Fishing on the Sandy may End... your help is needed.

[SandySteel]

ODFW is considering several proposals for management of fish on the Sandy with the removal of Marmot dam. Currently, the Sandy is managed for two sections of the river. The upper river is managed for wild fish only and all hatchery stock are sorted at Marmot and recycled. The lower river continues to have hatchery planted in it and thus continues to be open to fishing. That all may change soon without action from the fishing public.
The four ODFW staff proposal options for managing the Sandy Basin all assume no sorting facility (such as using a remaining bottom section of Marmot Dam or adding a weir). National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) requirements under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) listing will severely limit and drastically reduce the number of hatchery fish that can be released into the system without such a facility. This will be particularly true for Summer Steelhead and Spring Chinook even under the most liberal option. The most restrictive option will eliminate all hatchery released and would likely close fishing in the Sandy. We need to save this fishery in balance with improving wild fish runs. Please attend (and get your fishing friends to attend) a public hearing on this subject at the ODFW headquarters, 2501 SW First Ave Portland, OR on Monday, Oct. 2nd - THAT'S MONDAY! - at 7:00 PM.
Our main points are:
1) Maintain the current split basin management plan (where the upper basin is already a wild fish sanctuary).
2) We need a sorting facility to filter the hatchery fish from the upper basin.
3) Wild fish broodstock programs must be adopted along with other steps tocomply with ESA standards.
We hope to see you there in defense of your sportfishing interest.

Let's see what kind of response we can get at the meeting from everyone on iFish. I know Jenny just got done with boat stickers. It would be neat if everyone had a button. Oh well. I will be there with my Steelheader buttons on.

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Eric Neiwert
Sandy River Chapter Northwest Steelheaders
Portland OR

[Mrdorkfish]

I REALLY wish i could be there since i spend most of my time there in the winter.....I have to work ! I can bet ya Jack Glass will be there since they will be pretty much telling him......"you can't make a living here anymore" Read up at ODFW http://www.dfw.state.or.us/public/Ne...92000newsb.htm

Mrdorkfish

[wiser]

SandySteel,
would you please name one run of wild fish that is improving on the Sandy River. The things I read all say "every run of wild fish on the Sandy River is either extinct, in extreme decline or barely hanging on. I'm not against hatcheries but the current practices and the practice of bifurcating a river system just don't make sense. Now all hatchery fish are concentrated below Marmot Dam, ensuring the eradication of wild fish in an area containing 38% of the spawning habitat in the whole system and the majority of the rearing habitat. Decreasing the hatchery component will be painful but will be the surely the quickest and quite likely the only way to recover wild fish in this remarkable watershed.

[SandySteel]

Youngsalt
The real question that should be asked is whether or not a "native" run actually still exists or if the "river born" fish that spawn above Marmot are really just naturalized hatchery fish. Marmot dam for many many years did not have fish passage. There were no runs above it. So really, why should we expect there to be a native run that hasn't been overwhelmed by past hatchery practices?
You see, in this battle between hatchery and native fish we have gotten away from the main question of the genetic stock that is at the heart of the problem with most hatchery based fish. The practice of using hatcheries to produce smolt is very efffective. The problem lies in the fact that often these fish are from "out of system" streams and don't have the genetic history that make them a good match for the watershed they are planted in.
For many years now, the Northwest Steelheaders have pressed the ODFW to adopt a native broodstock program for all hatchery runs on the Sandy. We even went so far as to build an acclimation pond near Marmot for this reason. It isn't time to eliminate hatchery fish from the Sandy simply because they are hatchery fish. It is time to amend the kind of hatchery practices that go on in the Sandy to try to rebuild the stocks.
And the spawning habitat you speak of on the Sandy is seriously in need of repair. One perfect example is Buck Creek. This creek for several years now has suffered from having too steep of a gradient due to a culvert pipe for the road. The steelheaders have been the only ones doing stream work to repair the habitat in the stream to try to improve it for spawning fish.
There is a lot of work to be done on the Sandy that many of the groups that are calling for an end to hatchery fish will never put a spade to. The very important river born fish will never have a shot without our help to both increase their numbers through a native broodstock program and through the improvement of habitat for them to spawn in.

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Eric Neiwert
Sandy River Chapter Northwest Steelheaders
Portland OR

[Mrdorkfish]

SandySteel, I think there are more naturalized fish than we think......honestly do you think these fish say to themselves..."i got by Mrdorkfish but i don't think i should reproduce because i was from hatchery stock" They still have the drive to "DO IT"! Keep the hatchery thing going but lower the deadline for "NO ANGLING BEYOND THIS POINT ! Hatchery fish are not dumb.....even dumb humans make babies !!! they have the native instinct to reproduce.


