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Hatchery Salmon to Count as Wildlife
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 29, 2004; Page A01
SEATTLE, April 28 -- The Bush administration has decided to count hatchery-bred fish, which are pumped into West Coast rivers by the hundreds of millions yearly, when it decides whether stream-bred wild salmon are entitled to protection under the Endangered Species Act.
This represents a major change in the federal government's approach to protecting Pacific salmon -- a $700 million-a-year effort that it has described as the most expensive and complicated of all attempts to enforce the Endangered Species Act.
The decision, contained in a draft document and confirmed Wednesday by federal officials, means that the health of spawning wild salmon will no longer be the sole gauge of whether a salmon species is judged by the federal government to be on the brink of extinction. Four of five salmon found in major West Coast rivers, including the Columbia, are already bred in hatcheries, and some will now be counted as the federal government tries to determine what salmon species are endangered.
"We need to look at both wild and hatchery fish before deciding whether to list a species for protection," said Bob Lohn, Northwest regional administrator for the National Marine Fisheries Service.
Lohn added that the new policy will probably help guide decisions this summer by the Bush administration about whether to remove 15 species of salmon from protection as endangered or threatened.
From Washington state to Southern California, the decision to count hatchery-bred fish in assessing the health of wild salmon runs could have profound economic consequences.
In the past 15 years, the federal government's effort to protect stream-bred wild salmon has forced costly changes in how forests are cut, housing developments are built, farms are cultivated and rivers are operated for hydroelectricity production. Farm, timber and power interests have complained for years about these costs and have sued to remove protections for some fish.
They are enthusiastic advocates of counting hatchery fish when assessing the survival chances of wild salmon. Unlike their wild cousins, hatchery fish can be bred without ecosystem-wide modifications to highways, farms and dams.
"Upon hearing this news, I am cautiously optimistic that the government may be complying with the law and ending its slippery salmon science," said Russell C. Brooks, a lawyer for the Pacific Legal Foundation, an industry-funded group that has challenged federal salmon-protection efforts in court.
Word of the new policy was greeted by outrage from several environmental groups.
"Rather than address the problems of habitat degraded by logging, dams and urban sprawl, this policy will purposefully mask the precarious condition of wild salmon behind fish raised by humans in concrete pools," said Jan Hasselman, counsel for the National Wildlife Federation.
"This is the same sort of mechanistic, blind reliance on technology that got us into this problem in the first place," said Chris Wood, vice president for conservation at Trout Unlimited. "We built dams that block the fish, and we are trucking many of these fish around the dams. Now the administration thinks we can just produce a bazillion of these hatchery fish and get out from underneath the yoke of the Endangered Species Act."
Six of the world's leading experts on salmon ecology complained last month in the journal Science that fish produced in hatcheries cannot be counted on to save wild salmon. The scientists had been asked by the federal government to comment on its salmon-recovery program but said they were later told that some of their conclusions about hatchery fish were inappropriate for official government reports.
"The current political and legal wrangling is a sideshow to the real issues. We know biologically that hatchery supplements are no substitute for wild fish," Robert Paine, one of the scientists and an ecologist at the University of Washington, said when the Science article was published in late March.
Federal officials said Wednesday that the new policy on hatchery salmon -- to be published in June in the Federal Register and then be opened to public comment -- was in response to a 2001 federal court ruling in Oregon. In that ruling, U.S. District Judge Michael R. Hogan found that the federal government made a mistake by counting only wild fish -- and not genetically similar hatchery fish -- when it listed coastal coho salmon for protection.
To the dismay of many environmental groups, the federal government chose not to appeal that ruling, though it seemed counter to the reasoning behind the spending of more than $2 billion in the past 15 years to protect stream-bred wild salmon.
"There was an inescapable reasoning to Judge Hogan's ruling," said Lohn, chief of federal salmon recovery in the Northwest. "We thought his reasoning was accurate."
He said the Bush administration will continue to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on habitat improvement for salmon.
"We have major problems to overcome, both with habitat and with improving the way hatcheries are operated," Lohn said. "Run right, hatcheries can be of considerable value to rebuilding wild fish runs."
#################################################
Here's more:
B.C. salmon: something's not fishy
Vancouver Island's rivers no longer leap with steelhead. Populations are dwindling to record lows, prompting worries of extinction, says MARK HUME
By MARK HUME
Tuesday, March 23, 2004 - Page A17
E
Something dreadful is happening to the rivers on Vancouver Island. Pool by pool, riffle by riffle, they are dying.
