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HUMPY HEAVEN! POV Salmon Seining: Kitoi Cost-Recovery (Part 3)Wild salmon recovery -
Fish and Wildlife Service and the Northwest Power and Conservation Council — have failed to implement recommendations from their own scientists about how to improve outcomes at the hatcheries they support. Allyson Purcell is the director of West Coast hatcheries for NOAA, which oversees endangered salmon recovery, sets regulations for hatcheries and funds roughly a third of all Columbia River hatchery production.
In an interview, she conceded that federal hatchery reform efforts have historically focused on saving wild salmon, but said that her agency is now researching ways to create more resilient hatchery fish. She also acknowledged that hatcheries will need to change to sustain fish populations as the climate continues to change.
People like John Sirois, a former chair of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation in northeast Washington, have been waiting a long time for changes.
Nearly a decade ago, he cut the ribbon at the opening of the Chief Joseph Hatchery, miles upriver from the mouth of the Columbia. That hatchery, one of 23 facilities overseen by the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, opened in John Sirois of the Colville Tribes looks over an area where salmon swam before the Chief Joseph Dam was built.
There are many reasons that Columbia River salmon die, whether they were born in the wild or in hatcheries. Millions more die in the ocean or get snared by commercial fishing ships, ending up as grocery fillets or pet food before they can return upriver toward their spawning grounds. Some die-off is natural.
But the dismal survival rates of salmon bred on the Columbia today are neither natural nor sustainable. Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica examined the yearly survival of eight Columbia River Basin hatchery populations of vulnerable salmon and steelhead trout, detected at a federal dam on their way out to sea as juveniles and on their way back upriver as adults.
This dam-to-dam measure provides one of the only consistent indexes of how well salmon are surviving. Our analysis of the publicly available data provides a high-level and easily understandable snapshot of hatchery performance; previously, assessing the health of the hatchery system would have required combing through thousands of pages of government reports and academic research.
Even with this generous estimate, however, the survival rates of these hatchery fish have been well short of the established goals for rebuilding salmon populations, according to the Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica analysis.
Story continues below graphics. Note: Survival rates are for four vulnerable populations of Chinook salmon that were released from hatcheries between and , the most recent years for which complete data is available. Source: Columbia Basin Research estimates, map data c OpenStreetMap contributors.
Note: Survival rates of two threatened populations of steelhead trout released from hatcheries between and , the most recent years for which complete data is available.
Note: Survival rates are for vulnerable populations of coho and sockeye salmon that were released from hatcheries between and , the most recent years for which complete data is available. Source: Columbia Basin Research estimates. According to our analysis, salmon populations released from to , the most recent years for which complete data was available, had some of the worst survival rates on record.
Some aim to get less than half a percent of their fish back. Records obtained from NOAA show that over the past five years, dozens of hatchery programs have fallen short of their typical production levels, some by more than half.
Some have tried to address that shortfall by capturing more wild fish to breed. Others used eggs that were shared by nearby hatcheries. But major shortages across the Columbia basin in and left hatcheries scrambling to find enough egg-bearing female fish.
Tribal hatcheries, which are located farther upriver where salmon face a longer, harder journey, bore the brunt. Between spring and fall, Patterson and his friend and fellow tribe member Chance Fiander spend evenings atop plywood scaffolds built into the rock face of the Klickitat River canyon, plunging dip nets 30 feet into the waters, awaiting the jolt of a salmon fighting its way upstream.
Shane Patterson of the Yakama Nation, right, uses a dip net to fish for salmon on the Klickitat River. He said a lot of people rely on fishing for income and to feed their families. This April, there were so few spring Chinook salmon for the annual spring feast Patterson attended — held to honor the first foods of the new year — that it took donated bags of frozen salmon to feed everyone at the longhouse that day.
Seen here in a photo from , the station was named after NOAA Fisheries founder Spencer Baird, an early champion of hatcheries. Freshwater and Marine Image Bank. But the early hatchery efforts faded.
Similar research reached the federal Department of Fisheries, a precursor to what is now NOAA Fisheries, in Amid the poor results and the Great Depression, state and federal fisheries agencies largely abandoned costly large-scale efforts to breed salmon.
Overfishing was the first blow to salmon populations. Dams were the biggest. Between and , 18 dams were built on the Columbia and Snake rivers. Nearly half of all salmon habitat in the Columbia basin was completely blocked; the rest was drastically altered as humans turned a free-flowing river system into a series of reservoirs and built farms and communities.
It was the best offer officials made to the tribes that depended on salmon. Left Native Americans fish for salmon from traditional platforms at Celilo Falls, Oregon, in The falls and traditional fishing grounds were flooded in by the opening of the floodgates of the newly completed Dalles Dam.
Right Grand Coulee dam construction, Efforts should be directed toward ameliorating the impact of this development upon the injured interests and not toward a vain attempt to hold still the hands of the clock.
Biologists for the Fish and Wildlife Service knew at the time there was no evidence to suggest hatcheries could make up for the impact. Hatcheries again failed to offset the damage.
By the late s, hatcheries were releasing three times more juvenile salmon than scientists estimate the wild fish ever produced themselves. But fish counts at federal dams showed that while tens of millions more juvenile salmon were heading downriver each year, the number of returning adult salmon kept dropping.
