Record-setting drought conditions have left many of B.C’s streams and waterways too low for salmon to swim up to spawn. Heiltsuk First Nation leaders say hundreds of fish were found rotting in a creek in Bella Bella, B.C., usually teeming by fall with migrating pink and chum salmon.
Joe Gaydos found a bluefin tuna washed up on Orcas Island off the coast of Washington state. According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the fish usually roam the more temperate waters of the Pacific Ocean.
Jekyll and Simon keep showing up in all the same places — which is weird, because they are great white sharks. The apex predators are widely believed to be solitary creatures, not dependent on family networks or group dynamics to navigate the oceans.
"It's the first time I guess the whole town seeing a shark in real [life]," he said. "Must have been just about the whole town that come to see it." The shark is likely a salmon shark, typically found around Alaska and B.C.
A Vancouver Island watershed is experiencing such a severe drought the town of Lake Cowichan says it will start using pumps to keep the local river flowing.
The number of sockeye returning to Klukshu, Yukon, to spawn began to drop off in the 1990s. This year, hundreds of the bright red fish line the small creek that winds through the village. Neither the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations nor Fisheries and Oceans Canada are sure why the fish have returned after decades of steady decline.
A meteorologist says unseasonably warm weather in B.C. is once again causing a large area of the Pacific Ocean to heat up considerably, emulating a phenomenon from past years known as the “blob.”
Anglers in Aklavik, N.W.T., are trying to figure out why there was a shortage of fish in local hotspots this year.
Two pink salmon have been found near Fort Good Hope, N.W.T., 260 kilometres farther up the Mackenzie River than ever reported.
This year the Eagle station's fall chum estimate is 23,828 fish. This is far below the escapement goal of 70,000 to 104,000 fish.
The Yukon First Nations Education Directorate gave away 30,000 pounds of free fish as part of its nutritional program in Whitehorse this week. People were particularly happy to receive the donation because salmon are well below the historical average this year.
The number of chinook salmon that reached the Whitehorse fish ladder this year hit a 40-year low, and it's not clear why. Just 282 chinook passed through the fish ladder this year, compared to 690 last year. "We did see some large pre-spawn mortality die-offs in a tributary of the Yukon River — the Koyukuk in Alaska. This was for summer chum, and not chinook — but we expect that that higher water temperature also affected the chinook migrating through."
Some welcome new visitors have recently appeared in a southeastern Alberta park — otters.
A new marine heat wave spreading across a portion of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of British Columbia resembles the infamous "blob" that disrupted marine life five years ago.
A lack of chum salmon is causing pain in riverside communities of Yukon and Alaska, as mushers are left without a traditional source of food.
A resident said his kids don't want to go swimming at that location because there are so many dead fish in the water.
Recreational anglers on the Tatshenshini River are now allowed to catch one fish and have one in their possession. Last year, they were only allowed to catch and release the fish.
Researchers on Vancouver Island are studying fish they recently discovered that share genes of both coho and chinook salmon. The hybrid fish, are likely the result of drought in the Cowichan watershed, which has impacted when and where coho and chinook spawn.
Northern Harvest Sea Farms is busy cleaning pens of dead salmon, and the province's head aquaculture vet says higher-than-average water temperatures are to blame.
As the ice breaks up on waterways across the North, the spring river breakup has come to a close in Hay River but not before it created a feast of fish for local birds.
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