STRANDED FISH SAVED
SPECIES CUT OFF BY FLOOD GET AIRLIFT
BANFF NATIONAL PARK— Several aquatic experts stand on the edge of a makeshift pond downstream of Lake Minnewanka, watching schools of fish swim by.
There’s bull trout, brown trout, lake trout, long-nosed suckers and white suckers.
The team — decked out in insulated waders, non-slip boots and gloves — are ready to electrofish, a scientific method that uses electricity to momentarily stun the fish and makes them easier to catch.
“Power’s on,” says Kirsti Brennan, a fisheries biologist, as they start to electrofish in the pond.
Within minutes, they catch three fish.
It’s a salvage operation that has been taking place all week at several spots along 14 kilometres after hundreds of trout, suckers and whitefish were stranded during the June floods.
At the time, TransAlta had to open its spillway at the Lake Minnewanka dam — creating the side channels and pools of water in the Cascade River system and displacing a large number of fish.
The spillway was closed Thursday, so the pools and side channels have started to dry up.
“Our intent here is to move fish that are stranded so that they don’t perish in these pools,” says Charlie Pacas, aquatics specialist with Banff National Park.
Closer to the Banff town site, another team has also caught half a dozen fish in the Cascade River, which normally has no or low flows in the area.
The fish are placed in a holding tank until they can hitch a helicopter ride.
The helicopter, which drops its bucket into the river to pick up some water, hovers above as two Parks Canada staff transfer the fish.
It then flies off to drop the fish into the Bow River, where they’ll have a better chance at survival.
The entire operation has included dozens of staff from Parks Canada and TransAlta, as well as contractors hired by the power company.
“We had to open the spillway, which introduced the water,” says Glenn Isaac, manager of environment, health and safety with TransAlta’s hydro division. “This is a section of river that hasn’t seen flows in 60 years.”
Isaac says TransAlta, which is funding the operation, wanted to reduce any environmental impact caused by the spillway being opened.
“So we got together with Parks Canada and came up with this plan and brought in 80-some-odd people,” he says. “In my 20 years, I have never seen a fish salvage this large and probably never will again.”
I have never seen a fish salvage this large and probably never will again GLENN ISAAC, TRANSALTA
“It’s big, it’s huge,” says Isaac. By the end of the week, it’s expected the teams will have saved up to 1,000 fish.
It’s hoped the salvage operation will reduce fish stress and mortalities.
Parks Canada’s Pacas says there were fish killed during the height of the flood, but it’s unknown exactly how many.
“It’s hard to tell,” he says. “We do know there were some fish in trees so when the initial pulse came through, a lot of fish were displaced from the lake into the river and they ended up in places they probably didn’t want to be.
“There has been some mortality, but we’ll get a better assessment of that when the water levels start to recede.”
He says they also hope to get a better sense of how it will affect efforts in the past two years to eliminate brook trout from the Cascade system and reintroduce the threatened westslope cutthroat trout to its historic range.
“Right now, we’re going to salvage fish,” says Pacas, “but that doesn’t mean we’ll restore the river back to what it was before this event.
“There will still be non-natives in the river and we have to start thinking about how we are going to do that.”