There was a story in the Vancouver Sun today about coho salmon in the city. It's part of a series of short articles on urban wildlife. While I applaud the Sun's initiative in educating the public about nature, the coho story ended with a rather strange sentence that implied coho never existed in urban streams in the lower mainland until humans began stocking the fish.
"Fish in the city: Initially all the coho that swam out to sea from city streams were hatchery-born. They were transported to creeks as fry, where they remained until heading to Georgia Strait and the Pacific a year and a half later. Hatchery-born fry are still added to creeks but, over time, wild-born fry have become part of the spring mix."
There is a huge historical gap here -- human activity wiped out "fish in the city" for decades. Vancouver used to have over 60 streams, of which only a few still exist, and only a couple provide spawning access and habitat. All the rest have been paved over and piped. Where I live next door in Burnaby we are more fortunate in having a greater number of productive urban streams because development happened later here, at a time when people were more aware of environmental and sustainability issues.
But no, hatcheries and humans did not create salmon runs in the city! The best we can say is that we brought some of them back in a diminished state with a lot of hard work after realizing the error of our destructive ways.
Posted by Paul at October 14, 2006 08:03 AM