To a casual passerby, glancing down from one of the slick new bridges on the Island Highway, nothing seems amiss. Rivers like the Cowichan, Nanaimo, Little Qualicum, Englishman, Trent and Tsable look just as beautiful as ever, running from under the mossy, green forests to the blue waters of Georgia Strait.
Mike McCulloch knows better.
Mr. McCulloch, a fisheries technician with the B.C. Conservation Foundation, helps organize small teams of swimmers that are responsible for taking an unusual annual census. They pull on wet suits against the bone-numbing cold, and snorkel the rivers that flow out of Vancouver Island's rugged mountains. They are looking for an increasingly rare species of salmon known as steelhead. They aren't finding many.
The Gold River, on Vancouver Island's West Coast, historically had runs of as many as 5,000 steelhead.
Last year, swimmers counted 900; this year they found 35.
"The magnitude of decline is overwhelming," said Mr. McCulloch. There are worse statistics. In the little Trent River, which should have 100 steelhead, the snorkel team found only two. Both females.
In Goldstream, a small river just outside Victoria that spills from one dappled pool to another, there should be several hundred steelhead waiting to spawn. The swimmers found none.
The trend is repeated in river after river. The fish population data, compiled by swimmers who peer under banks and dive into the gloomy darkness of deep pools, is mathematically plotting the path to extinction.
"When you get down to one or two fish in a stream we call it quasi-extinction," Mr. McCulloch said. "At zero, it is termed extirpation, meaning the species is extinct locally."
Steelhead rivers on Vancouver Island have been in trouble for several years, but never have the numbers been so low. "It's a situation that's getting quite desperate," Mr. McCulloch said. "We're only a life cycle away from a spiral into oblivion."
Steelhead aren't like other salmon on the Pacific Coast. They are believed to be the progenitor species, the fish that spawned all the other kinds of salmon.
There are six species of wild Pacific salmon, each filling its own niche in the ecosystem. Some, like pinks, are small but prolific. Others, like chinook, are fewer in number but grow to immense sizes. But only one, the steelhead, survives spawning. The irony is that, for reasons not fully understood, steelhead, the survivors, are now dying out as a species.
Mr. McCulloch said habitat destruction is part of the problem. Vancouver Island watersheds have been logged and many rivers run through heavily urbanized areas. Some watersheds are dammed. Poor ocean survival, due to a shift in temperatures, is a major factor affecting all salmon species. Steelhead, which have been tracked all the way to the coast of Russia in their Pacific migrations, have been the hardest hit. Because they live longer in their freshwater phase, they have also suffered the most in the rivers.
The B.C. Conservation Foundation, a non-profit group, is working jointly with the provincial Ministry of Land, Water and Air Protection to restore Vancouver Island steelhead. One plan, not yet funded, is to fertilize 15 rivers where nutrient levels are low because of declining salmon runs.
When salmon die after spawning, their bodies decompose, enriching the watersheds and stimulating the growth of aquatic insects, which feed young fish. But overfishing and habitat problems have robbed many rivers of the massive salmon runs they once had, stripping the streams of nutrients. Steelhead usually live for two years in freshwater before heading to the ocean. If they are underfed, they will be too small to survive when they run to the sea. Mr. McCulloch has been scrounging dead salmon from federal salmon hatcheries and placing them in rivers as fertilizer, hoping to stimulate the growth of baby steelhead. From the dead bodies of one species they hope to revive another. In one experimental program, artificial fertilization saved the Keogh River, where steelhead runs are stable and salmon stocks are increasing.
Mr. McCulloch calls the Keogh "a beacon" in the darkness, but the restoration project can't be copied without more money. The foundation and government fisheries agencies need $4-million a year in excess of their core funding, about double what they have. BC Hydro and some forest companies are helping with corporate donations, but the federal government, which has $1-billion to help beef farmers, which squanders millions on sponsorship scandals and which dithers over endangered-species legislation, seems oblivious to the steelhead crisis.
"There are too many rivers in trouble and not enough money," Mr. McCulloch said.
Meanwhile, in the Trent, two females wait alone -- the last hope for a river.
