2006 news releases

Sep 08 2006
Nearly extinct salmon helped
Comox Valley Record
Sep 08 2006
Colleen Dane

It may just look like a pile of rocks — but for salmon heading upstream this year, it’ll actually be the perfect place to spawn.

Providing good spawning ground in the Puntledge River is just one goal for the Greater Georgia Basin Steelhead Recovery Plan (GGBSRP). This year, after completing the second year in gravel replacement that added 650 square-metres at three locations between the Stotan Falls and BC Hydro’s diversion dam — they’ve taken great strides in improving that area of salmon habitat.

“High-quality spawning gravel is really important because you get really good egg-to-fry survival,” said Scott Silvestri, fisheries technician with the GGBSRP.

Minimal amounts of the healthy environments for reproducing is one of the problems that’s been targeted in the Puntledge as a reason for remarkably low return counts.

“We’re definitely at record low levels in the Puntledge — like near-extinction levels,” said Silvestri about annual steelhead returns.

Those low levels are a result of changes to the river’s flow that has happened over many years — Silvestri harkens back to the creation of storage and diversion dams in 1912 and the flooding of the headpond between Comox Lake Dam and the Diversion Dam. That led to an estimated 90,000 square metres of spawning habitat being flushed away permanently.

Since the 1990s, steelhead trout returns have reached record lows, throughout eastern Vancouver Island, he said — and the Puntledge is just one place where projects like these are happening.

While the project is targeting specifically summer run steelhead trout and summer run chinook salmon, other species such as resident rainbow trout, cutthroat troat and coho salmon will also benefit, said Silvestri.

There’s little they can do about what happens to these fish when they’re at ocean — but groups like these can do their best to increase the survival rate while the fish are still in fresh water, said Silvestri. This project is one way to do that.

Funded by BC Hydro’s Bridge Coastal Restoration Program and the province’s Habitat Conservation Trust Fund, the two weeks of work last month, including supplies and equipment, cost $51,500.