It was a rare window into the past: small black field notebooks from the first decades of the last century, pages swollen and yellowed with time, forgotten for more than 50 years.
“I think this collection is regarded as one of the richest collections of fish scales in the world,” says Michael Price, who launched his Ph.D. studies in biological sciences at Simon Fraser University in 2016 to figure out what stories the scale collection could divulge. Techniques to read the scales’ genetic information—something Gilbert could never have imagined—hadn’t been invented, so the scales languished for another 20 years until Price arrived. The wait was worth it.
It adds up to this: a century ago, about 1.8 million wild adult sockeye returned to the Skeena River each year. In the eight years ending in 2014, it was fewer than 500,000, and the fish have done more poorly since then, Price says. He added that degradation of the creeks doesn’t explain the huge declines. “It’s really death by 1,000 cuts,” he says. “It’s a combination of all our human actions that undoubtedly has contributed to their decline.
The Pacific salmon industry is all too conscious of the crisis. Both in 2017 and this year, the sockeye fishery on the Skeena was closed because fish were too sparse, says Christina Burridge, secretary to the Canadian Pacific Sustainable Fisheries Society, which represents processors and exporters. And, this month, the industry voluntarily withdrew its entire B.C. salmon catch from the Marine Stewardship Council, the organization that certifies fisheries as sustainable.
While they say the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans is trying to improve monitoring and establish rehabilitation plans, it’s too little, too late.