Do hatchery salmon help or harm the wild ones?
Monday, November 12, 2001
By ROBERT McCLURE
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
The killer appears faceless, his visage obscured inside the hood of his dark green raincoat. He grabs the salmon, then lifts a baseball bat high over his head.
Wham! He dispatches the flopping fish with a few swift whacks, then moves on to the next. Captured on videotape by a hunter who stumbled onto this scene at an Oregon fish hatchery, the faceless salmon-killer and his accomplices spawned widespread outrage. Since then, the scene has been played again and again -- before Realtors and the Rotary, in cafes and Capitol meeting rooms.
People asked: Why did state employees kill these fish? Why not let them breed? The answer lies in a cornerstone of the government's salmon-rescue blueprint, which boils down to this: the wilder, the better.
When studies showed that hatcheries appeared in some cases to reduce the abundance of wild salmon, some hatchery runs -- like the one the Oregon hunter videotaped in 1998 -- were targeted for extinction.
The video's stark portrayal of workers clubbing fish ignited a fierce debate that reverberated in federal courtrooms and that on Friday prompted the federal government to announce it will rethink its salmon-protection policy.
The debate is this: Can hatcheries that were built primarily to augment salmon and steelhead fishing be tweaked to help struggling wild runs, rather than hurt them?
Some suspect not. For years, scientists have compiled evidence suggesting that the presence of hatchery-bred fish can be harmful to wild fish and that hatchery-bred fish are less able to survive in the long run than wild ones.
But increasingly, property-rights advocates, Indian tribes and timber, farming and construction interests are questioning the conventional scientific wisdom. Tribes, in particular, want to experiment with reforming hatchery practices to help struggling wild runs recover.
"We're spending millions of dollars to produce hatchery fish, and when they come back, we're killing half to three-quarters of them," said Andre Talbot, a fish scientist with the Columbia River Inter Tribal Fish Commission. "It's stupid. These are valuable animals."
Counters Bill Bakke of the Native Fish Society: "Where we've closed down hatcheries in the past, at least in some cases, the fish population has actually increased. It's this mythology that the hatchery is the source of our fish that is the problem."
In a court case sparked by the hunter's video, U.S. District Judge Michael Hogan ruled Sept. 10 that salmon raised in the hatchery near Oregon's Alsea River deserve the same legal protection as salmon spawned naturally in a nearby creek. He said federal officials improperly refused to protect hatchery-bred fish under the Endangered Species Act.
On Friday, National Marine Fisheries Service officials announced that the government would not appeal that ruling. Instead, NMFS is launching a yearlong re-examination of the fitness of hatchery fish.
In the balance hangs the future role of Northwest hatcheries -- including Washington's state-run hatchery system, the world's largest -- that have cost hundreds of millions of tax dollars over the past two decades.
The case could also lead to a re-counting of most West Coast salmon and steelhead stocks. If hatchery fish are counted, at least some stocks will prove numerous enough to lose Endangered Species Act protection, environmentalists fear.
"If hatchery fish can have the (act's) protection, it's as if we'd settle for lions in zoos and say it's the same as lions in the Serengeti," said Patti Goldman, a Seattle lawyer trying to appeal Hogan's ruling on behalf of environmentalists.
Property-rights advocates say they simply want to temper strict land-use restrictions imposed to protect salmon-bearing streams.
"It's not that we hate salmon or hate fishermen," said Russ Brooks, a Bellevue attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation whose suit led to Hogan's decision. "There's got to be some balance. The government needs to realize that they're affecting people's lives."
Salmon hatcheries have been a part of the Northwest since the late 1870s, when cannery owners built one on Oregon's Clackamas River. Having seen how Eastern fisheries were hammered by pollution and overfishing, they wanted to hedge their bets, and hatcheries do an excellent job of increasing the survival of salmon eggs and fry.
But salmon must then go to sea and return before reproducing. As dams were built that walled off huge sections of river where fish no longer could spawn, still more hatcheries were built.
Even as early as the 1950s, though, studies suggested that fish raised in hatcheries do not survive as well as their wild counterparts.
Today, the state and federal governments operate about 100 hatcheries or related facilities in Washington, while tribes and local governments run others.
Near one on the Columbia River east of Vancouver, hatchery manager Ed LaMotte recently spotted two salmon pushing up the channel of the White Salmon River, their black bodies scabbed up from fighting through the rocks. Probably "strays," or fish that were born in the nearby federal hatchery but failed to return there, LaMotte speculated.
"She's probably trying to build a redd," or nest, LaMotte said, pointing to one. "There's not a lot of good gravel, but she's trying."
Upstream, the Condit dam holds back gravel needed by fish for nesting. Downstream, the Bonneville dam flooded the areas in the Columbia where fish used to spawn. When the Condit dam is removed in 2006, it will open up lots of spawning ground. But virtually the only fish left in this run are those coming from his hatchery, LaMotte said.
"The genetics of the fish we raise in the hatchery isn't exactly the same as the genetics of the stock a hundred years ago, but it's about as close as you're going to get," LaMotte said. "With a little luck, some of the same traits that the fish need to survive in the wild will still be preserved."
