“This is the best time in history to be a wildlife photographer,” Melissa Groo says. But, “it’s the worst time in history to be a wild animal,” the conservation photographer says. 

Animals are threatened by climate change, human population growth and habitat loss. Combined with other issues like invasive species and disease, the world is facing a massive extinction crisis. 

“At a time when animals are under such threat, wildlife photography is exploding,” says Groo, who is an associate fellow with the International League of Conservation Photographers and sits on the league’s ethics committee.

And these photos can come at a cost. 

Humans can be disruptive, scaring animals from their nests or dens. Alternatively, animals can also become habituated to human presence. Baiting animals to get better photos is a widespread practice, according to Groo, and food habituation can put animals at higher risk of being shot by hunters or conservation officers who deem them a risk to humans.

Many organizations have guidelines for best practices in wildlife photography but, with so many photographers out there, ethics aren’t easy to enforce. An inspector from B.C.’s conservation officer service, Scott Norris, told The Narwhal B.C.’s Wildlife Act — which was enacted in 1996 to protect animals from harm — doesn’t address photography directly.

“I don’t know, when the act was written, if it was even anticipating wildlife photography,” Norris says.

In The Narwhal’s recent investigation into environmental non-profit Pacific Wild — outlining allegations of verbal and emotional abuse, bullying and harassment — photography was a passion for many former workers. Beautiful wildlife photos are a staple for most conservation organizations’ campaigns to attract and inspire people. But some of these former workers also grappled with a question: when does wildlife photography benefit conservation, and when does it serve human interests?

Paul Paquet, a wildlife photographer with Raincoast Conservation Foundation who has a PhD in zoology, says there is “a persistent lingering and self-censuring question as to whether we are just helping ourselves or helping the wildlife we photograph.” It’s a question many photographers are “not eager” to talk about, he says.

Photography is not only about conservation — it’s about creativity and art, which serves the artistic desires of people, but has the potential to still benefit wildlife, he says.

“The representation of nature through artistic photography makes it possible to evoke appreciation and mindfulness of nature, which are powerful emotional relationships that surely benefit wildlife conservation,” he writes in an email.

Groo says photographers have to constantly be asking themselves to weigh the benefits and costs of capturing wildlife shots.

Putting the animal first

“Photos can go viral in a heartbeat across social media. To come up with a really compelling photo that draws attention to the plight of a species under threat, or a landscape under threat — it’s a really powerful tool,” Groo says, but adds it’s important that people follow best practices so they don’t cause harm.

Keeping distance, not using flash and avoiding harassing animals with drones are some ethics that Groo and photographer John Marriott explain. Marriott is also on the international league’s ethics committee. He says the central question to keep in mind is: am I affecting the animal’s behaviour?

“I think a lot of times photographers purposely try and change an animal’s behaviour so they can get a shot,” Marriott says. Examples include using artificial animal calls or using food to draw animals closer to the camera.

“I would get away from the idea of thinking that you have to get close to animals to create something unique and new,” he says. 

Groo says going into the field with scientists can help because they usually have a good understanding of the species they are studying and how to best interact with them. She tries to use her photos to tell the story of the destruction of a particular part of habitat or to communicate specific conservation objectives. 

She says some mistakes are unavoidable, and that she still makes mistakes herself. She recalls trying to photograph a male kingfisher — bright birds with long narrow beaks — and noticing he was stressed by her presence, even though she was hidden. She saw him bring a fish to his nest tunnel on a riverbank, where either his partner was on eggs or his hatched babies would have been. At the last minute, he looked toward where she was hidden in a camouflage blind and flew away.

“It was almost as if, at the last moment, he just decided: I can’t give away the presence of my nest,” she says. “I was just so sure he was leaving because of me … I never went back.”

Is the risk to the animal ‘really worth what you’re going to come up with?’

In The Narwhal’s investigation into Pacific Wild, one of the allegations facing co-founder Ian McAllister was that he hung a seal carcass from a tree in 2013 to attract wolves and take photos of them. A worker discovered the photos in 2015 and the incident was reported to B.C.’s conservation officer service in 2020. That year he addressed the issue publicly on Instagram.

In the post, McAllister says that he had been placing camera traps in the area for many years to try to follow the size of the wolf pack. In this case, he says a seal washed up on the beach. “There were boats in the area and potentially hunters that would be more likely to see wolves because of the seal so I decided to drag it into the forest and hoist it into a tree so that I could put a few camera traps nearby,” his post states.

