Roger,
You obviously have more training in this area than I do. However I still feel very strongly that Sea Lion populations are too high in the Columbia river area. This is causing far more endangered fish to be harvested than I would like to see. The biggest problem here is that the Sea Lions of that area have learned how easy it is to work the dams and "hog lines". I feel the ONLY way to keep this from completely wiping out the run of fish is to remove SOME sea lions. They are simply too smart to just relocate (they already proved that with Hershel). In addition to that we need to curtail commercial and sport harvest of these fish for this year at least.
Lets look at these numbers. There were reportedly 5,000 Sea Lions and Harber Seals from Bonneville Dam to the mouth of the Columbia as far back as the beginning of March or so. Now if each of them ate 1 Salmon a day for March and April that would be 30,000 fish. However most of them will eat 4 fish a day. That bumps the number up to about 120,000 fish for that 2 month period. Since the run was only supposed to be about 150,000 and the Commercial and Sport anglers have already pulled about 30,000 fish out of the system. What is left of the run?
As you stated the Seals need to eat to survive. But if they completely wipe out the run there won't be anything left to renew the run. I'm seriously concerned that we have gotten to that point with the Columbia river spingers. I hope I'm wrong but I don't think I'm off by much. And you are also right in that it would be better for the Seals to hit a balance in numbers to self regulate. Unfortunately that balance may just cause a drastic problem for the dwindling Salmon stocks.
Lets think on this too. There are basically only a few predators of Sea Lions. Sharks, Transient Orcas, and Man. The typical Pugest Sound Orca doesn't eat Seals or Sea Lions. The Sharks are actually pretty few and far between as well since we seem to have wiped them out to near extinction as well. And since the Transient Orcas are also in fairly small numbers that leaves us with the task of striking a balance that the food fish can sustain rather than let "nature" take its course.
In a perfect world we wouldn't have to worry about this as we wouldn't have eat salmon so we wouldn't continue to over harvest them. Thus we wouldn't worry about the Seals eating more than the fish population could sustain as the balance would be there to keep things in check. Unfortunately Man has screwed up the balance. They have wiped out the upper predators leaving the middle predators with no checks on the populations. Then we went and said that we were not going to kill them so we'll let their population grow to the point where they eat their preferred food to near extinction. When that has been accomplished it will finally dawn on people that we should have taken care of the problem long ago but were too shortsighted to realize the problem.
You obviously have more training in this area than I do. However I still feel very strongly that Sea Lion populations are too high in the Columbia river area. This is causing far more endangered fish to be harvested than I would like to see. The biggest problem here is that the Sea Lions of that area have learned how easy it is to work the dams and "hog lines". I feel the ONLY way to keep this from completely wiping out the run of fish is to remove SOME sea lions. They are simply too smart to just relocate (they already proved that with Hershel). In addition to that we need to curtail commercial and sport harvest of these fish for this year at least.
Lets look at these numbers. There were reportedly 5,000 Sea Lions and Harber Seals from Bonneville Dam to the mouth of the Columbia as far back as the beginning of March or so. Now if each of them ate 1 Salmon a day for March and April that would be 30,000 fish. However most of them will eat 4 fish a day. That bumps the number up to about 120,000 fish for that 2 month period. Since the run was only supposed to be about 150,000 and the Commercial and Sport anglers have already pulled about 30,000 fish out of the system. What is left of the run?
As you stated the Seals need to eat to survive. But if they completely wipe out the run there won't be anything left to renew the run. I'm seriously concerned that we have gotten to that point with the Columbia river spingers. I hope I'm wrong but I don't think I'm off by much. And you are also right in that it would be better for the Seals to hit a balance in numbers to self regulate. Unfortunately that balance may just cause a drastic problem for the dwindling Salmon stocks.
Lets think on this too. There are basically only a few predators of Sea Lions. Sharks, Transient Orcas, and Man. The typical Pugest Sound Orca doesn't eat Seals or Sea Lions. The Sharks are actually pretty few and far between as well since we seem to have wiped them out to near extinction as well. And since the Transient Orcas are also in fairly small numbers that leaves us with the task of striking a balance that the food fish can sustain rather than let "nature" take its course.
In a perfect world we wouldn't have to worry about this as we wouldn't have eat salmon so we wouldn't continue to over harvest them. Thus we wouldn't worry about the Seals eating more than the fish population could sustain as the balance would be there to keep things in check. Unfortunately Man has screwed up the balance. They have wiped out the upper predators leaving the middle predators with no checks on the populations. Then we went and said that we were not going to kill them so we'll let their population grow to the point where they eat their preferred food to near extinction. When that has been accomplished it will finally dawn on people that we should have taken care of the problem long ago but were too shortsighted to realize the problem.
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