Is it time for ‘Dignity Dave’…before it’s too late? The CA Stellar Sea Lion Exposed
April 17th, 2009
As I was driving into work today the rain was pouring down on the hood of my truck. I cracked the window and noticed a particular smell…..Spring. Nothing reminds me more of this time of year than Sal, dressed up in his home-made improvisational rain gear….that we coined PAR APPAREL for the homeless people (respectively) that used to live in their Homemade city called….’Dignity Village’. Just a classic photo here, folks.
The winter-long anticipation of the smell of wet trees and flowered foliage just barely in bloom…..a light breeze NOT from the East for once in a long time….and it hit me…….IT’S TIME TO BANK STURGEON FISH OUR FAVORITE SPOTS! It’s time to get Dignity Dave out on the river with a bank rod in his hands…..”Hey Sal, how about a nuther 95 incher??”
Sal aka Dignity Village Dave
With chinook season coming to a soon ending in the CR and Willamette……we have the chance to revisit some fishing that we really use to love to do. I’m not saying we abandon steelhead, because I am having one helluva year, but I would like to mix in some BIG ROD casting from the bank in search of fish 60 inches or bigger.
Plus, we have to fish for them before the California Stellar Sea Lions eat them all. If you want to get sick to your stomach, check out the article below….
BUT FIRST, CHECK OUT THE VIDEO OF THE ‘STURGEON BALL’. There is so much about these wondrous fish we don’t understand….
| Sturgeon ball |
Read on…..
From the Oregonian last month…….
Last month, government agencies gathered the media at Bonneville Dam to discuss the problem of sea lions eating endangered salmon.
As if on cue, a sea lion surfaced below the dam, feasting on a fish as birds circled overheard. Cameras clicked, videotape rolled.
But most missed that the sea lion wasn’t eating a salmon. It was eating a sturgeon.
Amid debate over the government’s response to salmon-eating sea lions, which includes killing the mammals with gunshots or injections, a parallel but very different predator-prey phenomenon has evolved.
Sea lions have gone from practically ignoring sturgeon at the dam to eating them by the hundreds, which could eventually threaten the fish and force wildlife experts to make some difficult choices.
“Sturgeon is now on the menu,” said John North, Columbia River program manager for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.
In 2005, sea lions were observed eating only one white sturgeon at Bonneville. Last year they ate about 800.
“It was unheard of for a sea lion to even eat a sturgeon not that long ago,” North said. “You would have been laughed at if you suggested it.”
And though California sea lions eat most of the salmon at Bonneville, it’s their larger cousins, Stellers, that eat nearly 98 percent of the sturgeon below the dam, according to the Army Corps of Engineers.
Compounding the problem is that Stellers, unlike California sea lions, are protected under the Endangered Species Act, limiting what wildlife agencies can do to keep them from sturgeon that spawn below the dam.
“I think people are worried that, left unchecked, this could become a problem down the road,” said Robert Stansell, a corps fish biologist at Bonneville. For now, sturgeon aren’t threatened with extinction.
Sturgeon numbers collapsed at the start of the 20th century because of overfishing, but rules implemented a few decades ago on the size of fish that could be caught helped them recover. Now there may be 1 million in the river below the dam.
And white sturgeon, which can live for a century and grow as long as 10 feet, have increased in popularity in recent decades among sportfishers, who don’t look kindly on competing with sea lions for a limited catch.
“Who’s to say how many they actually take? It’s just depleting the runs more and more and more,” said Bret Dickerson, a Camas, Wash., fishing guide who first saw a sea lion catch a sturgeon about eight years ago.
State agencies allow recreational and commercial fishermen such as Dickerson and his clients to take about 40,000 sturgeon a year from the lower Columbia, though those are limited to younger fish.
And many of the fish the sea lions target at Bonneville, particularly in the spring and summer, are there to reproduce.
Sturgeon don’t usually spawn until they are about 6 feet long, beyond what’s legal for fishermen to take. They may produce an egg mass — which can weigh 20 pounds and contain hundreds of thousands of eggs — only every three or four years.
“We do quite a few things to try to protect” them, North said. “Now there’s a new player in town that’s focused on those fish.”
As the fish collect below the concrete barrier of Bonneville, they present an irresistibly easy source of food for the sea lions.
“Because we have an artificial barrier that has created something quite unnatural, we have upset the balance,” said Brian Gorman, a spokesman with the NOAA Fisheries Service in Seattle. The sea lions “just keep eating and eating and eating.”
There were no Stellers at the dam in 2002. There were 20 last month, according to the corps.
This year, as in previous years, federal and state agencies have used firecrackers, rubber bullets and other techniques to shoo away sea lions. Traps also are in place to relocate sea lions to permanent enclosures in zoos, but those facilities are few.
And this year the states have the authority to kill as many as 85 California sea lions at the dam, a step animal welfare groups deplore and are challenging in court.
The federal protection of Stellers isn’t permanent. The population from eastern Alaska to California has increased for decades and numbers more than 45,000, according to the NOAA.
“They’re getting to the point where there’ll probably be in the next year or two or three a proposal to delist them,” Gorman said.
Ah, this always makes the tempers flare both ways, doesn’t it?
H3l