“The dilemma — and yes opportunity — is that when I returned to the camera traps there were wolves in the area and I spent some time to get images of them. A few of the shots were good enough to publish and one of them ended up on one of my books.”Reflecting on the incident, McAllister states this was an anomaly. “This is the only image that I have ever taken in over 30 years of photography and film work that could be described in the ‘baited’ category other than throwing tuna in the water to take pictures of sharks,” he writes. In hindsight, he states the image should have been deleted because of how it was taken. 

“This is a good discussion to be having because so many of the images we see now of wildlife are of animals being followed and photographed by telemetry, on the roadside eating carrion, or in some kind of artificial situation,” his post concludes. 

McAllister did not respond directly to The Narwhal’s request for comment.

Groo didn’t speak about Pacific Wild directly, but she says conservation photographers should be constantly questioning their intentions with their photography.

“I think it’s a really good question of, what [photo] are you hoping to get that you haven’t gotten already?” she says. “And really weighing the cost of impinging or imposing on that wild animal’s life. Is all that really worth what you’re going to come up with? Is it really something so unique, so singular, that doesn’t already exist in your archive?”

“Is it really necessary? And is this really in the best interest of everyone?”

‘I don’t trust the personal integrity of most conservationists’

Some organizations have created ethics guidelines to ensure photographers operate respectfully and without exploiting people or animals, including Raincoast Conservation Foundation, where Paquet works. (McAllister was a co-founder of Raincoast but parted ways with the organization in 2008 over differences with its leadership. Raincoast launched a copyright lawsuit with McAllister, but the issue was settled out of court.)

Paquet says the central guiding principles are “do no harm,” and that “the welfare of the animals is more important than the photograph.”

Raincoast’s ethics policy outlines how to work with both people and wildlife. It emphasizes consent and consultation, and specifically references a guide written by Jess Housty, a Heiltsuk community organizer and advocate. She writes about centring Indigenous voices, avoiding staging or stereotyping and considering how your work benefits the Indigenous people you are shooting, or if you are just being extractive. She says wildlife photography can be extractive as well.“I have complex feelings about [wildlife photography],” Housty says in an interview.“It can raise awareness and raise money, and sometimes that’s really important. But I think specifically, when you’re either monetizing it for a career or when you’re using it to advance a cause, it just becomes so dependent on the personal integrity of the person doing the photography. And frankly, I don’t trust the personal integrity of most conservationists.”

William Housty, conservation manager for Heiltsuk Integrated Resource Management Department, who is Jess Housty’s brother, says there are benefits to wildlife photography and ecotourism but “it’s getting to be a bit much in some areas.” He says if there are too many people, it can stop animals, like bears, from visiting their regular spots.

“Wildlife filming has just kind of gotten out of hand,” he says. “It definitely has its perks and potential to generate interest in ecotourism and those sorts of things but we just have to be really careful about how it’s done … because it could have harmful impacts on the surrounding environment.”

‘If they feel embarrassed about sharing how they got the shot … that should be a good telltale sign’

Based on the range of guidelines and advice from wildlife photographers, one thing is clear: keep your distance.

Marriott says he follows Parks Canada’s guideline to stay 30 metres — or three bus lengths — from any animal that is not a predator. For predators like bears and wolves, it’s 100 metres. 

The International League of Conservation Photographers’ ethics guidelines emphasize “minimizing any negative physical, emotional or behavioral impacts” on animals, as well as “accuracy” and “transparency” about how an image was captured — like with bait or at a game farm or with an artificial animal call, Groo explains.

“If they feel embarrassed about sharing how they got the shot when they share the photo on social media, I think that should be a good telltale sign for us as photographers, maybe we shouldn’t engage in that practice,” she says.

Raincoast’s guide emphasizes following the protocols of Indigenous Nations, as well as Canadian laws. It outlines not altering the wildlife’s behaviour, keeping distance and not spending more than one or two hours with animals “to reduce the impact that our presence has on their routine.”

“We always put the wildlife subject first,” it reads.

They also promise to never shoot wildlife in captivity or on game farms, where photographers can take photos of gated wild animals.

Groo says guidelines are important but following ethics is largely a personal responsibility. 

“It’s incumbent on each of us,” she says. “Each of us has an impact, each of us has influence and power.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Most of us growing up along Canada’s East Coast never worried about hurricane season. Except for those working at sea, we viewed hurricanes as extreme events in remote tropical regions, seen only through blurred footage of flailing palm trees on the six o’clock news.

