Still missing

Out with the old investment banker, in with another. The Missing Salmon Alliance (who?) has a new chair, Matthew Fleming of the Fleming banking dynasty who replaces David Mayhew, retired Cazenove banker. Whether Mayhew achieved much in his stint is unclear. Maybe he persuaded some wealthy people or organisations to stump up but there is no list of such donations on the MSA’s website.

July’s T&S interviews new man Fleming who offers a lot of platitudes but little else. It seems having oodles of money is somehow considered a qualification for these positions. Fleming’s day job is to help the loaded spend and pass on wealth to their kids. Can’t really see how this skill transfers to staving off the extinction of salmon. Probably helps bring it on if anything.

Fleming’s ‘first major initiative is a state-of-the-nation report on Atlantic salmon’. Sound familiar? I think we already know the state of the salmon — dire. Shuffling the cards around the table a bit more will not achieve much. If Fleming could use what clout he has to make the government take concrete action that would be useful. At the end of the article he says something along those lines. Let’s hope he does.

The question that has Fleming and company chasing their tails is why are the salmon quickly vanishing. I have pointed out that illegal fishing is a leading suspect along with bycatch. The only fisheries scientist I’ve seen to take the bycatch option seriously is Sophie Elliott. She is the lead author on a recently published research paper with several co-authors, only one of whom is part of an outfit that falls under the MSA umbrella. This is mainly about work on the River Frome that counts returning adult salmon. No surprise they find that only a few percent return at best. At least it shouldn’t be a surprise because terrible marine survival has been known about for many years, hence the population collapse; but the paper presents this finding as something almost new.

Stephen Jay Gould, the late renowned palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist (and a bit of a whizz at stats, incidentally) once observed how errors in textbooks were propagated into new books because authors drew heavily on the old without giving enough thought to the validity of the contents. Something similar could be said about biologists and statistics. Authors such as Elliott tend to repeat analyses from other similar studies because that’s considered to be the way it’s done. The big problem with any research on salmon coming home from sea is the time it takes to collect the data and its sparseness. Elliott et al try to test the influence of a range of factors from water temperature to the sub-polar gyre index, itself derived from a complex methodology, on the likelihood of a salmon returning. The paper is sparing with the detail, especially the crucial factor sample size. To have meaning, any stats analysis requires an adequate sample size, which needs to be even larger when multiple factors are put in the mix. The only reference is in a supplementary table of statistical output and the number looks very small indeed. Crank the handle and swallow the numbers might be the motto here.

The graph of some interest is this

It suggests that as sea ice extent goes up, smolt survival rate goes down. The authors speculate that melting sea ice produces more cold water which suits the salmon better. My thought is that colder conditions means more sea ice, but oceanic systems are very complex. Who knows? And with the concern over the amount of data, the graph may not mean much.

Elliott does include bycatch in the list of test variables but the sample worries apply, and whether commercial landings are a suitable proxy is questionable. I suspect salmon caught this way are chucked back over the sides (to expire). The paper surmises that bycatch ‘appears to be low’. Illegal fishing is not even mentioned.

The paper does sound an optimistic note, suggesting that because endangered species like the bluefin tuna is now recovering, we could do the same for salmon. Of course, the reason tuna stocks fell so steeply was overfishing: sushi scoffers love them. Once this stopped they recovered. I still think it’s a fair bet that human fishing is the culprit, despite the closure of legitimate fisheries. In conclusion the authors suggest ‘climate mitigation measures to safeguard salmon’. We can’t even do that to save ourselves at the moment. And they suggest improving water quality to ‘support and build population resilience to anthropogenic pressures.’ Frankly this is all very obvious and possibly too late.

Fish will never be resilient to the anthropogenic pressure of being netted out of the sea and finishing up on a dinner plate somewhere. Once again I say, find out whether this is happening before faffing about with any more decade-spanning research projects. Perhaps Matthew Fleming and friends can put up the cash to fund some marine policing. That’s what really is missing.

