The sight of dozens of tiny chum and chinook salmon funnelled into a trap by special nets sent biologists from Raincoast Conservation Foundation into an excited frenzy of high-fives as they squelched through the muddy waters of the Lower Fraser tidal marsh.

“We were in our waders, waving our nets and jumping up and down in the estuary,” said Misty MacDuffee, Raincoast’s wild salmon program director.

As the group was setting the nets in March, weeks after knocking holes in the Steveston jetty, it was difficult to see the fish because of cloudy water, but then it became apparent that juvenile salmon were moving through the newly created passages into the relative safety of the marsh, said Dave Scott, Raincoast’s Lower Fraser salmon program coordinator.

“We were ecstatic to see it was working. Seeing those fish made us realize that what we were doing was really necessary,” he said.

Dave Scott, Lower Fraser salmon program coordinator with a team from the Raincoast Conservation Foundation, nets juvenile salmon accessing Sturgeon Bank through the recently punctured Steveston jetty. Photo: Alex Harris / Raincoast

The importance of estuaries

It is rare for a habitat restoration project to show such instant signs of success, but creating breaches in the eight-kilometre Steveston jetty, which controls the main arm of the Fraser River as it enters the estuary, offered an almost immediate payoff.

The jetty, constructed from rock rubble between 1911 and 1933, means juvenile salmon leaving their freshwater birthplaces are blocked from the calm side channels of the estuary. So, instead of spending time growing and feeding in the brackish marshes of Sturgeon Bank, they are likely to be whooshed out into the Strait of Georgia before they adjust to salt water living.

The fish, which are less than five centimetres long at that stage in their lives, must go through physiological changes before they head out to sea.

The lower Fraser River. The Steveston jetty prevents juvenile salmon from accessing the estuary zone in Sturgeon Bank. A habitat connectivity project managed by the Raincoast Conservation Project is changing that. Map: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

As salmon move from freshwater, where they have been incubated as eggs, they are transformed through a smoltification process before they hit salt water, said Murray Manson, restoration biologist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, which is funding the project through the federal government’s coastal restoration fund.

But that is not easy for small fish in the Fraser where jetties and dredging in the main channel are designed to move water to the ocean as fast as possible. The original aim was to help ships navigate their way quickly into the Strait of Georgia and stop sediment gathering in the main shipping channel.

There is one opportunity for the fish to make an exit and get into the marsh in front of Sturgeon Bank and, if they miss it, they are pushed out into the Salish Sea, MacDuffee said.

“If you are a tiny little fish who wants to stay in shallow, fresh protected water, Georgia Strait is not where you want to end up,” she said.

MacDuffee holds up juvenile salmon captured along the Steveston jetty in March. Photo: Alex Harris / Raincoast

“They don’t want to go out there until they have been able to spend time acclimatizing and going through this physiological transformation. They are moving from freshwater, where they are always trying to keep their mineral balance and their salts held in, to going into salt water where they are always trying to keep salt from getting into their bodies. Everything has to reverse for them,” she said.

So, at a time when the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) is reporting that eight of B.C.’s chinook populations are endangered, four are threatened and one is considered of special concern, the sight of the young chinook and chum using breaches in the jetty to get to safer waters was inspiring.

“There they were, just moving through all the channels that had just been created. One of our engineers said that, if we just get all the rock and hard material that forms the jetty out of the way, nature will do the rest. Nature will carve the path through the marsh, behind the breaches,” MacDuffee said.

The initial work, researched by Raincoast biologists, saw a clamshell dredger chomping lumps out of the jetty and it is expected that when the Fraser is running high it will scour out the breaches, naturally helping the process.

A clamshell digger removes jetty materials used to modify flow of the Lower Fraser River since the early 20th century. Photo: Alex Harris / Raincoast

The Raincoast team surveying for tiny juvenile salmon along the Steveston jetty. Photo: Alex Harris / Raincoast

The Raincoast team in the lower Fraser River. Photo: Alex Harris / Raincoast

Provided ongoing monitoring shows the plan is continuing to work, the 50-metre wide breaches will be deepened next year.

“The breaches are being cut in two phases. We will see how they behave over the next couple of months and then we will hopefully cut down a little deeper so (the jetty) is open over a broader range of tide cycles,” Manson said.

Development around the Lower Fraser estuary has meant dykes, fish-killing pump stations, dredging and infilling, Manson said.

“Sometimes people aren’t even aware that large areas of land used either for terminals or even neighbourhoods are built on infilled marshland that used to be tidal and used to have small channels that the juvenile chinook would move into,” he said.

“You couldn’t really plan out out a better way to try and remove a species.”

