City Council asked to support eradicating smallmouth bass

ASF and others seek to poison Miramichi Lake to eradicate invasive species

A member of the Atlantic Salmon Federation made a presentation to City Council today asking them to provide a letter of support for their efforts to eradicate small mouth bass from Miramichi Lake using a fish killing toxin.

The organization was onside with native communities and other groups and had been following the regulatory process to get permission to do the work when a group of native protesters and property owners on Miramichi Lake staged a protest and blocked the completion of the project last summer.

The group is determined to complete the work this summer and hopes that support from regional municipalities like Miramichi, Blackville and Doaktown will push the project past the finish line.

Smallmouth bass were introduced illegally to Miramichi Lake several years ago and are finding their way into the watershed. The toxin, Retenone, kills gill breathing organisms, and a second chemical neutralizes the toxin as it flows out of the lake and into the watershed to prevent unwanted killing of other fish.

Smallmouth bass are very invasive and would wreak havoc on the other species in the Miramichi if left unchecked.

There is a video below of the presentation to council, and we have transcribed his comments.

Miramichi Lake:  MAP

Transcription

So what are we doing? We're trying to tackle the problem of an illegally introduced invasive species, in the upper reaches of the Miramichi Watershed. And that's smallmouth bass. I want to be really clear, because we have had a little bit of confusion. We're not talking about striped bass out here on the waterfront, they two different but related species.

These are freshwater fish native to the Ohio River Valley that have been spread extensively around the world mostly for angling purposes. And in 2008, they were discovered following an illegal introduction in Miramichi Lake which is a headwater tributary of the southwest branch of the river. We are proposing to eradicate these fish using a product with a toxin with active ingredient, Rotenone. I'll talk a little bit more about rotenone in a minute, that it's an organic compound derived from the roots of several species of bean plants in South America and the Pacific Rim. It's been used in food fishing for millennia and has been used successfully in fisheries management for problems like this since the 1950s. And the reason why we're here is that the future of the Watershed turns on the success of this project. And we're really looking for the support of the river communities through the motion from Mayor and Council.

So, why are small mouth such a problem? First off the 26 native fish species in the Miramichi Watershed have no history with this fish. They haven't co-evolved. They've never coexisted. Smallmouth are prolific. They're a top predator. They're well adapted to a variety of habitats. People have the impression, Oh, okay, they might spread out and establish themslves in the southwest Miramichi River, but in fact over time they'll colonize all of these small streams and tributaries the trout lakes that people like to visit. It would be slow, but eventually every single place they can go, they will go and establish themselves and they compete for food. They compete for habitat and they directly consume native species. A risk assessment that DFO did in 2009 concluded that if they should establish themselves in the river, there would be a measurable decrease in the abundance of native species. I think we could all agree that Atlantic Salmon, sea trout, and the other native species of the Miramichi are under enough pressure and don't need this issue.

We're focused not on the single species, but the entire ecosystem. Next to habitat destruction this species is the greatest threat to biodiversity. Their establishment and spread in the Miramichi would permanently alter the ecosystem forever. It would change the cultures. It would affect the economy.

It's a little bit dated now, but an economic impact analysis that the Atlantic salmon federation did in 2012 found there was 18 million dollars of direct spending just on Atlantic salmon angling in the river valley and it supports about 630 full-time equivalent jobs, so that the significant contributor to the local economy is the big question here.

What's the current distribution? I like this image (map of Miramichi Lake region) because they're in that circle. They started in Miramichi Lake which is at the tip of the arrow over time. They've traveled down Lake Brook which connects to the Southwest Miramichi. And we know they're present in about 13 km of the river and we've confirmed that distribution through molecular analysis by taking small water samples and analyzing them for the presence of animal DNA including small mouth.

