A move to re-introduce salmon fry into Prospect Lake has given area residents pause.
Dozens showed up to Prospect Lake Preservation Society’s annual general meeting at the Prospect Lake Community Hall last week to hear arguments against stocking the lake with coho salmon.
Shawn Steele, a director with PLPS, fielded questions and concerns from many residents.
“The concern isn’t about the salmon release itself, but the implications of it,” said Steele, a longtime local who managed the Prospect Lake Golf Course, which is on the lakefront, until it closed in 2015.
At first look the concerns might seem to go against the general consensus that salmon are a healthy part of a watershed’s ecosystem. However, the shallow lake has a long history of being artificially raised, said PLPS director Scott Emerson, who grew up there.
“When I was a kid the weir was open and some summers the lake would be so shallow that without rains the algae blooms would grow rapidly,” Emerson said. “Keeping it deeper helps control the lake temperature.”
The weir was built about 100 years ago and sits in Tod Creek a few metres downstream. Residents are afraid the juvenile salmon will need a higher creek level to swim out to sea and then again to return as spawning adults (as a biologist said, if they returned in three to four years, they’d actually move through Prospect Lake to spawn in tributaries such as Killarney Creek).
To that effect, PLPS recently circulated an informational handout to Prospect Lake residents.
“In order for the salmon to get back upstream, you need to release water from the weir to allow the salmon to get back up,” Steele said.
However, the information outlined in the handout contained a series of inaccuracies, said Ian Bruce, executive director of Peninsula Streams Society, which would lead the project through a contract with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
Bruce spoke at the PLPS meeting, where residents shared worries of a lowered lake level leading to declining property values.
“Although the DFO has the right to lower the lake it would be very unlikely to do that for a few fish,” Bruce said.
The lake is stocked annually with up to 5,000 rainbow trout, though Prospect Lake was once home to native sea-run cutthroat and coho that used Tod Creek.
Rick Todd lives on the Goward Road property his grandfather purchased in 1920, and has lived there for more than three decades.
“My grandfather used to catch the odd coho in the fall, he bought the place to go fishing,” Todd said. “It’s the lake level that people are worried about, not the fish.”
The Tod Creek dam, built in 1917, originally had a fish fence in it but it failed in the 1930s and was only replaced in 2015 by Butchart Gardens (who continues to own and operate the dam), using a Peninsula Streams plan.
What Bruce contests most about the PLPS informational handout is a suggestion the DFO intends to lower the lake height. The handout says Tod Creek has an inadequate base flow for salmon fry to swim back upstream. The handout said draining Prospect Lake by one to four feet could maintain a summer base flow in Tod Creek at a risk of long-term and devastating impacts to the lakeside properties.
“Although salmon fry do move around in streams, the point here is that they can rear in the lake and not have to leave to go downstream into habitat that has no water in summer,” Bruce said. “No one has proposed [changing the lake height] and it hasn’t been modeled hydrologically. The lake outlet would have to be dredged to drain it down four feet and DFO would never undertake such a drastic measure that would affect so many property owners, for the benefit of so few fish.”
Moving forward, Peninsula Streams has scheduled an open house in the fall for Oct. 14 and bused watershed tours for Oct. 7 and 21. In the meantime, Steele says PLWU will seek an integrated water management plan, in advance of the Oct. 14 open house.
reporter@saanichnews.com
