The Rise of Vancouver and the Collapse of Forage Fish: A Story of Urbanization and the Destruction of an Aquatic Ecosystem on the Salish Sea (1885–1920 CE)

Since its establishment as a Euro-Canadian settlement in the mid-nineteenth century, the marine ecology surrounding Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada, has been negatively impacted by urban development, habitat destruction, poor fisheries practices, and pollution. Focussing on forage fish – herring, smelt, and eulachon – we present the results of an extensive meta-analysis including an archaeological, ethnohistoric, and scientific/regulatory literature review of Indigenous and commercial fisheries’ harvesting records to track the early historic collapse of these fisheries from about 1885–1920 CE. We identify significant reductions in the major forage fish fisheries around Vancouver within decades of the initial Euro-Canadian settlement. These severe negative effects occurred long before scientific description of local ecosystems had begun, and the magnitude of these effects went generally unrecognized and/or are poorly understood. We argue that this is a case of the shifting baseline syndrome (SBS): each generation of researchers mistakenly assumes that modern ecological conditions they encounter approximate their natural pre-contact state.