[email protected]
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040323/COHUME23/Comment/Idx
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 29, 2004; Page A01
SEATTLE, April 28 -- The Bush administration has decided to count hatchery-bred fish, which are pumped into West Coast rivers by the hundreds of millions yearly, when it decides whether stream-bred wild salmon are entitled to protection under the Endangered Species Act.
This represents a major change in the federal government's approach to protecting Pacific salmon -- a $700 million-a-year effort that it has described as the most expensive and complicated of all attempts to enforce the Endangered Species Act.
The decision, contained in a draft document and confirmed Wednesday by federal officials, means that the health of spawning wild salmon will no longer be the sole gauge of whether a salmon species is judged by the federal government to be on the brink of extinction. Four of five salmon found in major West Coast rivers, including the Columbia, are already bred in hatcheries, and some will now be counted as the federal government tries to determine what salmon species are endangered.
"We need to look at both wild and hatchery fish before deciding whether to list a species for protection," said Bob Lohn, Northwest regional administrator for the National Marine Fisheries Service.
Lohn added that the new policy will probably help guide decisions this summer by the Bush administration about whether to remove 15 species of salmon from protection as endangered or threatened.
From Washington state to Southern California, the decision to count hatchery-bred fish in assessing the health of wild salmon runs could have profound economic consequences.
In the past 15 years, the federal government's effort to protect stream-bred wild salmon has forced costly changes in how forests are cut, housing developments are built, farms are cultivated and rivers are operated for hydroelectricity production. Farm, timber and power interests have complained for years about these costs and have sued to remove protections for some fish.
They are enthusiastic advocates of counting hatchery fish when assessing the survival chances of wild salmon. Unlike their wild cousins, hatchery fish can be bred without ecosystem-wide modifications to highways, farms and dams.
"Upon hearing this news, I am cautiously optimistic that the government may be complying with the law and ending its slippery salmon science," said Russell C. Brooks, a lawyer for the Pacific Legal Foundation, an industry-funded group that has challenged federal salmon-protection efforts in court.
Word of the new policy was greeted by outrage from several environmental groups.
"Rather than address the problems of habitat degraded by logging, dams and urban sprawl, this policy will purposefully mask the precarious condition of wild salmon behind fish raised by humans in concrete pools," said Jan Hasselman, counsel for the National Wildlife Federation.
"This is the same sort of mechanistic, blind reliance on technology that got us into this problem in the first place," said Chris Wood, vice president for conservation at Trout Unlimited. "We built dams that block the fish, and we are trucking many of these fish around the dams. Now the administration thinks we can just produce a bazillion of these hatchery fish and get out from underneath the yoke of the Endangered Species Act."
Six of the world's leading experts on salmon ecology complained last month in the journal Science that fish produced in hatcheries cannot be counted on to save wild salmon. The scientists had been asked by the federal government to comment on its salmon-recovery program but said they were later told that some of their conclusions about hatchery fish were inappropriate for official government reports.
"The current political and legal wrangling is a sideshow to the real issues. We know biologically that hatchery supplements are no substitute for wild fish," Robert Paine, one of the scientists and an ecologist at the University of Washington, said when the Science article was published in late March.
Federal officials said Wednesday that the new policy on hatchery salmon -- to be published in June in the Federal Register and then be opened to public comment -- was in response to a 2001 federal court ruling in Oregon. In that ruling, U.S. District Judge Michael R. Hogan found that the federal government made a mistake by counting only wild fish -- and not genetically similar hatchery fish -- when it listed coastal coho salmon for protection.
To the dismay of many environmental groups, the federal government chose not to appeal that ruling, though it seemed counter to the reasoning behind the spending of more than $2 billion in the past 15 years to protect stream-bred wild salmon.
"There was an inescapable reasoning to Judge Hogan's ruling," said Lohn, chief of federal salmon recovery in the Northwest. "We thought his reasoning was accurate."
He said the Bush administration will continue to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on habitat improvement for salmon.
"We have major problems to overcome, both with habitat and with improving the way hatcheries are operated," Lohn said. "Run right, hatcheries can be of considerable value to rebuilding wild fish runs."
#################################################
Here's more:
B.C. salmon: something's not fishy
Vancouver Island's rivers no longer leap with steelhead. Populations are dwindling to record lows, prompting worries of extinction, says MARK HUME
By MARK HUME
Tuesday, March 23, 2004 - Page A17
E
Something dreadful is happening to the rivers on Vancouver Island. Pool by pool, riffle by riffle, they are dying.
