The SF Chronicle has had a couple of front page, full color treatments of the salmon season disaster. Even the far away NY Times understands: this is bad stuff. Not only economically — commercial fisherman are going the way of buggy makers — but as a harbinger of a host of other bad news.
Faced with the collapse of the fall Chinook salmon run in the Sacramento River, the Pacific Fishery Management Council voted Thursday to cancel all commercial salmon fishing this year from the California coast to north-central Oregon. The season was to have begun on May 1.
“This is a complete disaster by any standard,” said Don Hansen, the council chairman.
… The warning signals of the collapse came last fall. Among the adult salmon that return from the ocean to spawn in the rivers of their birth are immature ones that have spent as little as a year in the ocean. The quantity of these younger fish, called jacks, is a reliable predictor of the abundance of the next year’s run. Last fall, the count of the fall Chinook jacks from the Sacramento River was less than 6 percent of the long-term average.
Two factors are suspected. One is federally sanctioned diversion of water from the Sacramento River into the irrigation system used by farmers in the Central Valley of California. The other is a climate-driven change in the normal upwellings in the ocean that could have deprived the young fish of food.