Grizzlies starve as salmon disappear

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Wiki provides an overview of collapsed fisheries:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfishing

This study, from Science Magazine predicts the complete collapse of all fish stocks by 2048, but you have to buy it to read it:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/314/5800/745

For free you can read commentary on the article:

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/nov2006/2006-11-06-02.asp

The Canadian Cod fishery collapsed in 1992. At least 15 years it before it happened, I listened to the debates on RCI. I heard fisherman stating there were a lot of fish out there and how fishing limits were all bogus. Then the cod fishery collasped.

OPPS! :eek:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Northern_Cod_Fishery

This article, from the Globe and Mail shows the current concern of the salmon fisheries.

They were expecting 17.5 million fish but only 1.37 million came.

Counting fish, that ought to be a boring job. "999,001, 999002, 999,003, 99,004, ah shucks!, I got the count wrong, and I have to start all over again!"
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...-collapse-of-salmon-fisheries/article1284281/
 
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counting fish, that ought to be a boring job. "999,001, 999002, 999,003, 99,004,
ah shucks!, i got the count wrong, and i have to start all over again!"
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lol :d <--- weird. I typed that in all caps, and put a cap D for a laugh emoticon, but it won't print either. Go figga.
 
I think the point of salmon runs is gorging to add weight for hibernation. (I'll abide by my own suggestion and see if I can find a reference to that, then post it here by edit.)
Salmon offer a very concentrated, easily-captured source of proteins and lipids. For griz, it must be like setting up camp for a few weeks in a burger joint that's giving away food.

Take those salmon away, and Mr/s Griz have to find enough other food to gain that "few hundred kilos" of weight another way. If there's a prolonged drought when they're trying to do that, that could cause problems.
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Funny, I don't think there are any salmon runs in Idaho or Colorado or Montana and they have strong griz populations. I agree with Cosmoline on this.

Besides, when the bear get hungry you will see MORE of them, not fewer. If you're not seeing them around a river with a bad salmon run, that's because the salmon run is bad and they've gone off to get something else to eat.
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Now THAT is a logical point. :D
 
Why griz prefer salmon when they can get them

In all cases, I've added bold emphasis to quoted sections.

From this source:

Brown and black bears vary their diets seasonally. Upon emergence from hibernation, bears usually feed upon forbs and any terrestrial meat available. Forbs are broad-leaved herbs other than grasses and are chosen over grasses because they are a more digestible protein source. Upon arrival of salmon and production of berries in the summer and fall months, bears turn to these sources to meet their nutritional needs and gain body mass.

When salmon and berries are available, salmon is eaten preferentially by brown bears because salmon contain high amounts of protein. Berries are utilized more often and earlier in the season by black bears for two reasons. First, black bears are smaller than brown bears; therefore they are more able to meet their energetic needs consuming berries. Second, black bears are excluded at salmon streams by brown bears.
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From this source:

What about fish? Most people assume that grizzlies feed on salmon. Unfortunately for bears on the eastern slopes of the Rockies, there ain't no salmon here. They must rely on other sources of food. Farther west, salmon form an important food source during the annual run. In a few locations with narrow, shallow streams, trout may occasionally be taken.
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Finally, an abstract of a paper on a study on bear diets. Unfortunately, I'm posting all of the abstract available without registering for the site.

Major components of grizzly bear diet across North America.
Canadian Journal of Zoology | March 1, 2006| Mowat, Garth; Heard, Douglas C.

Abstract: We measured stable carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios in guard hair of 81 populations of grizzly bears (Ursus arctos L., 1758) across North America and used mixing models to assign diet fractions of salmon, meat derived from terrestrial sources, kokanee (Oncorhynchus nerka (Walbaum in Artedi, 1792)), and plants. In addition, we examined the relationship between skull size and diet of bears killed by people in British Columbia. The majority of carbon and nitrogen assimilated by most coastal grizzly bear populations was derived from salmon, while interior populations ...
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Well it's a real shame, and obviously they need to regulate these fisheries in a much much stricter manner. :mad: Methinks that some fisherman are greasing some palms in high places in the wildlife departments.
 
Demand.

