The Stoney Creek Environment Committee celebrated its 25th anniversary this past weekend and released thousands of coho smolts into the water to bolster the local salmon population. As always, the volunteer streamkeepers called on local families to help set the tiny fish free.
“It went really well. It was a gorgeous day, and everybody thought there were more people this year than there were before,” said Alan James, a volunteer streamkeeper with the Stoney Creek Environment Committee.
James guessed that around 2,000 people came out. Adults and children helped by taking plastic bags of fish to the creek, where they let them swim away.
The Kanaka Creek hatchery supplied the smolts, which are just over a year old, and they leave the creek for the open ocean soon after their release. The streamkeepers’ hopes are the salmon will return to the Burnaby creek to spawn. This round of salmon had their fins clipped, so streamkeepers will be able to tell if any fish from this year’s release made it back alive. They’ll look for the clipped fins when they count the dead spawners in the fall.
“In the past, we got fish back, but we don’t know if they are fish from the fish release or they were born there,” James said.
Overall, James said the Stoney Creek salmon population is “doing pretty well.”
“We had reasonable returns last fall, not as good as the previous year, but still substantial,” he said, adding the salmon’s survival probability is mostly determined by open ocean conditions, which includes predators and food sources.
“The small bit the streamkeepers have done is so that when they do come back, they have a place to spawn,” he said.
