Spotters see salmon previously thought extinct
Tourists are flocking to the Twizel River to catch a rare glimpse of hundreds of dancing sockeye salmon bursting out of the water as spawning season gets under way.
Groups gathered on a Twizel bridge to spot the southern hemisphere’s only population of the fish, which was previously thought be extinct, scramble up the riverbed in search of the perfect spot to lay their eggs.
It comes after thousands of the fish were spotted for the first time in decades near Lake Pukaki, in the Mackenzie district’s alpine rivers.
The fish was though to have become extinct in the 1980s, but reported sightings started filtering in about 2005. This season marked the first time a sighting had been officially confirmed.
Central South Island Fish and Game officer Jayde Couper said there were about 1000 spawning fish in just one of the lake’s tributary streams this year. The sockeye’s comeback from the verge of extinction was ‘‘wide- spread’’.
The fact ‘‘sockeye appear to have come back from the dead is heartening and a positive sign of the health of the fishery in the Waitaki Lakes’’, Couper said.
The fish, which live in lakes and were only seen when they returned to rivers to lay eggs, had even turned up in areas they were not known to exist in previously.
Sockeye had also been spotted in almost all of the rivers and streams flowing into Lake Benmore, and in the Lower Ohau River, the Twizel and Fraser Rivers and the Tekapo River.
Couper said the State Highway 8 bridge, near Twizel, was a popular spot because people could watch the fish from the platform without disturbing them.
He warned people not to interrupt the fish, which are protected under the Conservation Act.
‘‘You can’t catch, net or spear the fish, or even walk in the river bed and trample their nests.’’
Despite their numbers, sockeye are rarely caught by anglers as they filter feed on plankton and are not normally attracted to anglers’ luires.
Fish and Game was developing a method of monitoring the growth of the species it had thought to be extinct.
‘‘There are too many salmon and not enough time and resources to count them all,’’ Couper said.
The fish were introduced in 1901 in an attempt to create a searun salmon canning industry.
That failed when the sockeye never ran to the sea, leaving Chinook salmon to become the basis of the South Island salmon industry.
These day’s, sockeye’s main value in the fishery was as a food source for native fish, trout and Chinook salmon.