Today, a warming ocean spins hurricanes faster, makes them wetter and drives them towards Atlantic Canada and even further inland. Hurricanes, winter storms and rising sea levels will continue to worsen unless we slow climate change.

The lifeblood of coastal economies and societies has always been the connection between land and sea, and that’s become more evident with climate change. But this isn’t just a coastal story anymore.

The oceans moderate the world’s climate through the absorption of heat and carbon. And just how much carbon the ocean will continue to absorb for us remains an open question. Whatever we do, it must be grounded in our growing wisdom of the deep connections between life on land and in the sea.

As Canada commits to a net-zero future and plans its post-COVID economic recovery, innovations and investments could backfire if they reduce the ocean’s ability to absorb our excesses.

Links between land and sea

The ocean has always directly affected the climate on land. The well-being of communities across the globe is directly linked to the ocean’s capacity to continue its regulating role of heat and carbon cycles.

Drought in the Prairies is tied to water temperatures in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. When temperatures are most extreme, they signal the possible arrival of a “megadrought.”

In Australia, the occurrence of below-average rainfall, lasting several years, can be predicted by high Indian Ocean temperatures. This dries soils and lowers river flows, resulting in major community impacts such as water restrictions, declines in agricultural production and increased frequency of bushfires.

The success of Canada’s climate policies will therefore hinge on understanding how ocean processes are changing and society responds. The opportunity is at hand: Canada has committed to net-zero carbon in 2050, and to economic recovery once the COVID-19 pandemic has passed.

The federal government’s throne speech in September highlighted the oceans as critical to economic recovery post-COVID. The “blue economy,” mentioned in the throne speech, includes fisheries, aquaculture and offshore wind energy.

These two commitments are fundamentally linked: economic recovery and carbon neutrality both depend on the ocean’s ability to continue to regulate climate through heat and carbon absorption.

But the development of national policies on climate change, both in Canada and internationally, has generally ignored the ocean in climate calculations.

Scientists lobbied intensely before the Paris Climate Agreement just to make sure the ocean was mentioned.

Read more: Blue carbon: the climate change solution you’ve probably never heard of

The ability of the ocean to absorb heat and carbon changes over time and its role in moderating the effects of climate change needs to be better understood. Photo: TJ Watt

Changes to the ‘carbon sink’

We dare not further neglect the most important global storage depot on Earth: the ocean stores hundreds of times the heat and 50 times more carbon than the atmosphere, and takes up more carbon than all the rainforests combined.

Ocean carbon and heat absorption also provide a critical natural timescale against which we can measure our effectiveness in battling climate change. Fluctuations in the ocean “carbon sink” — the amount of carbon the ocean can remove from the atmosphere — will change the urgency with which we need to act.

For example, a waning carbon sink shrinks our window to curb land-based carbon emissions. But a growing sink might give us more time to enact difficult but necessary carbon policies that will have disruptive economic consequences.

There is no time for delay, and rewards come quickly; strong scientific evidence demonstrates that ocean processes controlling this absorption can either weaken or strengthen measurably in just a few decades.

Heat is absorbed physically from the atmosphere and mixed through the ocean on the scales of millennia. But carbon is absorbed through a complex network of chemical and biological processes, including coastal ecosystems such as kelp, mangroves and seagrasses that sustain local economies. Plankton (the tiny plants and animals that feed everything from mussels to whales) store carbon, so their behaviour and biology become a critical factor in the climate discussion.

We urgently need better observations of the ocean’s continued role as our heat and carbon sink.

Read more: How a salt marsh could be a secret weapon against sea level rise in B.C.’s Fraser delta

Shifting carbon sink

The North Atlantic Ocean is the most intense carbon sink in the world: 30 per cent of the global ocean’s carbon dioxide removal occurs right in Canada’s backyard. If we extend Canada’s net-zero calculation to our exclusive economic zone (waters within 200 nautical miles of our coast), our net carbon emissions could change significantly.

Current estimates suggest including the oceans would reduce net emissions and help us get to net zero faster, but what happens if that changes? We must understand fully the processes controlling the “sink” to make the right climate policy choices.

Read more about the role of natural landscapes in the fight against climate change in The Narwhal’s Carbon Cache series.

This recalculation could shift our thinking on how to rejuvenate the Canadian economy. Investment in controversial industries such as deep-sea mining, which can supply materials needed for renewable ocean-based energy technologies like those used in offshore wind, can at the same threaten the very ocean ecosystems and food systems on which we depend. Formulating effective policies in the face of these uncertainties is a major challenge. Our path forward must build on our growing understanding of the deep connections between societal and ocean well-being.