Many scientists, however, say naturally spawned fish are the most likely to conserve much-needed genetic variations. Genetic variability has allowed salmon to survive thousands of years in streams as varied as the steep, cold creeks of the rain-drenched Olympic Peninsula and the slow-moving, warmer waters where the Snake River creeps through arid high desert -- all the while hustling to survive through droughts, floods, stream-altering volcanoes and earthquakes, and in an ocean whose hospitality regularly surges and swoons.
Fish born outside a hatchery are genetically programmed to spread their risk.
For example, some lay their eggs in the well-washed gravel of those cool Olympic streams, where they are very likely to survive and hatch. Others nest in the beds of lower-level, warmer streams where they are more likely to be smothered by dirt. However, suppose a drought comes along. The fish in the lower river are most likely to have water throughout the summer. The upper mountain streams might run dry. Later, descendants of the survivors can climb high and recolonize the upper reaches.
Consider also the timing of the salmon's return from the sea to reproduce. Wild fish usually come back over a period of several months, meaning at least some will probably avoid whatever disaster nature throws their way in any given year.
Traditional hatchery management has often destroyed such variability. Fish are purposely hatched together, released together, and they return at roughly the same time. The problem? One example is that birds congregate where millions of young salmon are freed each year. It's an easy meal. Naturally spawned fish happening by get eaten, too.
Hatcheries are notorious for taking fish adapted to one stream and hatching their progeny in another, meaning they may return to spawn, for example, when that particular stream is a raging flood and inhospitable to safe egg laying.
Meanwhile, hatchery fish compete with and overwhelm wild fish. Because they are typically released before wild fish hatch, hatchery fish early in life are larger -- so they gain an advantage competing for living space and food.
Also, the sheer number of hatchery fish allows fishing seasons to go on when they otherwise would be shut down for lack of fish -- yet some fish from struggling wild runs get caught, too. And diseases caused by hatchery conditions can be transmitted to wild fish.
Fish biologist Jim Lichatowich decries hatcheries' "herds of salmon."
"Unlike the salmon raised in a hatchery environment, with its feedlot regime, the salmon in a natural population in a healthy river do not all do the same thing in the same place at the same time," Lichatowich points out in his 1999 book "Salmon Without Rivers."
Even though the fish are not always distinguishable in genetic tests, there are definite behavioral differences stemming from the hatchery experience, critics note.
"Hatcheries and the wild stream have only two things in common -- daylight, and water," said Patrick Hulett, a researcher with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Bakke's Portland-based Native Fish Society assembled a compendium of more than five dozen scientific papers regarding the hatchery-versus-wild debate. Among the findings:
· Adding hatchery coho to Oregon coastal streams did not boost the number of adults returning from the sea to spawn. "Our introduction of (young hatchery fish) has hurt coastal coho populations rather than helped them," scientists concluded.
· Scientists put hatchery-spawned fish, naturally spawned fish and hatchery-wild crosses in four streams and in a hatchery pond along Oregon's Deschutes River. The hatchery fish did fine in the pond, but did not survive as well in three of the four streams. "It indicates a genetic difference," said Reg Reisenbichler, a scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey who headed the study.
· A review of more than 300 attempts to use hatchery fish to rebuild wild runs found that only 25 were successful and concluded, "The closer the hatchery stock is genetically to the natural stock, the higher the chances for success."
· Once they are set free, hatchery fish are not as good at producing offspring as are wild fish. A study in Washington's Kalama River showed that the success of hatchery steelhead in producing offspring was only 15 to 28 percent that of wild fish. "Somewhere between the time they left the river and the time they came back as adults, they didn't cut the mustard," said Hulett of WDFW, one of the researchers involved.
Citing studies such as these, NMFS scientists decided in the early 1990s that protections for hatchery fish under the Endangered Species Act "should be viewed as a temporary measure, to be held to the minimum necessary for recovery."
The idea, said NMFS geneticist Robin Waples, a key architect of the policy, was to protect as many of the varied genetic codes as possible.
"We felt, biologically, this was reasonable," Waples said. "We're not trying to predict which populations are going to be important in the future, because we'd probably get that wrong. If you save a diverse array of these, the species has a much better chance of surviving into the future."
Tribes want to use hatcheries as a "bridge" to a time when naturally spawning salmon populations can again sustain themselves. But first ecosystems will have to be repaired from the logging, dredging, damming and other insults salmon populations have suffered, they say.
Don Sampson, director of the tribal fish commission, accuses NMFS of misinterpreting the Endangered Species Act in trying to create a master race of wild fish -- "Aryan management," he once called NMFS' policy.
He also accuses NMFS of doing little to help salmon recover -- failing, for example, to order the dismantling of four dams on the Snake River.
"We ought to figure out as a scientific community in the Northwest how best to make these fish as natural as possible and integrate them with the wild populations," Sampson said. "Hatcheries ought to be used for a period of time. If that is 25 to 50 years so that wild populations can sustain themselves and survive, then we ought to plan to use hatcheries to get us through this bottleneck of mortality."
Advocates of hatcheries say disease can be controlled. Native wild fish can be taken annually to revitalize the genetic pool. Natural foods and more-natural water conditions can be employed.
"We're still paying for past sins in a system that has largely reconfigured itself and continues to reconfigure itself and will continue to reconfigure itself," said Jeff Koenings, director of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.
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P-I reporter Robert McClure can be reached at 206-448-8092 or
robertmcclure@seattlepi.com
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