Thanks to stricter pollution laws, toxin levels have been dropping steadily in the Baltic. Concentrations of environmental toxins have dropped by as much as 80 percent.

Conservation groups are calling for the immediate closure of the herring fishery in the Strait of Georgia following the release of new federal government data showing a four-year population biomass decline of almost 60 per cent. “We’ve been systematically overfishing these stocks and the Gulf of Georgia fishery is the last one left,” Pacific Wild...

A considerable number of the herring catch that’s been landed in recent days has been found to be infected. As such, almost all of it will be incinerated. Note, according to Fisheries Information and Resource System (FIRMS) the infection rate of herring with Ichthyophonus in Iceland was estimated to be 32% in the in the winter 2008/2009.

The commercial roe-herring fishery opened with a flourish over the weekend as the gillnet fleet took its share of what the federal government predicts to be “near-historic” returns to the Strait of Georgia.