A sad story from the Globe and Mail in Canada. Grizzly bears in British Columbia are dead or dying, stream-walkers say, because nine million sockeye salmon expected to return from the ocean this summer have failed to appear.
The cause? The immediate cause for the salmon crash is believe to be sea lice, but experts suggest that the underlying cause is fish farms nearby, which create the conditions in which sea lice thrive.
Alexandra Morton, who several years ago correctly predicted a collapse of pink salmon runs in the Broughton Archipelago because of sea lice infestations, in March warned the same thing could happen to Fraser sockeye.
She said researchers used genetic analyses to show Fraser sockeye smolts were getting infested with sea lice in Georgia Strait.
“I looked at about 350 of this generation of Fraser sockeye when they went to sea in 2007 and they had up to 28 sea lice [each]. The sea lice were all young lice, which means they got them in the vicinity of where we were sampling, which was near the fish farms in the Discovery Islands. If they got sea lice from the farms, they were also exposed to whatever other pathogens were happening on the fish farms (viruses and bacteria), ” said Ms. Morton in an e-mail.
That piscine disaster now has led to the vanishing of a charismatic megafauna:
Reports from conservationists, salmon-stream walkers and ecotourism guides all along British Columbia's wild central coast indicate a collapse of salmon runs has triggered widespread death from starvation of black and grizzly bears. Those guides are on the front lines of what they say is an unfolding ecological disaster that is so new that it has not been documented by biologists.
Here's a map that shows the linkage between fish farms, sea lice, and salmon runs. You can tell what the newspaper is thinking....
