Researchers drawing on 100-year-old sources of salmon data have found that recent returns of wild adult sockeye salmon to the Skeena River—Canada’s second largest salmon watershed— are 75 per cent lower than during historical times. Research carried out by Simon Fraser University and Fisheries and Oceans Canada and published today in Conservation Lettersreveals that wild sockeye populations have declined by as much as 56-99 per cent over the last century.
The research team used modern genetic tools to analyse a collection of fish scales that had been in storage for more than 100 years, revealing population patterns of decline that are far greater than previously recognized.
Fisheries scientists began collecting scales from sockeye salmon caught in commercial fisheries in 1912, and the collection continued until 1948.
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