BC hasn’t had much rain over the past several months, and the ongoing drought has caused unprecedented damage to the salmon ecosystem, with thousands washing up dead in a dried-up creek in recent weeks.
The footage captured by German researcher Sarah Mund was shared heavily on social media and was taken in Neekas Creek, which is in Heiltsuk Nation territory.
The video has garnered over 170,000 views.
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William Housty is a member of the Heiltsuk Nation, who said on Twitter that global warming is to blame.
This is Neekas, Heiltsuk Territory. All of these salmon went into the creek, the creek dried up b/c of no rain so far this fall, and just died, and this is just one reach! Global warming is killing everything. This is such a sad scene. Video credit, Sarah Mund pic.twitter.com/vYhEKwD5mN
— William Housty (@WilliamHousty) October 4, 2022
According to the Heiltsuk Nation website, the territory extends from the southern tip of Calvert Island, up Dean and Burke Channels as far as Kimsquit and the head of Dean Inlet to the northeast, and up the Mathieson and Finlayson Channels to the north.
Daily Hive spoke with a couple of members of the Heiltsuk Nation about this troubling discovery. One of the main takeaways was that governments need to do more to reverse the effects of climate change.
We first asked Housty why this was happening.
“This is happening because we are seeing an all-time low in rainfall for this time of year and all of the creeks that are normally now full of water are high and dry,” he’s said.
“Any salmon that are moving into the rivers a dying because of lack of water and oxygen. It is unheard of to be in October and have no rain.”
This problem isn’t isolated to just this reason of Heiltsuk territory; as Housty says, it’s happening across the region and along the BC coast.
He also said that something of this scale has never been seen before.
“We see pre-spawn mortality annually, but it is normally a half-dozen or a dozen salmon; we have never seen anything to this magnitude.”
We spoke to Housty’s sister, Jess, who shared her thoughts about this troubling discovery.
“It’s way outside the spectrum of normal that I’ve seen in my lifetime. It’s frustrating to see non-local people making excuses for it based on their read of a video clip — people on the ground here are intimate with these systems and know this is a huge and heartbreaking departure from ‘normal,'” she said.
“We only saw mass death”
We also spoke with Allison Dennert, a researcher with Earth2Ocean Research Group. She’s also a member of the Department of Biological Sciences at Simon Fraser University.
Dennert told Daily Hive that the “smell of the salmon was burning our noses and eyes, and we were in shock at the volume of pre-spawn mortalities.”
According to Dennert, there was little evidence of the wildlife she’d usually expect to see during salmon runs, such as bears or wolves.
“We saw only mass death.”
She said the water was stagnant and unusually cloudy due to bacterial and fungal growth, and she saw chunks of flesh from the rotting salmon.
Dennert has been doing this for seven spawning seasons, working with the Heiltsuk Nation, and she’s never seen anything like this before. She says that no one in the community has seen anything of this magnitude.
“There were approximately 65,000 dead pink salmon in the creek that day — a number I’ve never seen in my years studying salmon.”
Dennert echoes the sentiments of Housty when it comes to climate change.
“BC is experiencing a historic drought and record-breaking seasonal temperatures. The lack of rainfall we’ve seen during spawning season is incredibly unusual.”
She added that the area around Bella Bella receives more than 3000mm of rain annually, but they’ve only had a single day of light rain in the last month.
“These kinds of droughts and extreme weather events will only become more and more frequent as climate change progresses.”
When it comes to solutions, one of the main ones is just hoping for more rain.
“To prevent this in the future, I encourage your readers to: be politically active. Vote for municipal, provincial, and federal governments with concrete and substantial climate action plans. Reduce your own fossil fuel consumption. Make consumer choices that reduce carbon emissions. Advocate for reduced societal reliance on fossil fuels. Support local organizers and NGOs doing conservation and climate action work.”
Dennert added that she couldn’t stress enough how unusual and concerning it was to witness this.
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