"After 150 years of experimenting, it’s becoming clear that pumping more baby fish into the ocean may actually be making the problem worse ".
"The arid heat of the Okanagan may feel like a long way from the ocean, but salmon are just as crucial to the Syilx Okanagan people as they are to the First Nations on the B.C. coast. More than a million fish used to migrate up the Columbia River every year to the Okanagan lakes. Scientists believe the historic First Nation salmon fishery at Okanagan Falls was one of the largest in the Columbia watershed, and salmon made up 50 per cent of the Syilx diet.
“Salmon are a very important part of the culture,” says Howie Wright, the program manager for the Okanagan Nation Alliance Fisheries. “Even when there wasn’t a lot of salmon, they were always important.”
Dams, habitat degradation, pollution, overfishing and reduced water flows and high temperatures devastated the Okanagan salmon populations during the last 150 years. Returns hit an all-time low of 2,500 fish in the 1990s. The collapse prompted the Okanagan Nation to start working with Indigenous bands on the U.S. side of the border to return salmon to their former range. With money from U.S. dam mitigation funds, the Okanagan Nation opened a hatchery, initiated habitat restoration efforts and, more recently, developed an innovative portable hatchery program."
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