Sockeye en route to Okanagan facing mass mortality

OSOYOOS — This year’s drought conditions are having a devastating impact on the sockeye salmon return, which according to biologists is causing mass mortality.

The warm water temperatures and low stream levels have halted the salmon migration. Currently, upwards of 180,000 sockeye are stopped near Brewster, Washington, where the conditions are much cooler.

“Normally our food fishers would be fishing along the Okanagan River, between OK Falls and Oliver, but because of the high water temperatures there’s no salmon at all,” says Tessa Terbasket, a harvest coordinator with the Okanagan Nation Alliance (ONA).

But there is limited food fishing at Osoyoos Lake. The same lake that saw tens of thousands of salmon return last year, is now seeing between 5,000-10,000.

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The federal government has responded by closing recreational and commercial sockeye fisheries.

Bob Otway, a regional member of the Sports Fishing Advisory Council, says he’s pleased with the conservation efforts.

The ONA says the warm waters can be lethal for salmon, making the fish more susceptible to disease.

It estimates that only 10 to 30 per cent of all sockeye salmon that made it to the Columbia basin will survive.

This is disheartening news for the ONA because the group has been helping to replenish the sockeye population for nearly a decade.

“If the numbers aren’t coming back as what we’d like to see, it’d set us back quite a few years to our early steps of the stock regeneration program,” says Terbasket.

Under current conditions, 18,000 to 30,000 sockeye will make it back to Okanagan spawning grounds, a drastic change compared to last year’s return of 90,000.