Mrdorkfish
OMG i am going fishing tomorrow i better get my butt to bed !

[Steve]

At the risk of starting an arguement over wild fish runs here is my take...
The Salmon, Steelhead, Cuthroat, Rainbow, Sturgeon, Pikeminnow and all the other fish found in Oregon and Washington are on the evolutionary scale mere new comers on the block....Some 14.000 years ago and for 10,000 years before that the streams were barren and devoid of any life beyond insect and algaes.
Pretty bold statement...but prehistorically accurate. 14,000 years ago the last of the ice ages had slipped down from the arctic as far as lower California. An ice wall estimated to be 1,000' tall covered every living blade of grass, tree, ground mountians to dust filled rivers with moving ice..glaciers..then about 12,500 years ago it started (Global Warming) without mans help..
A gigantic glacier slid between two mountian ranges in the Missoula Montana createing an inland freshwater sea that the great lakes are only a small remnant of the vastness of sea. at some point in time the glacier dam breached (sound familiar) and a thousand foot wall of water came west createing what we now call the Columbia River, it came so hard and fast that rock the size of busses and houses were swept loose and deposited hundreds of mile away...anyway it created 3 or more lakes (Condon, Lewis, and Allison0 filled the Willamette Valley, Columbia Basin, and the Lewis river areas for over 40+ years...
The point I want to make is that the fish have migrated north from the southern California coast inhabiting the rivers first on runs after bait fish into the bays with straggler being left behind that started spawning low in the rivers and slowly moving up as competeing and increasing numbers moved to seek newers spawning waters...one bay at a time, one river, one creek...the point being all the fish have a common ancestors, I have not found any one who could tell me how long a run of fish has to be in a river system before they are a distinct species as identified by DNA. As for the idea that hatchery fish are inferior or less strong......that is debatable..I would like to see an study done on two streams stock "Wild" "native" steelhead fry in one and hatchery fry in the other in comparable numbers and see what happens...I pick fry so any dumbing down of hatchery fish is eliminated..... bet the returns would not favor the Nates...will wait to see if I am burned as a Heretic...Steve

[happybrew]

SandySteel and Steve: you make some good points. What constitutes a "species" and what is "native" are as much functions of labeling as they are of actual biological differences. If we were to bring back wooly mammoths from old DNA, would they be "native"?

Steve, the experiment you propose would be impossible to carry out. As soon as you start tampering with a native run by stocking it, it is no longer a wild run. It would therefore be impossible to control all of the variables involved, because in order for the results to be valid for wild fish, there could be no tampering. It's the old Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle at work. You cannot make a precise measurement without in some way altering what is being measured. You can never truly get an accurate look at every variable, therefore, without altering another variable in the process. The most you can hope for in this case would be good observational studies, but you could never get the kind of data that you can through experimentation because as soon as you start messing with the fish populations, you create selective pressures that will nullify extending the results to wild populations.

With that being said, I think ODFW is nuts. There is absolutely no way to determine whether truly wild fish are present, because the kind of testing that would establish that wasn't available years ago. We have no idea what the native DNA was, so we can't determine whether it still exists. I think it's safe to assume that few native stocks exist, and the best thing to do is to continue hatchery runs with wild broodstock, to minimize the selective pressures toward domesticated steelhead.

happybrew

[Hammer Bob]

I do not believe that there is any way to determine the difference between a hatchery fish and a native fish. DNA analysis, at its current level, is unable to seperate out different "strains" of fish. An extensive study was performed on Ca. steelhead populations in an attempt to determine seperate strains...they were unable to do so. If we wish to restore native, in-stream spawning, self-sustaining runs of fish in our streams and rivers then we must be prepared to make some sacrafices. These sacrifices will include reduction or elimination of fishing until recovery has shown success. It may not be a pleasant alternative but I think in the long-term it will be for the best. Progeny of any fish which is spawning naturally is already subjected to the selective pressures which will determine if it has the genetic fitness to survive in that system. We may have lost the "true" native strain of a system but we can begin to rebuild self-sustaining runs of fish through habitat restoration, removal of dams, and elimination of hatchery fish.

[Mike H]

And I thought all you guys read STS! In the Aug.-Sept. 200 issue, there is a interesting column in the "Publisher's Drift" section which contradicts what I'm reading in this post. The column is on pg. 4 and is titled "More Good Wild-Steelhead News!"

I have not read the published study which is the focus of this column but from what I read in this summary, there ARE genetically pure wild steelhaed left. Check it out!

