Striped bass in a Canadian river are eating all the salmon. Time for a cull?

Since the 19th century, Atlantic salmon in the Miramichi have lured wealthy anglers from across North America and Europe to fishing camps along the river's banks, its undammed branches once producing more of the fish than almost any other river on the continent.

- Moira Donovan

In 2010, the fishery was valued at C$16m (£8.5m) and provided hundreds of jobs.

Rip Cunningham has been travelling from the US state of Massachusetts to the Canadian province of New Brunswick to fish since the 1970s. When he started, he would sit on the deck at the Black Brook Salmon Club, on one of the Miramichi's tributaries, watching the water ripple with the leaps and rolls of salmon. "It was an amazing experience, just because you saw the amount of life that there was in the river," he said.

Sitting on that same deck 55 years later, Cunningham reflects on how much things have changed. Miramichi salmon have declined by as much as 86% since 2012, and the lodge's bookings are down by half.

For some, the decrease can be traced to one culprit: striped bass. As Miramichi salmon have declined, numbers of striped bass have been on an inverse trajectory. Researchers estimate there may now be half a million striped bass - predators that gobble young salmon as they migrate from their birthplace in the Miramichi to the Atlantic Ocean. As a result, anglers and conservation groups say, the only hope for the salmon is to kill hundreds of thousands of bass.

But striped bass are also native to the Miramichi, having coexisted with salmon for millennia. Thirty years ago, commercial fishing nearly drove striped bass to extinction; in the 1990s, they numbered fewer than 5,000. Since then, the closure of fisheries has helped bass make a spectacular recovery.

That recovery is now pitting two fish - and their supporters - against one another, in an ecosystem under pressure from the climate crisis.