To a casual passerby, glancing down from one of the slick new bridges on the Island Highway, nothing seems amiss. Rivers like the Cowichan, Nanaimo, Little Qualicum, Englishman, Trent and Tsable look just as beautiful as ever, running from under the mossy, green forests to the blue waters of Georgia Strait.
Mike McCulloch knows better.
Mr. McCulloch, a fisheries technician with the B.C. Conservation Foundation, helps organize small teams of swimmers that are responsible for taking an unusual annual census. They pull on wet suits against the bone-numbing cold, and snorkel the rivers that flow out of Vancouver Island's rugged mountains. They are looking for an increasingly rare species of salmon known as steelhead. They aren't finding many.
The Gold River, on Vancouver Island's West Coast, historically had runs of as many as 5,000 steelhead.
Last year, swimmers counted 900; this year they found 35.
"The magnitude of decline is overwhelming," said Mr. McCulloch. There are worse statistics. In the little Trent River, which should have 100 steelhead, the snorkel team found only two. Both females.
In Goldstream, a small river just outside Victoria that spills from one dappled pool to another, there should be several hundred steelhead waiting to spawn. The swimmers found none.
The trend is repeated in river after river. The fish population data, compiled by swimmers who peer under banks and dive into the gloomy darkness of deep pools, is mathematically plotting the path to extinction.
"When you get down to one or two fish in a stream we call it quasi-extinction," Mr. McCulloch said. "At zero, it is termed extirpation, meaning the species is extinct locally."
Steelhead rivers on Vancouver Island have been in trouble for several years, but never have the numbers been so low. "It's a situation that's getting quite desperate," Mr. McCulloch said. "We're only a life cycle away from a spiral into oblivion."
Steelhead aren't like other salmon on the Pacific Coast. They are believed to be the progenitor species, the fish that spawned all the other kinds of salmon.
There are six species of wild Pacific salmon, each filling its own niche in the ecosystem. Some, like pinks, are small but prolific. Others, like chinook, are fewer in number but grow to immense sizes. But only one, the steelhead, survives spawning. The irony is that, for reasons not fully understood, steelhead, the survivors, are now dying out as a species.
Mr. McCulloch said habitat destruction is part of the problem. Vancouver Island watersheds have been logged and many rivers run through heavily urbanized areas. Some watersheds are dammed. Poor ocean survival, due to a shift in temperatures, is a major factor affecting all salmon species. Steelhead, which have been tracked all the way to the coast of Russia in their Pacific migrations, have been the hardest hit. Because they live longer in their freshwater phase, they have also suffered the most in the rivers.
The B.C. Conservation Foundation, a non-profit group, is working jointly with the provincial Ministry of Land, Water and Air Protection to restore Vancouver Island steelhead. One plan, not yet funded, is to fertilize 15 rivers where nutrient levels are low because of declining salmon runs.
When salmon die after spawning, their bodies decompose, enriching the watersheds and stimulating the growth of aquatic insects, which feed young fish. But overfishing and habitat problems have robbed many rivers of the massive salmon runs they once had, stripping the streams of nutrients. Steelhead usually live for two years in freshwater before heading to the ocean. If they are underfed, they will be too small to survive when they run to the sea. Mr. McCulloch has been scrounging dead salmon from federal salmon hatcheries and placing them in rivers as fertilizer, hoping to stimulate the growth of baby steelhead. From the dead bodies of one species they hope to revive another. In one experimental program, artificial fertilization saved the Keogh River, where steelhead runs are stable and salmon stocks are increasing.
Mr. McCulloch calls the Keogh "a beacon" in the darkness, but the restoration project can't be copied without more money. The foundation and government fisheries agencies need $4-million a year in excess of their core funding, about double what they have. BC Hydro and some forest companies are helping with corporate donations, but the federal government, which has $1-billion to help beef farmers, which squanders millions on sponsorship scandals and which dithers over endangered-species legislation, seems oblivious to the steelhead crisis.
"There are too many rivers in trouble and not enough money," Mr. McCulloch said.
Meanwhile, in the Trent, two females wait alone -- the last hope for a river.
[email protected]
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040323/COHUME23/Comment/Idx
