask how much increased fiscal demand and strain this will put on states. Let’s also not even ask why the water is at “lethal” levels for salmon in the first place.

Again, I find it simply ama-zing that this article seems to blame a 1,291 percent de-crease in the chinook salmon population over the past six years on sea lions (with potentially a bit of influence from increased ocean temperatures and habitat destruction) as compared to several hundred dams on vital salmon run rivers, over-commercialized fishing and agriculture pollution.