Part of the problem was how the fish were bred. Salmon have lasted millions of years, across multiple ice ages, because of the diversity in their populations.
But in the hatcheries, that diversity started to disappear and fish developed traits that make it harder for them to survive in the wild. Because their fitness is just so poor.
In the early s, several salmon populations landed on the endangered species list. Scientists and environmental advocates began to argue that hatchery fish posed a threat to wild salmon recovery.
By the end of the s, a panel of scientists for the Northwest Power and Conservation Council concluded that hatcheries had failed in their objective to mitigate habitat damage and were harming wild populations by competing for food and spreading weaker genes.
And, they noted, other scientific reviews had reached the same conclusion. Congress created a task force to reform hatcheries in , aiming to minimize competition between wild and hatchery fish and to keep weaker hatchery-fish genes out of the wild.
Soon, hatcheries faced limits on which fish they could breed, how many wild fish they could capture, how many fish they could release, and how many of their fish were allowed to escape to spawn in the wild.
Each hatchery program now requires a genetics management plan. The agency did not require updates to outdated facilities, nor did it order changes to how hatchery fish were penned, fed or released. Tribes had begun experimenting with new methods of breeding in their own hatcheries.
They documented some success at increasing abundance while minimizing the harm to wild genetics. At the Melvin R. Sampson Coho Hatchery in Ellensburg, Washington, coho salmon from tribal collection points are used as breeding stock to maximize genetic diversity.
But endangered species regulations and environmental lawsuits alleged that releases of hatchery fish were threatening wild salmon and compromising their recovery.
Tribes found that their only tool for putting fish back into rivers — and for exercising their treaty rights — was under threat. The National Congress of American Indians in issued a resolution calling for the protection and maximization of hatchery production.
Purcell said NOAA has for many years been backlogged in reviewing hatcheries to make sure their breeding programs adequately protected wild fish. Those delays left hatcheries exposed to lawsuits from environmental groups that have blocked or reduced releases of hatchery fish.
Purcell acknowledged concern for wild fish has led to some hatchery reductions, but said the agency has tried to avoid that when possible for the sake of tribes. Sirois fishes at Icicle Creek at the Leavenworth Fish Hatchery, an area that the Wenatchi people had to fight to regain access to.
Across the water, his friend Jason Whalawitsa was fishing with his son atop scaffolds they had built. The Wenatchi people, part of 12 bands making up the Colville Tribes, spent decades battling in court to reclaim their legal right to fish for salmon in Icicle Creek. Now, they worry how long the supply of fish will last.
Salmon numbers have always fluctuated, but salmon biologists say the latest downturn is different: Climate change is making temperatures increasingly inhospitable to salmon, which need cold water.
And in warmer oceans, fish starve without adequate food. The obstacles to saving salmon are myriad. Large swaths of the Columbia River Basin remain impaired by the effects of excessive heat and chemical pollution, and biologists say habitat restoration efforts are far behind what is needed to give salmon a real chance of rebounding.
And salmon there and elsewhere would still need a major boost in fitness to survive the ocean journey. Tanks filled with thousands of coho salmon at the Melvin R.
Sampson Coho Hatchery, which aims to breed fish in a more sustainable way that maximizes genetic diversity. Facilities could also adjust how many fish are released and when: Longtime hatchery philosophy has been to flood the river with fish. But scientists have found that overloading the environment with too many fish can slow population growth , and that varying release times gives fish a better chance of survival.
As climate change damages the habitats of wild salmon, hatchery fish become all the more important. Officials at federal agencies governing hatcheries said they know salmon survival needs to improve, but demurred when asked about adopting the strategies Berejikian mentioned.
Most production at the 13 hatcheries run by the Fish and Wildlife Service is governed by legal agreements or settlements, giving the agency little flexibility, spokesperson Brent Lawrence said. Guy Norman, chair of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, acknowledged changes are needed at hatcheries to produce stronger fish.
Norman said the council would help facilitate research and improvements, but that it has a limited role in prescribing operations at the state and tribal hatcheries in its program. However, the council has ordered changes in the past, such as stipulating that all hatcheries funded through its program needed to follow recommendations for protecting wild salmon.
Chester Wahpat, 67, right, of the Yakama Nation, with his grandson at the Wyeth fishing camp in Cascade Locks, Ore. Wyeth, a fishing site along the Columbia River opened only to Indian fishers, was created by the federal government when the creation of dams destroyed traditional tribal fishing grounds.
Otis Johnson of Warm Springs, Ore. Restoring Columbia Basin salmon is a key to orca survival. Modernizing the Columbia River Treaty. and Canada to join forces to protect and restore the health of this great river. and Canada should join forces to protect and restore the health of this great river.
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Wellness supplements article was produced recvery partnership with the Recovwry Wild salmon recovery Reporting Network. The fish were on ealmon way to be executed. Wild salmon recovery minute, they were swimming around a concrete pond. The next, they were being dumped onto a stainless steel table set on an incline. Hook-nosed and wide-eyed, they thrashed and thumped their way down the table toward an air-powered guillotine. Hoses hanging from steel girders flushed blood through the grated metal floor.
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