DFO chose a program of control and containment. In 2015 Canada acted its aquatic invasive species regulation which expressly permits the use of rotenone products in fisheries management. So in 2016 our seven groups got together and our purpose was to Lobby the provincial and federal government for a definitive solution to this problem. In 2019 we started the application process for this. We hear a lot. Well, why don't you just go fish them out? Isn't the use of a chemical harsh solution?

Frankly, it is a harsh solution, but it's the only one that has any reasonable likelihood of success. And in the hundreds and hundreds of cases we've looked at where this has been done around the world, there's no example where the intoxicant has persisted in the ecosystem or the ecosystem hasn't recovered. This is a very understood process and product. You just can't fish them out. You can see in 2010, that's when there was a kind of maximal effort to remove all of those fish from the lake and the numbers were driven down to a low point in 2012 where less than 50 fish were caught. But as soon as you take your foot off the gas a little bit, you can see the rebound.

So you understand the problem with trying to contain and remove them. It's an impossibility. And this was a predicted failure, but it kept going anyways. As I said, our groups the whole time since 2008 were calling for the use of this fisheries management tool rotenone to address the problem before it became worse. And before we have this spread initiated, this has been done all over the world. Hundreds of times. We've brought in the experts. We have people on our team from California, Montana, Idaho, British, Columbia, Nova Scotia.

Strong support from the provincial government and the Department of Natural Resources. These are just a few recent examples in Despres Lake, which is in the headwaters of the Canes. There was chain pickerel introduced and DNR acted quickly and successfully eradicated them. Windy Lake in BC. I visited that project. It was the last of a 12 Lake eradication program done by the BC Ministry of environment that kept smallmouth bass and yellow perch out of the Thompson. Ever in the fall of 2020 and Nova Scotia the provincial government acted to eradicate invasive smallmouth bass from a head water lake of the St. Marys River. This is the most common method of aquatic invasive fish control and eradication worldwide because it is safe and effective.

The product that we are intending to use has been reviewed and approved by Health Canada. At the concentrations at which we're using it's quite toxic to gill breathing organisms, but virtually non toxic to humans, birds and mammals. And that's another reason why it's favorite: it's selectively toxic at incredibly low concentrations to gill breathing organisms, and not to others.

So last year, we were ready to go over two years of regulatory work. We did a provincial environmental impact assessment Federal assessment. We held 18 permits to carry out this job. And this was all work done by our Government and partners. It was an incredibly heavy lift. We brought together a team of 120 people up in Juniper. Some really important mitigations to the project to minimize negative consequences to non-target species, which basically means everything but smallmouth bass. We built a fish barrier 90 meters across the Southwest Miramichi River at slate Island so migratory fish coming up couldn't get into the project area. It just kind of gives you a sense of the scale of some of the work we were doing.

We had 120 people deployed throughout the project area and we showed up to do it. And there were a handful of protesters on the water, women from different New Brunswick Maliseet, communities who were working with a handful of cottage owners on Miramichi Lake that remain opposed to the project. People, without personal protective equipment, who are determined to obstruct the project. We held our crews over in hotels a couple extra days and then people started to have to leave, it put us over budget, 150,000 bucks. Collectively our groups have raised and spent close to a million and a half dollars on this. And eventually, we just had to put it on pause, and we return to those Maliseet and continue to be engaged in dialogue there today.

So, just just to recap before my last slide 2021, you know, we built up to the go point. This is probably the single largest conservation project in the history of the Miramichi Watershed and you can imagine the disappointment when it wasn't able to go through. In 2022 our challenge is to get a different outcome faced with the same set of circumstances.

We spent a lot of time last year meeting and speaking with the cottage owners and, you know, we're never going to be able to change their mind. And this year, we really want to show people that there is support for this during the environmental impact assessment. We had 1292 letters of support sent into the provincial government in favor of this project. So we are, we have an execution strategy. We are determined to get this done because the future of the river, and to some extent, all of the river communities depend on it.

That's why we're here hoping for a motion of support from Mayor and Council of the great city of Miramichi.