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They’re gone. First millions of sockeye salmon and now even grizzly bears are only rarely sighted. The winter stocks of the native people are running low. Is it a food chain reaction? How Canada’s western province of British Columbia shudders at the thought of the world climate. By Alexander Smoltczyk

Salmon, that pink bit of the hors d'oeuvre at the reception, is the soul of Vancouver. Almost anyone here can tell you the difference between sockeye and pink salmon, humpback, Coho, Chinook and steelback. There is a stylized salmon silhouette on all of the city’s manhole covers. The spawning season is anticipated with as much excitement here as elsewhere the monsoon season. Sporting fishers and Indians, breeders, environment saviours, apocalypticists and commercial fishers are all waiting for the salmon.

The Vancouver Sun reports daily. At the narrows of Fraser River, municipal employees stand with counters in hand and wait. They don’t go further west than Vancouver, and perhaps the ancestors of the westward trek see something of themselves in the similarly epical efforts of the salmon moving against the flow, upriver, taking advantage of every corner and every bit of cover, to, exhausted at the end of the journey, expel their eggs or their semen and perish. The next generation will have better life.

Perhaps not, though, for this autumn an entire generation has gone missing. The province’s Department of Fisheries and Ocean, which oversees the salmon, extrapolated the number of registered smolts, the young salmon, and, using an algorithm, reached an expected and highly probable number of 10.578 million sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka). In reality, only 1.7 million of the fish have returned to Fraser River. This summer’s headlines were “Where have all the salmon gone?” Where are the nine million sockeyes; who has them on their conscience?

The second just as frequently asked question is: what if the salmon is a canary? Wait just a minute! No, in all seriousness: what if the fate of the salmon can be read as an otherwise unnoticeable, yet fatal change, like the canaries taken into mines to die as a sign of toxic gas?

The grizzlies are also missing

Disquiet reigns. The First Nations, the native Canadians, are protesting because they cannot stock up on their winter stores of dried salmon and pickled fish. The further upriver the nations live, the louder their protests. It is an ancient conflict. The word “rivals” comes from rivus, Latin for stream. Rivalis means “one who uses a stream in common with another.” When there is a shortage of fish at the river mouth, none get further upstream.

The spawned-out salmon cadavers serve as the food for entire species, their meat fertilizes the rainforest west of the Rocky Mountains every year by the millions. Grizzlies and black bears feed on the fish before hibernating and carry the Pacific nutrients via their faeces to every remote nook. Biologist Thomas Reimchen from Victoria University on Vancouver Island calculated that up to 4,000 kilograms of salmon carcasses lie on every hectare of bear territory. It seems there are still trappers in British Columbia who spend their lives walking or paddling every kilometre of the rivers, for the newspapers quote some rangers who say there are frighteningly few grizzly bears at the headwaters of the Fraser this autumn. The reason is the failure of the sockeye salmon to appear.

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The end of salmondom: To Alexander Smoltczyk’s climate blog

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Vancouver is the native city of Greenpeace. It’s a city where almost everyone drinks 100% organic coffee, likes the Dalai Lama and only eats sea fish bearing the sustainability certificate of the David Suzuki Foundation. Suzuki is a pioneer expert on global warming and was one of the first to announce that climate change is responsible for the absence of the sockeye. Yes, salmon is the canary for the status of the North Pacific.

In truth, the North Pacific was warmer than usual in the years 2005 until 2007. In the meantime, it has cooled down again. Yet 2005 was the year that the young sockeye salmon left their freshwater habitat for the Pacific.

Dispute of the salmonologists

What difference does half a degree more or less make? Apparently, according to the salmon experts at the Department of Fisheries, a big one. The half a degree in temperature won’t kill them, but “the plankton composition changes, other species from warmer waters migrate north and compete with the salmon for food. The upflows change,” says Jeff Grout, who is responsible for the salmon populations in the department.

Salmon register every tiny change, like precision instruments. But, the calibrator has gone home and no one can say what the standard value actually is. In other words, the salmon measure something with high precision; we just don’t know what.

So, hypotheses are popping up all over. I was given a dozen different explanations in Vancouver, on the fishing boats and along the Fraser River. Each of them was convincing, scientifically grounded and brought forward passionately. Some blame the Russian trawlers, other the many sea lions, and others the spread of the non-native Atlantic salmon or Mother Earth’s wrath in general. A Sto:lo Indian at Hell’s Gate, the river narrows in the middle reaches of the Fraser, explains that construction and logging are to blame.

They increase the discharge of sediments and, in addition, the salmon do not tolerate the tremors caused by the freight trains of the Canadian Pacific railway that runs directly on the shoreline. An amateur whale researcher named Alexandra Morton has caused quite a stir, even among scientists, with her “sea lice” theory. The high concentration of parasites in the breeding cages of the salmon farms out on the Pacific damage the passing smolts. It is possible, but needn’t be – considering the fish farms of the province bring in half a million dollars in sales every year.

“The ocean is a black box”

Yet, why has it only affected the sockeye salmon, while the pinks and Coho have returned this year in large numbers in spite of the sea lice and the Canadian Pacific? “The ocean is a black box. The salmon swim into it and appear again two or three years later, in more or less large numbers. We cannot say what happens exactly. Everything is correct, nothing can be disproven,” reports Daniel Pauly, director of the Institute of Fisheries at the University of British Columbia and one of the most respected designers of mathematical ocean models worldwide.

There is humility towards this black box. One perceives a quiet fear that we have gone too far. Too many fish farm licenses were granted, too many building permits, too many escape clauses for the First Nations and, of course, too much carbon dioxide from the oil fields in Alberta. Perhaps every one of these explanations is correct in some way and the factors all amplify one another in a complex manner? The fear of climate change is also ever present. Nothing is as complex as global weather and it is impossible to tell each of the factors apart. We are not in control and yet we are responsible. That’s spooky.

Only one thing is certain, as the 69-year-old fisherman Alan Baker from Albion knows, whose grandfather cast his nets here and who has seen nothing comparable in fifty years: “There’s something going on out there,” he says pointing in the direction of the Fraser estuary. There is nothing more to say.