Canadian researchers, including those at the Ocean Frontier Institute where we are based, are poised to address the fundamental questions about the ongoing role of the ocean in absorbing carbon, and to help develop appropriate policies. These conversations cut across traditional academic boundaries. In the past, ocean research was separated into the natural and applied, the social and human sciences. Now, we all need to work together.

The role of the ocean has been neglected for too long and must be drawn to the centre of the carbon discussion as we plot our trajectory to net-zero carbon in 2050. Canada’s carbon policies can lead the way internationally if they are grounded in strong, and strongly integrated, natural and social sciences. It is time for the research community to step up in their support.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

The world has screeched to a halt as it grapples with COVID-19. Perhaps “screeched” is the wrong word; the process has been a quieting, a softening of the racket humans have created since the Industrial Revolution.

Planes are grounded, ships wait at anchor and cars are parked as people hunker down at home. 

While we still don’t know how quiet it’s going to get, the effects of the silence are already rippling through the ocean — but they won’t last forever. 

“We get this window, we get a snapshot into life without humans. And then when we come rushing back, that window will close,” says Cornell University marine acoustician Michelle Fournet.

“It’s really an important time to listen.”

A quiet tragedy

The morning after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, everything grew unusually quiet. Especially in North America, the flow of people and goods through the air and across the oceans dwindled out of fear and uncertainty — as though the movement and commerce that had gone uninterrupted for half a century needed a moment to reflect. 

The tragedy and its aftermath also presented a rare opportunity to study how all that activity was affecting some of the most endangered animals on the planet.

While the world was still in shock that morning, researcher Manuel Castellote set off in a boat from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Falmouth, Massachusetts, as he and collaborator Susan Parks had done many times before. They were collecting data for a study on the social behaviour of North Atlantic right whales, but the noise environment had changed drastically overnight.

The absence of ship noise, unexpected and impossible in most circumstances, allowed the researchers to study the whales in a quiet environment.

The resulting paper was a milestone in the understanding of the link between noise pollution and whales. By combining analyses of collected whale droppings (they float) and underwater recordings, Parks and her colleagues determined that ship noise is correlated with stress in whales. 

Parks is careful to explain that correlation does not prove causation, but other researchers are more confident about what the finding can tell us about how whales respond to noise.

“That paper is pretty beautiful evidence that industrial noise does have a stress impact on marine animals,” explains David Barclay, an ocean acoustics researcher at Dalhousie University. 

Now, the oceans have gone quiet again. Just like after 9/11, worldwide trade and movement has slowed. But this time, the tragedy is more widespread and longer lasting. The World Trade Organization noted in its March 11 barometer that container shipping and passenger air travel were the hardest hit industries, but most of the effects have not yet been measured. Statistics Canada data is similarly subject to lag, but in February the agency was already reporting a combined reduction in imports and exports of more than 16 per cent compared to the year before. 

A dramatic decline in demand for goods from China has led to a sharp increase of port storage facilities globally. The resulting drop in marine shipping provides a unique opportunity for researchers studying marine acoustics. Photo: Erik Odiin

Barclay and researchers in his lab seized the opportunity to measure how much change has occurred in the underwater noise environment. In a new paper, currently undergoing review, the researchers looked at real-time sound signals from underwater observatories on the seafloor off B.C. They found a notable drop in the amount of low-frequency sound off the west coast of Vancouver Island and in the Georgia Strait between Vancouver Island and mainland B.C. (Disclosure: the author’s brother, Dugald Thomson, is a member of the lab and the first author on the new study.)

Sound in the 100-hertz range — “pretty low on the piano keyboard,” Barclay says — dropped. The amount of the drop varied depending on the location, but worked out to around 1.5 decibels, roughly a 25 per cent reduction in power. A sound’s power, however, does not necessarily align with how much disturbance it causes, especially considering the different hearing ranges of different species.

“A lot of the larger whales use sound in this range,” Barclay says. Baleen whales like humpbacks and grey whales use low-frequency sounds to navigate and communicate over long distances. Meanwhile, toothed whales, like killer whales and porpoises, rely on higher-pitched sounds for their hunting and communication.

Three days after the Barclay lab paper was sent for review, BC Ferries cut the frequency of sailings on its major routes in half, but whatever decrease in noise this caused would be on top of what was described in the paper — meaning the oceans have already grown quieter than reported.

