Harper Won't Let BC Salmon Stand In His Way

With BC salmon stocks showing signs in recent years of serious troubles Steve Harper seems intent on making their plight much worse yet.  If the name Enbridge comes to mind, you're on the right track.

The Victoria Times Colonist's Jack Knox has written a chilling account of plans by the Harper regime to gut environmental protections of coastal fish habitats and to 'modernize' environmental assessment legislation to fast-track industrial development.

Knox refers to a story out of Ottawa that, "dealt with the leak of a proposal to weaken 36-year old rules protecting fish habitat, the intent being to clear some of the barriers faced by projects such as the proposed Enbridge pipeline from Alberta to Kitimat."

"The fisheries minister's office reacted to the leak with a statement saying 'federal fisheries policies designed to protect fish are outdated and unfocused in terms of balancing environmental and economic realities.'"

What a thinly veiled admission that, if it comes to British Columbia salmon or Athabasca bitumen, for Steve Harper it's the Great State of Alberta all the way.  That peckerheaded prime minister means to have his way no matter the danger or cost to B.C.

Oh Shit. Genetically Altered Salmon!

As if our wild salmon stocks didn't have enough problems from fish farming. Now there's a company seeking FDA approval to sell a Frankenfish salmon. From The New York Times:

"The salmon was developed by a company called AquaBounty Technologies and would be raised in fish farms. It is an Atlantic salmon that contains a growth hormone gene from a Chinook salmon as well as a genetic on-switch from the ocean pout, a distant relative of the salmon.

Normally, salmon do not make growth hormone in cold weather. But the pout’s on-switch keeps production of the hormone going year round. The result is salmon that can grow to market size in 16 to 18 months instead of three years, though the company says the modified salmon will not end up any bigger than a conventional fish.

“You don’t get salmon the size of the Hindenburg,” said Ronald L. Stotish, the chief executive of AquaBounty. “You can get to those target weights in a shorter time.”

The article omits any mention of the real danger of these fish. What happens to wild stocks when they escape their netted enclosures (as they inevitably do) and breed in competition to the native varieties? It's bad enough that we have Atlantic salmon swimming loose in BC waters but Frankenfish take that problem to an entirely new level. I really don't care what sort of garbage fish people from Alberta to Ontario are willing to eat. I just don't want the damned things loose and breeding wild in our coastal waters.

Global Warming Cooking Salmon to Extinction?

Pacific Northwest salmon stocks are severely endangered by global warming.

Salmon eggs need a steady supply of cold, freshwater in their spawning streams to hatch. If the water flow is interrupted - dead eggs. If the water supply gets too warm - dead eggs. It's why we look anxiously this time of year to the snowpack on our mountain tops. That's what ensures an adequate flow of sufficiently cold water to see hatchlings safely out to sea.

Global warming could spell the end to our salmon stocks. While the region is expected to remain wet in the winter months, snowpacks may decline. And what water does reach the spawning streams may be heated beyond the tolerable limits of salmon eggs. From McClatchey Newspapers:

Climate change already has made rivers warmer and spring runoff earlier, disrupting the life cycle of the fish that are an icon of the region.

No matter what actions the world takes to reduce greenhouse gases, river temperatures in more than half of the lower-elevation watersheds may exceed 70 degrees by 2040 - too hot for salmon.

"The only salmon that are going to survive the century mark are the ones in the large populations in the higher elevations that are still going to have snow and cold water," said Jim Martin, a former chief of fisheries for the state of Oregon.

But even these runs and those as far north as Alaska would be threatened if the world does not reduce gases like carbon dioxide over the next 50 years.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/67402.html