Health-conscious Prius-driving, bumper-sticker-environmentalist Americans want their wild salmon for the healthy fatty acids.

Nobody overfishes for fish that don't sell.

We're doing all right here in Idaho. Salmon and steelhead are coming back. However, there's no commercial fishing for the fish once they get here. Like sport hunting, highly-restricted sportfishing is sustainable. Fishing with big nets near estuaries isn't.

Another factor: habitat loss, like any other game. It's easy to overfish a decimated population.

Habitat loss is being addressed, to a degree. It takes time for populations to come back.

Also: overfishing is where the notion of multiple population equilibrium points (aka multiple stable equilibria, alternative stable states) comes from in population biology. I.e. populations don't tend towards one particular number after a major perturbation; they tend towards the nearest of several possible numbers where "nature is in balance." It is possible for populations to stabilize at a different level than they were before the disturbance -- including a much lower level. Once they've done this, they don't "come back", they just stabilize at that lower level.

What's the answer?

Conserving wild salmon has to become a greenie fad. The people who buy "fair trade" coffee, whatever the hell that is, ought to become "aware" of the grizzly's plight.
 
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All that matters to tree huggers now days is "global warming". They couldn't care less about real ecological issues or their fads effects upon them. :rolleyes: They are driven by leftist agendas and the latests fads to protest. They haven't a clue, 99 percent of 'em, of what they're even protesting except maybe how cute the fur seals are in those pictures or something.

The people who buy "fair trade" coffee, whatever the hell that is,
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I figure it's a buck higher at starbucks with that label. :D
 
Well it's a real shame, and obviously they need to regulate these fisheries in a much much stricter manner. Methinks that some fisherman are greasing some palms in high places in the wildlife departments.
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Well, I live in a fishing town/area. It's hard to displace fishermen by just outright shutting down their life's work, their culture (such as it is), and that. They've got a lot in vested in a specialized boat, a way of life, actually. What Texas is doing with shrimping is just cutting off sales of new tags/licenses for boats. Bay shrimping, except for bait shrimp licenses, is about dead now. Gulf shrimping is going to take a while. Persons can sell the boat and the existing license that goes with it, but there are no new licenses being issued. I think they'll still issue bait shrimp licenses, though. That only matters to bait vendors. There will be a day in Texas when there is no more commercial shrimping.

I don't know what they're doing with the crabs other than adding lots of extra legal hoops to jump through like having to tag each pot with your license number and such. There is also a 300 pot limit per license, now, and that's not much of a living. Ain't gonna get rich, put it that way. But, eventually, commercial fishing is going to have to go the way of commercial hunting. People will speak of shrimp nets as they do punt guns. Shrimp farming is alive and well, all-be-it with its own environmental issues, but farming is far less an environmental problem than fishing. I understand the same can be said about salmon.
 
The ocean does not have an endless supply of food, as once thought. Especially when its used as a garbage can. We've seen acidification of mountain lakes and die offs of fish more than the previous 10 yrs, even with pollution standards and controls. Recent article I read said that Grizzly's are getting smaller. That's the beginning stages of extinction. I remember when muley deer by their 2nd year, were pretty decent size. They're getting smaller in the last 10 yrs.
 
The game unit I hunt moose in went[recently] from 1 brown every 4 years to 1 a year.
The unit West of it went from one every 4 years to 2 A YEAR Browns, not blacks[3 a year, no closed season]
Snaring of BB over bait is now legal for first time in living memory.
And it was a lousy salmon run this year.
The bears seem to do quite well on caribou and moose calves
As far as salmon go, I don't know what BC's problem is but here they are always cyclic.I would not be shocked to see next years run the best ever.
 
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Basically, it sounds me to like this, in a nutshell.

Some countries proactively and effectively take great pains to MANAGE their waters in the proper way through legislation and adminstrative regulation, to maintain viable healthy long-term populations. Apparently there are a few shining examples of excellent water management; Australia claims to be among them.

