Is the steelhead DNA baseline complete enough to be able to identify watershed of origin in all of the capture fisheries? Anyone know?
It'd be nice to be able to see how fine a selection is possible and how complete the steelhead/rainbow DNA database is. Generally, DFO likes to have 100+ individual DNA samples from each watershed of origin for a baseline - and there are now some newer DNA techniques available to help w stock discrimination. Sure would be nice to have accurate allocations from mixed-stock fisheries towards watershed-specific TACs - in an ideal and perfect world.
Ya - and they have been constantly cutting DFOs stock assessment funding over the past 20 yrs or so, unfortunately. Wonder what the Province contributes since steelhead/rainbow is a "Provincial" fish?
What a mess, eh?
Read the science, its pretty clear that those nets aren't the big problem that we once thought they were. Harbour seals per the science do correlate to a strong causal reason for the declining survival of steelhead smolts. Moving to more selective fishing techniques certainly would help the few remaining fish, but it isn't the smoking gun. Of course we can all ignore the science and go with our gut feeling - it worked pretty good for the Executive team of Eastman Kodak.The comparison of Thompson steelhead collapsing due to harbour seals is embarrassing. I'm sure it plays a small role,
You want to see these stocks recover keep the nets out of the river and in Johnstone straight. Or go with actual selective measure beach seining....which we know how well that works lol
In the SARA call today DFO said they just recently required commercial fishermen to record steelhead encounters. They were quite proud of themselves that they put a section for it on commercial license.
FSC fisheries catch reporting much like recreational creel surveys they said.
The province said freshwater habitat is not an issue because there are no steelhead in the habitat.
The sara person said FSC won't get exemption under a listing because there simply is not many IFS steelhead left.
Seals? well seals were not even mentioned. But Naked people at the merritt mountain music festival destroying steelhead spawning grounds were LOL
Seal are no doubt a predator pit preventing the rebound but they certainly were not the smoking gun in the 70's when steelhead populations started to crash. As someone pointed out steelhead populations have crashed 80% in the last 2 decades but 99% since 1970.
I am willing to say that seals are part of the problem and maybe even the problem now
Don't worry tho Searun they pretty much said the IFS steelhead won't be listed because of "social and economic reason" So no recover plan will be implemented and No addition funding will be allocated towards these fish but guess what there will still be ****** no fishing closure recreational and commercial fishing windows in the river.
yay!
Harbour Seal abundance and the constructed index of pinniped predation explained 84% and 90% of the variation in log productivity for the Thompson DU (Fig. 8a and b), and 88% and 87% of the variation for the Chilcotin DU (Fig. 8c and d), respectively. These correlations were significant (p<0.001) and the strongest of all covariates that we examined.