Document text
Trapping spawning salmon is true desperation By Mail Tribune Editorial Board Oct 23, 2022 12:00 AM A A If you were homeless and camping along Bear Creek, large salmon swimming by on their way upstream might look like a free meal. What could be wrong with grabbing a few? Plenty. For starters, it’s against the law. Ronald Alan Castro found that out the hard way when police arrested him Oct. 14 on misdemeanor charges of unlawfully taking game or fish and wasting game or fish. A state wildlife biologist had spotted a makeshift dam strung across the creek using a tarp to catch salmon. When he reported this to Oregon State Police troopers who handle fish and wildlife cases, the troopers found more than a dozen salmon rotting in a laundry basket in the creek. Not only is that illegal, it’s extremely damaging to wild salmon populations by preventing them from spawning. October is peak spawning season for fall chinook salmon, which return every year from the ocean where they have grown to maturity. Bear Creek is hardly the best spot for fish to reproduce. The water quality is poor, with high sediment levels, turbidity and temperature, and oxygen levels are low. Still, hundreds of fall chinook, coho, summer steelhead and winter steelhead make the arduous journey up the Rogue River and into the creek, where they deposit and fertilize eggs as far upstream as Ashland. On top of the perennial water quality issues, fish faced the aftermath of the Almeda Fire as well, which sent toxic runoff from burned homes in Talent and Phoenix into the creek. So trapping salmon is illegal, as is leaving them to rot. And it adds one more threat to an already burdened species of wildlife. But it’s also remarkably stupid. By the time salmon make it this far from the ocean, they have used up nearly all their energy. They eat very little on the journey, depleting fat storage, muscles and organs, leaving their reproductive organs intact enough to spawn. They are literally decomposing while still alive. As you might expect, this does not make them very tasty. We hope whoever has been building fish traps on Bear Creek — biologists have spotted several this season — has learned the hard way that nearly dead spawning salmon aren’t worth the trouble to catch. And we urge everyone who spends time on the Greenway to heed the request of biologists and keep an eye out for illegal traps in the creek. The salmon need all the help they can get.