Fournet studies humpback whales in Southeast Alaska, where cruise ships have polluted the underwater soundscape for decades. There are entire generations of whales that have never had a quiet day in their feeding grounds. 

Now, Fournet says, “we can learn something not just about how these animals respond to noise, but about how these animals communicate at all.”

While Fournet, like other scientists, is afraid of what the economic downturn may mean for her funding, she’s dedicated to taking this rare opportunity to study the whales.

“If nobody funds this project, I am going to go into my savings account, I’m going to fly a hydrophone to Alaska and I’m going to pay for a boat to go out and put it in the water. And then I’m going to analyze that data on Saturday and Sundays, because it’s important,” she says.

Grey whales only live in the Pacific Ocean. Previous Atlantic Ocean populations were hunted to extinction. On the Pacific coast grey whales were nearly hunted to extinction, but in 1946 international protections were put into place, allowing the population to rebound from about 2,000 individuals to around 26,000 today. Photo: Cameron Venti

Noise can disturb killer whales’ communication, hunting

John Ford is one of the world’s leading experts on killer whales. As a former Fisheries and Oceans Canada scientist, he has spent a lot of time dropping hydrophones into the Georgia Strait. 

“To adopt a precautionary approach, one would have to assume [general noise] reduces the active space — the area around individuals in which they can actually communicate,” he says. 

Killer whales communicate around the 800-hertz range. But that’s not to say they can’t hear or aren’t disturbed by the lower-frequency noise made by big ships.

And then there’s echolocation: the whales’ hunting success depends in part on their ability to hear the faint echo of a sound bouncing off salmon that could be 100 metres away. That sensitive process likely requires at least some modicum of quiet in the environment, Ford says, something they’re less likely to get in a busy shipping channel. 

Aarhus University bioacoustics researcher Chloe Malinka says there is evidence that even when sound doesn’t overlap with the pitches the whales use to find food, “in many instances they just completely stop echolocating, or they change their foraging behaviour.” Sometimes whales stop hunting, which wastes valuable energy.

It’s not hard to imagine why: as anyone newly working from home can attest, there are all kinds of noises that can cause a disturbance, not just those that mask the precise sound the listener is trying to hear.

“Is it like living next to the airport — does it cause stress?” Barclay asks. 

Finding the answer may require a repeat of Parks’s study following the Sept. 11 attacks. But such studies, which require labs and up-close encounters with whales, are expensive. 

“Given the way the economy is right now, it might be that nobody can afford to fund us, and that’s a big fear that scientists have right now,” she says.

Orcas near Victoria B.C. In 2019 Victoria was the port of call for 257 cruise ships. The cruise industry is mostly suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Photo: Dick Martin

‘It shouldn’t take a human calamity’

Many people are already asking, when can the economy start running again, when can cruise ships make their way up the coast again? 

Michael Jasny, a marine mammal expert at the U.S. Natural Resources Defense Council, thinks they’re asking the wrong question. 

“One of the critical questions we’re facing, environmentally, is what kind of world we go back to once this catastrophe has passed,” he says. “Do we rebuild the economy along the same, unsustainable and destructive lines as we have previously, or do we take the opportunity to build a greener economy and a more sustainable world?”

The reduction in marine noise isn’t yet fully understood, but what is known so far appears to indicate a noise environment that’s somewhat closer to what the oceans would have sounded like 150 years ago. Not quiet, exactly — non-human noise like waves, wind, rain and even shrimp have always made a natural racket — but not full of the noise of human-made engines. 

The effect of that quieter ocean would likely be healthier marine mammals. Free from the distraction and stress we cause, hunting would become easier, mating more convenient and wayfinding more obvious. 

“One of the critical questions we’re facing, environmentally, is what kind of world we go back to once this catastrophe has passed.”

Turning down the volume could protect many more species than whales. A 2017 study found zooplankton can be killed by high-intensity noises, while tens of thousands of fish species are able to hear, and many use sound to communicate. With humans’ limited knowledge of marine life, the extent of what a quieter ocean would protect isn’t fully known.  

“It shouldn’t take a human calamity to achieve those benefits,” Jasny says. 

In all likelihood, the benefits to the natural environment will be short-lived. But Fournet says the “snapshot” being produced right now is just that: a chance to hear how the pre-industrial world sounded.

“It’s not going to be the saving grace of nature,” she says. “What’s going to be the saving grace of nature is when we take that snapshot and we blow it up to poster size and we share it with the world, and people realize what kind of an impact we have.”

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The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

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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