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Meet the new boss

Followers of fly fishing periodicals will know that Fly Culture is no more, ceasing publication late last year. The editor, Pete Tyjas, was offered the editorship of Trout & Salmon when Andrew Flitcroft retired. Apparently a dream job for him, FC had to go. The new editor has made some changes to the format although these are relatively minor. Early editions under the Tyjas editorship flagged ‘new writers’ on the front page — new, that is, to T&S but typically those who used to write for FC, most of whom are guides. In the last issue I’ve seen (July), the majority of article authors are either guides or part of the T&S team. An old stalwart, Paul Proctor, regularly dispenses advice to the great river of incompetent anglers out there. Apparently ‘smoke literally pours from our ears’ when we get to the river, such is our fevered intellectual activity. Must remember to check my rear-view mirror next trip.

Pete has often presented his environmental credentials, though as I’ve observed before, he is not entirely consistent. In the July editorial he says he stops fishing when the water gets too warm on the grounds of fish welfare. A commendable attitude but at odds with his enthusiasm for faraway fishing trips. He gives space to an article on one of these by Brett O’Connor. Apart from being a fishing guide (with regulation beard), he used to help out with Fly Culture, but the day job is ‘executive creative director’ — i.e. highly paid ad-man. I point out the pay bit because that’s how he can afford all the foreign fishing trips he mentions in passing. The article in question is all about a doozy of a holiday, as the Americans might say (appropriate as the package is offered by an American holiday company).

Argentina is a long way, at least 14 hours to Buenos Aires sardined inside an aircraft with a head rest in your face. Mind you, Brett could probably afford corporate class. Cost is around $11,000 a bit over £8,000. That doesn’t include flights or overnight accommodation on the way there. Five days fishing for over ten grand and sharing a room with a stranger, probably an overweight American who snores like a warthog? Er . . . Then think of the flight’s CO2 emissions, something like a quarter of the average UK resident’s annual carbon expenditure. In case anyone’s forgotten, those emissions are the reason Pete and the rest of us have to curtail summer fishing. And all for a modest chance of catching an outsize chinook salmon, itself a foreign transplant to the region.

That’s the price, monetary and environmental, so what about the article? Well for a creative executive it’s not very creative. Patagonia is from writings and TV programmes a remarkable place. Yet O’Connor struggles to convey any of the scenery he fishes in, resorting to ‘breathtaking in its beauty’, ‘almost overwhelming’ — too overwhelming it seems to avoid ad-man’s copy. Glaciers are all around with ‘icebergs freshly carved [sic] from ancient glaciers’. One imagines a giant Gaucho riding into the mountains with a chisel. He means ‘calved’. Naturally he makes no mention of the reasons for all this calving, the fast-melting ancient glaciers caused by global warming. Pained fishing tackle is a staple of the fishing article and Brett spares us none of the suffering. When he latches on to a monster his ‘reel erupted’. Incidentally, in a précised version on the Orvis website, his reel ‘exploded’. I’d ask for my money back if I were him.

So it goes on, ending with the netting of an unfeasibly large fish, a kind of frankensalmon. On the web piece he calls it an Atlantic chinook. I thought that chinooks are Pacific salmon, but then I realised that these introduced fish now swim a river that empties into the Atlantic Ocean. So the fish-moving meddlers have created an Atlantic Pacific salmon.

I suppose the article is no worse than the usual fare that Trout & Salmon or other magazines dish up. But I have to wonder whether Brett O’Connor, while he’s flogging stuff to the consumer, or planning his next round-the-globe holiday in pursuit of an introduced fish that takes very many hours and very much money to catch, gives any regard to the real cost to our fishing, the planet and all its living inhabitants, most of whom have never heard of a king salmon. And I wonder whether Pete Tyjas has any sense of the contradiction between lamenting environmental decline and publishing articles on his mates’ activities that are helping to bring this about.

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