The breaches, while are unlikely to affect shipping, are likely to provide side benefits to areas such as Delta and Richmond as the changes are expected to improve the Sturgeon Bank ecosystem by washing fine sediment into the marsh instead of powering it out to sea.

“The area we are connecting the river to is really being starved of that sediment. It is being forced out into the middle of the Strait instead of helping build a healthy delta and a healthy marsh. We are hoping and expecting that by providing more fine sediment along Sturgeon Bank it will help the delta grow and the delta is the City of Richmond’s primary defence against sea-level rise,” Scott said.

A perforated Steveston jetty will provide connectivity for juvenile salmon needing to pass from the Lower Fraser River to Sturgeon Bank. Photo: Alex Harris / Raincoast

Hope for endangered killer whales

Hopes are running high that restoring parts of the Lower Fraser habitat to help struggling chinook populations will also provide more food for the dwindling population of southern resident killer whales, whose primary source of food is chinook.

“The best investment both for chinook salmon and for southern resident killer whales is in restoring wild salmon populations — getting away from hatcheries — and getting the habitat back so the salmon can come and spawn in the places they have spawned for thousands and thousands of years,” MacDuffee said.

“The recovery of wild salmon is the best hope for the southern resident killer whales.”

The three southern resident killer whale pods have been reduced to 74 animals and studies have established that the greatest threats faced by the whales are lack of prey, contaminants and noise disturbance. The whales will face additional threats from increased oil tanker traffic if the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion is approved by the federal government in June.

“When we thought about priorities for the (coastal restoration) fund, right at the forefront was trying to get chinook populations in better shape, not only for the chinook, but for the species that rely on them like southern resident killer whales,” Manson said.

The initial success of the project shows that small-scale habitat restoration projects can make a significant difference, Scott said.

While big dams on rivers such as the Snake in Washington State, which block adult spawners, are an obvious impediment to salmon population recovery, smaller scale projects can have a noticeable impact, he said.

“They may not be as obvious as those really big pieces of infrastructure but these smaller ones can be really important,” Scott said.

The aim of the $75-million coastal restoration fund — part of the federal five-year, $1.5-billion oceans protection plan — is to restore vulnerable coastline areas and protect marine life and ecosystems.

In addition to the five-year Raincoast project, which is receiving $2.7 million, other projects on the Lower Fraser include a similar effort by Ducks Unlimited Canada and a project in partnership with the Fraser Valley Watersheds Coalition, to reclaim a gravel pit near Hope that has become a killing ground for young salmon.

The Tom Berry Gravel Pit, which was used during construction of the Coquihalla Highway in the 1980s, is beside the Fraser River and floods every year during the spring freshet, trapping young salmon, which are then stranded when the water recedes.

The project is returning the gravel pit to natural floodplain habitat, so small fish will be able to return to the river instead of dying in the pit.

But more needs to be done, MacDuffee emphasized.

“The most important thing is we have to stop destroying what’s left of the habitat in the Lower Fraser. There are a lot of proposals in the works right now that would erode and degrade those remaining stretches of habitat that still function,” she said pointing to LNG storage and export proposals and the Terminal Two plan, now under review, to expand cargo handling capacity at Roberts Bank.

“We have got to stop making the mistakes of the past and making decisions to facilitate industry … At a time when we need to be going in the other direction and restoring lost habitat, we are still undercutting and undermining the habitat that we have,” she said.

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Under the waves of Haro Strait, hydrophones record the noise made by passing vessels and, if you happen to be a whale, the din is already disorienting and disturbing, making it difficult to echo-locate food or communicate with other members of the pod.

“It’s a thunder. Thump, thump, thump, accompanied by squeals and engine noise. It’s like being under the hood of a hot-rod,” said Howard Garrett, president of Orca Network, the Washington State group that tracks the comings and goings of the 80 remaining members of the endangered southern resident killer whales.

All recent studies of the resident pods have identified marine noise around the Strait of Georgia and Juan de Fuca Strait as one of the stressors threatening their survival, in addition to lack of Chinook salmon — the whales’ favourite prey — contaminants accumulating in their blubber and degradation of their critical habitat.

Now, with federal approval of the Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, the situation for the whales is about to get much worse and experts are predicting that the fragile population, which spends about six months a year in the Salish Sea, will not be able to survive the onslaught of tankers.

The number of tankers travelling from the pipeline terminal in Burnaby through Burrard Inlet, around the Gulf Islands and into Juan de Fuca Strait will increase from about five a month to about 34 a month and, while the increased chance of an oil spill is stomach-churning for marine scientists, the damage from increased tanker noise is equally alarming.

