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OnEarth: Fall 2001: Departments

BRIEFINGS

Poached Salmon, Anyone?

When Neil Jensen and two other fishery officers strolled into La Baia, a ritzy Italian restaurant in a suburb of Vancouver, they beat the lunch crowd and placed a single order: salmon, every last fillet of it. "When three armed men are your first customers, and they take away all your fish, it's probably not what you'd call a good day," says Jensen of that morning in August 2000. From two deep freezers, they unloaded more than 800 pounds of vacuum-packed salmon and sent it off to the genetics section of the Pacific Biological Station, a lab run by Fisheries and Oceans Canada, which is the federal agency in charge of protecting marine species and also Jensen's employer. After sampling 190 of La Baia's fillets, geneticists confirmed the officers' suspicions. Nearly 100 percent of the salmon, both chinook and sockeye, had been poached from British Columbia's Upper Fraser River at a time when it was closed to fishing.

For buying and selling illegal salmon, La Baia was busted.

  salmon

Jolynn Sorensen

That was the first time Jensen, thirty-one, had taken advantage of the lab's DNA database, which currently contains the genetic codes of some 50,000 individual salmon that spawn in the rivers of western Canada and the United States. No doubt he'll use it again. Using search warrants, surveillance, and loose-lipped informants to prove the salmon were caught without a commercial license could have taken months and ended in zero arrests. But confronted with DNA evidence, La Baia's owners caved, admitting a backdoor purchase and paying a fine of $5,000 (U.S.) without a court battle.

As wildlife management issues become more complex, genetic databases are becoming more common. The U.S. National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Lab in Ashland, Oregon, has DNA information on everything from deer to tigers. Increasingly, wildlife officers are using DNA to clamp down on the trade in illegal skins and meat. The salmon database was developed in response to the 1985 Pacific Salmon Treaty between Canada and the United States, which introduced the concept of reciprocity into the salmon fishery -- so that Canada, for example, would be compensated for Canadian salmon taken by American fishers. "We needed a better way to identify the salmon's origin once it was at sea," says the lab's lead geneticist, Ruth Withler. Previously, fishers had primarily relied on visual inspection to know what kind of fish they caught. Sometimes it was hard to tell a coho from a chinook, much less know which country it came from.

Today that method is passé. Because salmon return to their natal waters with great fidelity, scientists can find DNA markers for salmon stocks from individual rivers. Further analysis of spawning seasons and the skin and flesh colors can reveal when they were there. For Jensen, that means a powerful new tool to keep the black market in check. And for poachers? "I'd like to say their days are numbered," says Jensen. "We'll see about that."

-- Jill Davis

Briefings: Parking Lawns | Poached Salmon, Anyone? | Ribbons & Rebukes

OnEarth. Fall 2001
Copyright 2001 by the Natural Resources Defense Council

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