Mike H

[garyk]

Hammerbob and HappyBrew,

I think you'll be gladened to know that pretty precise techniques do exist, and have been used in Oregon. Electrophoretic analysis of mitochondrial DNA produces a pretty exact picture of a fishes genetic heritage.

I'm not familiar with the CA studies you cite, but it is relatively easy to determine whether a fish's genetic make-up is in accord
with an area's wild stock. The literature on this is extensive and accessible.

Arguments are put forth that you 'can't tell what is what'. In fact the opposite is true. Using the above technique, we find that there is tremendous genetic diversity. Sometimes, to me, it seems like each watershed contains its own sub-specie.

As for hatchery stock fitness - on the west coast, for all the billions of smolts stocked over the years, I know of perhaps one example of where a self-sustaining hatchery stock fishery has been created (the Yakima). Time and again commercial aquaculture businesses (Ore-Aqua the latest) have gone bankrupt because they couldn't get the survival rates.

By a measure of dollars spent, salmon hatcheries are perhaps the greatest, failed natural science experiment ever.

[Hammer Bob]

garyk, The use of mitochondrial DNA does give a link to the origin of the stock from the aspect of the contribution of maternal DNA. It does not provide any information on the degree of hybridization which may have taken place since it is in no way representative of the paternal DNA source. So it still appears that while advances are being made on determination of stock origins there still is a great deal of work to be done on establishing the "purity" of a given strain.

[This message has been edited by Hammer Bob (edited 09-29-2000).]

[Navigator]

Well, this thread has wandered a bit. I think the issue is what kind of fishery should the Sandy be managed for. Set the objectives first. Those objectives should be for a selective fishery based on hatchery reared (and clipped fish). The Sandy is so accessible to a large fishing population that not to provide for this seems a crime. Now, we have the wherewithall and the knowledge to manage a selective fishery on the Sandy to protect naturally spawning fish. First would be to protect the fall chinook tule run with catch and release for this species. If I am not mistaken, this is truely a wild run historically. Second, if the Endangered Species Act and the professional biologists feel that their are native/natural steelhead runs in the upper river, these can be managed for with a catch facility at what is left at Marmot. Third, hatchery plants of summer and winter steelhead should to the extent possible be based on what genetics is available in the system at present. The tougher decisions are what to do with Spring Chinook - do we let them establish naturally above Marmot or do we keep them out and manage as a hatchery stock. Similarly with coho - reintroduce and create a natural producing (different than native) above Marmot (i.e., salmon river) or rely on hatchery or some combo like steelhead. It shouldn't be either or. Measure the habitat quality, the carrying capacity for rearing, make habitat improvements in the watershed and in the meantime manage for a combination of naturally spawning and hatchery brood stock fisheries for both the joy of having natural fish to observe and the joy of catching fish so close to a metropolitan area. Otherwise, we will all go over and start fishing the Wilson .....

Sandysteel, can't make the Monday meeting but feel free to add me to the count in support of a split basin management plan.

[sgs]

The hatcheries have certainly filled a hole left by the decline of the west coast natural fish runs. I believe that hatchery fish whether from broodstock or not, will really only ever be a band-aid. I guess that it just seems selfish of the sportsman to only look at fish for himself/herself right now or in four years from now. True stewards of the land look toward generations of use. The last thing I want is to have no fish in the river. But, I want my children to still have that natural fish in the rivers to show their children. Hatcheries have certainly been given a chance and come up short. Everyone has there hopes up very high for the broodstock programs and I too hope they work. However, I truly believe that the future of the salmon lies in protecting the "native" fish by protecting areas for the fish to reproduce. When NWS fights for hatcheries, they are just fighting within the fishing community rather than going after industry and the real threats to our fish.

[HOGTIDE]

First of all - garyk, you should be ashamed of yourself. You can't come from Columbia County and use all of those scientificological terms when talking about fish. We just say "a big un" or "a spawndeded one" out here. Anything fancier than that and you won't be allowed to have breakfast at the V. I. Although, we are now a bit more advanced technologically, we have a WALMART! Anyway, on to the topic. With my limited biological training, you know ... basic chromosone, gene pool alele pairs stuff, I had always been taught that the genetic possibilities within all species holds exponential potential. Divergence of strains of fish through the randomness of reproduction eventually creates variety within the gene pool and eventual adaptation of a given strain of fish to the stream that best suites them. The genetic capabilities within a half dozen fish returning to the same stream or hatchery create a number too long to list on this BB. Hatchery fish are wild fish genetically. Skamania strain fish (most widely dispersed in our region) at one time simply flourished in the Washougal system because that gene pool fine tuned itself to that specific water shed. However, that does not mean the Skamania fish donot have the potential, through genetic variation, to tune themselves in to another watershed system. Hatcheries do have their problems.The intensive aquaculture thing leads to bacteria and disease issues...but I would think there is more than sufficent genetic potential within all of those concrete feeder pools to start new wild strains throughout our region. I don't believe we necessarily need to concern ourselves with the question of "do historic wild runs still exist?" Maybe it should be,"Are runs(any runs)currently increasing and stabilizing within a given river system?" What do you think?

