Commercial fisheries group dismayed by the dolphins’ appearance, alongside increasing numbers of seals and sea lions
But while their return is being greeted by some with delight, the head of a commercial fisheries group is dismayed by the appearance of what he calls an “invasive species,” alongside increasing numbers of seals and sea lions.
Small numbers began to visit the Georgia Strait in the early 2000s, with about 100 to 200 eventually taking up residence in the Salish Sea, Trites said.Their remains have been found in First Nations middens going back 2,000 years, but they all but disappeared for 100 years, he added.Their return coincides with an increase in the number of seals, sea lions and transient killer whales that prey upon marine mammals.
“We’ve forgotten our Indigenous ways of harvesting seals and sea lions, and in those areas, we’re seeing a great overpopulation,” he said, adding that he believed overpopulation of seals and sea lions was a major contributor to the depletion of salmon stocks. In the past three years, Pacific Balance Marine Management has provided gift cards to First Nations harvesters to purchase bullets.
“It’s wrong to think things are coming into balance. OK, even if they are, why do we have to accept that kind of balance? Why do we have to accept a balance that has a top-heavy food web with a really large number of ugly, nasty blubberballs hauled out on the rocks?” he asked. The only way to know for sure, he said, would be to conduct a large-scale experiment to reduce the population by half, and assess the impact on salmon stocks over 10 years.“We had a 60-year period from 1920 to 1980 where seal populations were low in the Georgia Strait,” he said. “We had a huge long experiment if you like, and nothing went wrong in the ecosystem … In a way, we’d be returning the system to the state that showed really high productivity. It’s a no-brainer.
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