Some countries have a modus operandi and history of poorly managing their waters. CANADA would be example (perhaps the best example) of a country which is frankly (apparently) piss-poor at managing its fishery waters, because it lets local politics (and undoubtedly some greased palms) get in the way of what is best for the nation as a whole, the world as a whole, and even interfere with what's best LONG-TERM for the local population that relies upon the fishery for its industry and wants to reduce regulation. Frankly, they DON'T know what's best for them (long-term). The 1992 cod collapse is proof positive of this history and this phenomenon in CANADA; this new debacle is yet further proof of Canada's POOR waters management, seems to me. Looks like they haven't yet changed their ways or learned the lesson they should have from the 92 collapse in the east.

Bottom line - Heads should roll in Ottawa for letting this fishing lobby get the best of what's right for everyone in the long term, and that's sustainable native fishes, and that's only done by actively managing fishing levels.

'Course, I could be wrong...
 
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Sounds to me like they'll be more apt to come to your bait stations so you can shoot them. How many can one kill with the proper documentation for import to the US? One or two? I can't remember. Seems to me that the dwindling numbers would be a good thing (bears I mean)... fewer bears, equal more salmon, more salmon equal more food for humans at lower prices.
 
Well, hell, if we just clear the land altogether of the flora and fauna, and plant crops instead, THAT would be even MORE cheap food for humans - why don't we just do that?

Is that the only criterion that should be applied? Cheap food for humans?
 
Both were addressed in the original story, so I think we're discussing both here.
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Bear do not require salmon to survive. Humans will be more impacted if the salmon vanish. The bear can eat almost anything.

If we're talking about salmon runs, the devil is in the details. Atlantic cod provide a useful example of what can go wrong with certain kind of apparently abundant fish stocks. But that example would be more properly applied to POLLOCK than salmon. Pollock from N Pacific waters have largely replaced Atlantic cod as the breadbasket fish for the market. And they're related to cod. I've heard some pretty scary forecasts of a coming collapse in their population due to overfishing.

SALMON, otoh, have almost nothing in common with codfish other than having fins. They are anadromous and have a very different life cycle. They rely on fresh water streams for reproduction, and those streams are constantly subject to variation due to weather. It's natural for salmon to be dong well in one area and terrible in another. So if you come up here to river X and the King and Silver runs are bad, it's a big mistake to conclude from that experience that "the salmon are going extinct."

Salmon are pretty resilient and can bounce back from big collapses. That's the way they're made. I'm not worried about them going extinct as long as we keep the rivers reasonably clean and open. Some of the current shortfall may in fact relate to pollock by-catch. So again it's the pollock fishery the world should be paying attention to. Whether you know it or not you've probably been eating that fish a lot more than any wild salmon.

It's a big pet peeve of mine that Enviroment, Inc. focuses on certain sexy issues to raise funds instead of actually examining the real problems. North slope oil drilling, for example. As human activities go, it would be difficult to find one that hurt wildlife *LESS* than drilling on the slope. The heavy work is done in the middle of winter and the biggest impact on wildlife has been to ATTRACT more of it due to human activity and dumps. Comprende? The problem is that it makes the slope MUCH BETTER for animals than it had been, bringing ravens and brown bears up for some of the fixins' This business about how some caribou will see an oil rig and fail to calve is laughable. But the environment industry decided to make that the main cause. Not PEBBLE MINE, which proposes putting an entire LAKE of absolutely toxic poison (and I don't mean that in a figurative sense) at the headwaters of one of the last great fisheries on the planet, in the middle of N America's most active geologic zone. No, Pebble Mine gets almost no attention. It's all about the Slope.
 
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Points all well taken, espec. about the pollock; thank you.

But the fact still remains that if you fish the holy living hell out of the salmon at all river entrances from the sea, and they can't go up and spawn and re-produce, you're going to greatly lower their numbers, impacting them and everything that relies on them. You have to "manage" it by allowing X amount of harvest at this river, Y amount at that river, etc. at whatever numbers allow the population to sustain. The problem is if they're doing badly *everywhere* which could happen if they are fished everywhere, independent of natural fluctuations. My understanding is that they're fished at the point where the rivers dump into the ocean, as the salmon are coming up to breed. And the fact remains that Canada, as a country, has an extremely poor track record, it would seem, of properly managing their fishery to prevent collapse.

