Mike Pearson has spent years studying and working the Stoney Creek watershed in Burnaby.
As an ecologist, he samples the creek several times a year. And what Pearson has found most recently has him concerned for the future of a rare fish that calls the waters of Stoney Creek home.
There are several types of fish that inhabit the creek, including trout and coho salmon.
But his biggest concern is for the Nooksack dace, a small fish that is listed as endangered and protected under the federal Species at Risk Act. Pearson said the fish has only been found in four creeks in the country, one being lower Stoney Creek.
Most recently, he said he’s found inches and inches of sediment along the waterway where the creek meets up with the Brunette River, and he fears that could do irreparable harm to the dace. He explained the dace are a warm water fish and when it gets cold they go down into the river bed through winter.
With a large deposit of sand and sediment, Pearson suggested it could fill in spaces where the dace live and be potentially devastating.
“We’ll never know, were they active enough to get out of there, were some of them buried alive, I don’t know,” he told the NOW, during a recent tour of the area. “I suspect there is some serious damage.”
Last month, while city crews were repairing a culvert upstream as part of a rehabilitation project, heavy rains from a storm forced sediment through a tributary of the creek.
The city has been assessing the environmental damage to the creek and last week stated the early indication is the fish habitat will be fine.
Pearson stopped short of blaming the culvert work on the problems facing the dace fish, but instead suggested the recent events have added to the stresses in the creek, noting other spills, high temperatures in the summer, and foot and dog traffic in the area.
“We’ll never know the full impacts, but I’m certainly not comfortable with concluding everything is fine,” he said.
While Pearson suggested it is difficult to know exactly how many dace are actually in the creek, he said the city needs to figure out strategies to reduce incidents of spills in the waterway.
“It seems to me, we need to develop some much more robust protocols to how to work around the creek,” he said.
However, Pearson is more optimistic the chum salmon in the creek will be OK.
Meanwhile, city officials are still confident the fish habitat will recover from the damage caused by the rehabilitation project.
“These debris flows… this one was a result of construction, but these debris flows happen in nature as well,” James Lota, an assistant engineering director with the City of Burnaby, said. “It will recover. There should be no long-term effects on the fish habitat on that tributary.”
