Millions of Salmon Return Home
Dec. 9, 2014 - Every four years, millions of sockeye salmon journey thousands of miles from the ocean back to their native spawning grounds in Canada's Fraser River. There, after eggs are laid, the parents die. Then, eventually, the cycle begins anew as the next generation of salmon makes its way down the river and into the ocean.
Transcript
Jeremy Heighton
Event Coordinator
Adams River Salmon Society
[00:08] - People come from literally all over the world to be witness to this event of incredible odds.
[00:19] - Each female brings 4000 eggs here from the ocean, and deposits them here in the system. And yet, four years later we're lucky if we get two of those back as adults. And it's this incredible struggle between life and death every single day.
[00:41] Every four years these amazing animals have returned to their birthplace, in many cases meters from where they were born. But, you know, it's sort of the end and the beginning all at the same time. The death of the salmon is the birth of the child and the birth of the child depend upon the death of the adult before, they never meet, they never connect like so many other animals do.
And so I think that when people come here they come here to witness that, that moment of transition, and it's a very powerful and poignant story for people.
Allison Felker
Tourist
[01:11] It's really, you know it sounds like a cliche, but it really is a miracle that they make it, and and four out of four thousand or something actually make it back so it's pretty spectacular.
Aaron Hill
Ecologist
Watershed Watch Salmon Society
[01:30] When they go out to the ocean they go a long ways. These fish that are spawned up near the Rocky Mountains, up in the upper Fraser will go several hundred kilometers over a thousand kilometers out to the mouth of the Fraser. Then up along the coast, up into the gulf of Alaska, so they're traveling several thousand kilometers in their lives and then they come back.
And so it's a massive migration.
[02:00] Every four years there's this massive population year which is what we're in now and then there's a shadow year, about half as many, it's called a subdominant run. And then there's two years of really relative quiet, but generally speaking it's evolved to be on this four year cycle.
Jennifer Nener
Area Director for Lower Fraser
Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada
[02:17] So 2009 got a lot of attention because we had unexpectedly low returns, the total run size that year was about 1.5 million sockeye coming back to the Fraser, four years previous to that we had in the order of 7 million, so that was a significant decline and raised concerns..
Where we're at today obviously, looking at about 19.6 or 19.8 million coming back to the Fraser, and I would say things perhaps looking a little better for Fraser sockeye than people feared back in 2009.
Aaron Hill
[02:56] We used to see returns like this on a regular basis, over a hundred years ago, one thing that we do know about sockeye is that they're being increasingly affected by climate change. We have, in the Fraser river, increasing high water temperatures in the summer, and we have a number of weeks now in a lot of summers where water temperatures reach a lethal threshold for salmon. And that's going to increase as the climate warms and as the river system increasingly changes as a result of that.
Jeremy Heighton
[03:32] - We have this abundant planet that we all share, and when you look at the cosmos and the universes around us, it's an anomaly. It's something so unique that has one together from so many thousands of potential disastrous conditions and we have a responsibility to care for it.
We have a responsibility to be a part of it. And we have a responsibility to embrace what it teaches us, and I think when we do that, then we will become part of the planet we manage.
