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Steelhead in Trouble

Citing record low return estimates, conservation groups lobby government for steelhead protection

Jan 25, 2022 | 2:34 PM

KAMLOOPS — More than a dozen conservation groups are calling on the federal government to protect the endangered Interior Fraser River steelhead under Canada’s Species at Risk Act.

Experts estimate the spring return of steelhead to the Thompson River complex at 68 in 2022. According to Eric Taylor of the University of British Columbia Department of Zoology, that return is down from 2,000-to-3,000 in the mid-1980s.

“Those 68 fish that are estimated to come back this year to spawn in the spring of 2022, that’s spread across four streams,” Taylor told CFJC Today. “That’s less than 20 (each) in the four spawning streams. The numbers have really, really crashed precipitously.”

Taylor was chair of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) when it listed the steelhead as endangered in 2018.

Steelhead are a type of rainbow trout. Like many other salmon, they migrate to sea before returning to inland streams to spawn. Steelhead typically spawn in spring.

Taylor says there are several factors in the population’s decline, including changes in the ocean’s capacity to support the species, as well as impacts from natural disasters like flooding and wildfires.

He notes adding the steelhead to the Species at Risk Act would protect the species from another mortal threat — being caught up in commercial fisheries in the Lower Fraser River and along the coast.

“It would become illegal to kill, harm or harass the fish — so it would now be illegal to actually catch them, even as bycatch in a commercial fishery,” Taylor noted. “That would stop — at least in theory, if it’s enforced — a direct source of mortality when the fish are coming back as spawners.”

Protection under the Act would also compel government to develop a recovery strategy for the species.

“We need to concentrate on the things we actually have control of, and the thing we have control of is humans, by their activities, killing these fish directly,” Taylor added. “That gives me hope that we have that lever and we can pull it if we want to — if there’s the political will to do it.”

The Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard is Vancouver Quadra MP Joyce Murray, who was appointed last October. Taylor hopes the appointment of a British Columbian to the post will result in more high-level attention to the issue of declining fish populations in the B.C. Interior.

“The Thompson River (steelhead) situation is an example of a much, much broader problem we have with the state of Pacific Salmon and Steelhead Trout in British Columbia, and the government has yet to list any of them in the Species at Risk Act.”

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