Oh ya ...who cares about Sandy River fish? Its too stinkin cold to fish in that east county wind any way! Just kiddin'...born and raised in Gresham!

[SandySteel]

Fighting within the fishing community and not against industry? Now you're getting personal. How many stream restoration projects have other volunteer organizations been involved in in the last year on the Sandy?
And here's the biggy. Why is ODFW looking for ways to get out of the hatchery business on the Sandy? They tout hatcheries elsewhere. It all leads back to the mitigation dollars and mitigation requirements that PGE wants to walk away from. The City of Portland and the State gave millions to PGE to take down the dams without any long term plan for the long term effect that having the dam on the Sandy had in the first place. (The entire reason we have a hatchery program on the Sandy in the first place is because PGE has to pay for the loss of habitat and the loss of fish.) Personally, I would be fine if the dollars that are spent on hatcheries by PGE was switched over to increasing spawning and rearing habitat. But they just want to walk away. Please keep in mind that I am not a proponent of past hatchery practices. But I am not opposed to the use of hatcheries.

On the topic of the failure of hatcheries. The opponents to hatcheries simply tout their failures and their damage to native fish populations. I won't dispute that. This is due to a variety of mistakes. The primary one is loading streams with fish that don't have the genetics to survive in a particular stream. (Anyone who doesn't think that different streams have different kinds of fish is fooling themselves.) Those genetics affect everything from how far the fish is able to travel; take for example, Stanley basin way up in the mountains of Idaho, the sockeye there are different than lower river Alaskan sockeye, by a long shot; or how soon they return. If they return too soon or too late they might run into too low water or flood conditions. But the blind opponents to hatcheries simply want their elimination rather than using fish from native stock to fix the past practices of hatcheries.
If we walk away from hatcheries completely and rely solely on river spawning fish to repopulate the river with only the current spawning habitat we are asking for disaster. The Sandy has too low of a biomass returning to supply the river with the food it needs, There are too few fish to do the spawning and there is too little habitat left to spawn in.
The solution is threefold;
1Change the hatchery practices on the Sandy to only utilize native broodstock for all hatchery plants on the river.
2. Increase the spawning and rearing habitat on the river through both volunteer organizations and state and local agencies.
3. Increase the biomass on the river by returning all hatchery carcasses to the river to supply food to small fish and insects.

Please don't accuse the Northwest Steelheaders of only wanting hatchery fish in the river so that we can continue to fish at the expense of the future. Our actions speak otherwise.

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Eric Neiwert
Sandy River Chapter Northwest Steelheaders
Portland OR

[wiser]

SandySteel,
There is one other thing that should be done.
Manage for the fish, not just the fishing. This may mean a decrease in opportunity but should help the fish return.The broodstock program may not be a save all solution. The Summer Steelhead program has always used stock from outside the basin. If any of the returning fish were viable thgey would still have an origin outside the basin. I have appreciated the opportunity to fish on Sandy River stocks for over twenty years but I am willing to give the remaining native or naturalised stocks a chance of helping themselves. I think people might be surprised to see what could happen. Bifurcation of this system is bound to destroy the chance for recovery. It's akin to cutting off the blood to one of your arms, it will end up killing you. What makes the lower Sandy such a poor stepsister to the area above Marmot? Dumping hatchery fish on top of native fish in the lower system has been leading to a decline and even loss of the native fish there. There has been an increase in numbers of many species associated with the Columbia but the native Sandy coho and fall chinook are at or near an alltime low. Could that be associated with concentrating more and more hatchery fish below Marmot where those species are native? Just because we have bigger brains doesn't mean we've been using them to the best of our abilities.
PS Navigator,
The fall chinook in the Sandy river haven't been supplemented with hatchery stock since the early 1980's. I'm with you regarding release of all unclipped(there may be a few cluipped hatchery strays)fall chinook. This stock is part of the ESA listed lower Columbia stock and should be protected. ODFW is now allowing a targeted fishery on these fish that should be stopped. It is OK to release a fish even if it's legal to keep it.

[Steve]

Happybrew, there are a number of streams that have extinct runs in my area, wouldn't be hard to nose tag X number of hatchery fish and X number of wild fish from a known source.. even releasing them into the same stream at the same time...would give a general indicator of return and if one or they other was inferior...