“We don’t need to have an oil spill to have significant adverse effects — and no one is disputing that, not the National Energy Board, not Kinder Morgan and not federal scientists,” said Misty MacDuffee, Raincoast Conservation Foundation biologist.

To a whale, it does not matter whether a tanker is empty or laden, meaning the animals will have to deal with a 700 per cent increase, made up of more than 800 inbound and outbound tanker trips every year, MacDuffee said.

Two years ago Raincoast called together top scientists with specialities in endangered populations and acoustics to do an analysis of the viability of the three pods of whales and the conclusion was that the population was on a precipice and could go either way, MacDuffee said.

“They said they cannot endure any more of these stressors.”

The whales are already in the presence of some kind of vessel, ranging from small boats to ferries and tankers, for 85 per cent of the time and, with the additional tankers, they will be in the presence of a vessel 100 per cent of the time, MacDuffee said.

Sound travels four times faster in the water than in the air and it will diminish the ability of the whales to locate their food, which is already in short supply.

“They use echolocation when they are feeding, so they are sending out little clicks and chirps to find individual fish and estimate the size of it and where it is in the water column and then communicate with the pod on how to catch it,” MacDuffee said.

“Our research shows a decrease in efficiency in the presence of vessels, so that translates into less food,” she said.

Insufficient food is believed to have been one of the elements in the latest death among the whales. J28 died in October and it is believed her 10-month-old calf has also died, unable to survive without his mother’s milk to supplement his catch.

“Poor, poor whales. They are just surrounded and bombarded on all sides,” said whale researcher Paul Spong of OrcaLab, a whale research station on Hanson Island, off northern Vancouver Island.

“It’s oil or orcas — take your pick…I think the risks are too great.”

The possibility of a spill is the biggest threat and, as seen in Alaska after the Exxon Valdez spill, that would be disastrous, but noise will also affect their survival, Spong said.

Already, regulations are needed to restrict whale watching vessels and the noise levels of ships, but the government has ignored recommended amendments to marine mammal regulations, Spong said, suggesting one of the first moves should be to severely restrict the speed of vessels travelling through the area.

“The whales are having a difficult time finding food to eat and now, if you shave a little bit more away from them, you are having a big impact on their ability to survive,” he said.

Spong shrugged off a claim by Fisheries Minister Dominic LeBlanc that there would be only a one per cent increase in the noise level and said that was simply an acknowledgement that there would be an impact.

LeBlanc, in an interview with CBC Radio, said initially there might be a one per cent increase in noise, but a critical piece of getting the project right, is to ensure there is no increase in noise.

From Visually.

The whales are under pressure from lack of prey and coming into contact with ships of all sorts, so the Department of Fisheries and Oceans has put together an action plan under the Species at Risk Act, LeBlanc told CBC.

“We’re going to do a lot more to protect that whale population and, in fact, you’ll have a very comprehensive action plan in the new year based on 11,000 public suggestions,” he said.

The NEB found that there would be “significant adverse effects” on the southern resident killer whales from the additional tankers, but, as echoed by the Liberal government, suggested they could be mitigated.

In answer to questions from DeSmog Canada a spokesman for Fisheries and Oceans Canada said DFO recognizes the need to address the cumulative effect of all marine traffic in the area.

Before any shipping from the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project begins, the government will work to reduce impacts on southern resident killer whales in four areas, he said in an emailed statement.

Those include reducing cumulative noise from marine traffic with both voluntary and mandatory strategies, reducing chemical and biological pollutants, improving food supply by restoring coastal salmon habitat and new research to establish baselines.

“The objective is to more than mitigate for the impact of additional Trans Mountain marine traffic before the project begins operations,” the statement reads.

As part of the 157 binding conditions placed on the Kinder Morgan pipeline’s approval, the proponent will be required to develop a marine mammal protection program and support the measures identified in the Southern Resident Killer Whale Action Plan.

Also, the recently-announced $1.5-billion investment in the Oceans Protection Plan will help address the cumulative effects of shipping on marine mammals, according to the statement.

However, MacDuffee said, although ship noise can be reduced, there are currently no requirements to make engines and propellers quiet. She added it would take years to bring in legislation for new ships and to insist older ships are retrofitted.

The fight is likely to continue in the courts as Raincoast and the Living Oceans Society have already applied for a judicial review of the NEB’s report recommending approval of the pipeline expansion, saying the NEB failed to apply the Species At Risk Act.

The organization is now looking at the possibility of a second legal action.

Opponents on both sides of the border are vowing to battle the federal government’s decision and Garrett said there may be lessons from Washington State where the Cherry Point coal export terminal was stopped because of tribal and public opposition and litigation.

Image: NOAA

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