Question: Does the pollock 'by-catch' from the trawlers (be is salmon or whathaveyou) just get wasted, or is it processed too?
 
Question: Does the pollock 'by-catch' from the trawlers (be is salmon or whathaveyou) just get wasted, or is it processed too?
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It's getting tossed, which to my mind is a violation of wanton waste laws. But certain individuals in Seattle have a lot of power in this state. They're muy malo, and the right alliance of native subsistence users and sport fishermen could shut them down. Lord knows subsistence and sport mean ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more to this state than some #$@@ from Seattle who takes 99% of the profit outside. To me it's no different than some Japanese trawler stealing our fish.
 
Not PEBBLE MINE, which proposes putting an entire LAKE of absolutely toxic poison (and I don't mean that in a figurative sense) at the headwaters of one of the last great fisheries on the planet, in the middle of N America's most active geologic zone. No, Pebble Mine gets almost no attention. It's all about the Slope.
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It really is amazing how little national publicity pepple gets. I used to hunt the Mulchatna herd from Iliamna. fly 20-30 miles west, caribou and brown bear all around, no clue that there were other people on the planet. Now there are helicopters roaring in and out of Iliamna non-stop, and the Mulchatna herd is down-and it hasn't even been built yet.
 
Not to mention the fact that it's backed by Anglo-American. They make Exxon like like boy scouts. They cut their teeth running diamond mines back in the bad old days in South Africa! They'll come in, rip a mile-wide open pit into pristine hunting country, and leave a lake of toxins behind a mere earthen dam. When that thing busts in the next big quake, the Valdez spill will look like a nice day on the beach. A LAKE of cyanide and other toxins released into the rivers and ocean.

Speaking of pollock--a survey just released shows the numbers are way down. Surprise surprise. Considering the fact that everybody eats these things, this should be national or world news. But how many outside of AK even know what pollock are?

Pollock population estimates were low even before Friday's news. The previous assessment indicated that the 2008 spawning biomass was at the lowest level since 1980.

The Bering Sea pollock fishery is the largest commercial fishery by weight in the United States. It also is Alaska's most valuable fishery, worth some $1 billion after processing.
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http://www.adn.com/money/industries/fishing/story/940150.html
 
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But how many outside of AK even know what pollock are?
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Those who eat at Long John Silver fast food fish restaurants should know since that's what they're eating: pollock.

But in the age of fast food and grocery stores, people don't really understand where their food comes from. As a food educator friend tells me, kids in public high schools here now literally don't even know where eggs come from or what tuna really is.
 
I've been on the highway since Wednesday morning, is why I haven't chimed in before now.

I ran across an article a month or so back about the decline in the population of one of the salmon species. King? I don't remember, now. Anyhow, allegedly the cause is over-harvest of a prey species upon which they depend.

I got involved in the U.S. "Coastal Zone Management Program" in 1975. Spent four years brain-picking on the bug'n'bunny PhDs about marine biology and fishing harvest and all that. Texas P&W biologists, USF&WS and Natl Marine Fishries folks, as well as in-house staff. So, I managed to learn a little bit. I never bothered to learn the Latin names, but I darned sure learned about the inter-relationships of coastal and marine ecosystems.

To overly simplify the deal: The oceans are being over-harvested. The overall worst offenders are the Japanese and then (as near as I can tell) the Formosans. Next is "other Asians". :)

We see it around the U.S. as well. The problem now is emotional and individual-economic; "My daddy fished and I fish and I wanna keep on keeping on." Trouble is, there aren't enough fish left to provide a living for the number of fishermen who want to keep on keeping on.

Anyhow, in this case it's overharvest of one species (smelt?) which causes a decline in another species (Kings?) which then causes problems for another species: Bears.

Drifting: Did you know that the higher price of corn in 2007 wiped out the catfish farms of Mississippi and also (to a lesser extent) in Alabama and Georgia? I haven't seen news-squibs to indicate any resurrection...

Connections. Unintended consequences. They're everywhere.
 
This week I found out that Commercial satellites sell fish population tracks to the commercial fleets.

Satellite images show where the big concentration of fish are, and where they are moving, and the fishing fleets scoop them all up.
 
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