Judge Hogan's folly

[Straydog]

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlep-i.nwsource.com/opini...aucoinop.shtml

Don't be suckered: All fish not equal
Thursday, December 13, 2001

By LES AUCOIN
POLITICAL SCIENCE PROFESSOR

For anyone wanting to understand the blood fight spilling across the Pacific Northwest over hatchery fish vs. wild fish, it comes down to this: A sucker is born every minute.

At least that's what private property-rights groups and resource extraction industries are banking on.

They want you to accept the removal of wild Pacific salmon from the Endangered Species List so that the survival of these stocks will no longer impede their efforts to get the highest commercial value from Northwest watersheds.

The way to do it? Pretend that hatchery salmon are no different from wild salmon and create a false sense of abundance. Industry and private-property abusers love publicly funded hatcheries because they don't have to pay for them. More important, hatchery fish relieve them from the responsibility to effectively protect the natural habitat that wild fish need to flourish.

If developers get their way, wild creatures that have evolved for tens of thousands of years will exist only in memory books because the rivers and streams of their birth will have been dammed, deforested, diverted, channeled or smothered in suburban sprawl.

They have found a friend in U.S. District Judge Michael Hogan, who is a lawyer and not a fisheries biologist or geneticist. Yet in an Oregon case recently brought by private-property rights groups, Hogan ruled that hatchery Coho salmon and wild Coho salmon are the same.

His decision has triggered a full court press by pro-development lawyers who have been fairly tripping over themselves to expand the hatchery ruling to cover other endangered salmon species, the wild populations of which border on extinction.

The developers' mantra? "There's no genetic difference between a hatchery fish and a wild fish." They're banking that you won't bother to understand genetics until its too late and the pesky wild fish are out of the way forever.

A geneticist with no commercial ax to grind will tell you a quite different story: No two individuals of any species are genetically alike. Period.

The genetic differences within the DNA of thousands of wild stocks, or races, have helped them survive for millennia in Northwest tributaries -- despite droughts, floods, volcanoes, earthquakes and ocean conditions that ebb and flow.

Hatchery fish on the other hand are produced with eggs that represent only a fraction of the gene pool of their wild cousins. This makes them vulnerable to disease or eradication by a cataclysmic event -- not to mention that some cost up to $500 apiece to produce.

If you want authoritative science on the effects of hatcheries, go no further than the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences. Its 1996 report, "Upstream: Science and Society in the Pacific Northwest," unequivocally linked the salmon's survival to genetic diversity.

"Sustained productivity of anadromous (ocean-going) salmon in the Pacific Northwest is possible only if the genetic resources that are the basis of such productivity are maintained," the scientists said. "The continual erosion of the locally adapted groups (wild species) that are the basis of salmon reproduction constitutes the pivotal threat to salmon conservation today."

The report concluded, "(Our) .. recommendations about hatcheries, fishing, and rehabilitation are founded on the importance of maintaining appropriate diversity in salmon gene pools and in population structure, which has not been adequately recognized."

You might assume that fisheries managers would act on such august advice. But it has been difficult for state fisheries agencies because their budgets depend on income from fishing licenses, and the anglers who buy these licenses tend to expect a fish on the line in return. Hatchery fish often fill the bill.

But in a rare, unguarded moment, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, for one, has conceded that hatcheries are fool's gold. In its 1985 Northwest Hatchery Newsletter, the department said it had released hatchery Coho in coastal streams in order to boost the population of wild Coho. What happened was the opposite. Juvenile hatchery densities increased by 50 percent while wild juvenile fish declined by 50 percent. Numbers of adult spawners failed to increase in stocked streams, and numbers of juveniles in the next generation declined 46 percent in stocked streams.

"We concluded," the agency reported, "that release of hatchery Coho into coastal streams has ... hurt Coho populations rather than helped them."

So here's the deal Northwest residents are being offered: Let developers step up the demise of wild salmon to facilitate the Californication of the Northwest. And pay for it with tax-supported hatcheries, which produce fish that may or may not survive.

© 1998-2001 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

[Fishaholic]

11 scientists fault plans to save fish

12/13/01

JONATHAN BRINCKMAN

The region's four main plans for restoring salmon in the Columbia Basin are unlikely to succeed, a panel of independent scientists has concluded after a yearlong review.


The Independent Science Advisory Board analyzed two salmon-recovery plans drawn up by the Northwest states and two by the federal government. The 11 scientists on the panel found that all of the plans lack details and clear methods for putting them into effect.

"We would be doing the region a disservice if we told the citizens of the Pacific Northwest that if they just followed these plans, everything would fit together," said Eric Loudenslager, chairman of the science advisory panel.

The board presented its findings Wednesday to the Northwest Power Planning Council, which is charged with balancing hydropower generation and wildlife protection in the Columbia River Basin. The council has eight members appointed by the governors of the four Northwest states.

Federal and state officials said Wednesday they don't think the findings mean that salmon recovery in the Columbia River Basin is doomed. They said that they welcomed the review and that it will improve their efforts.

"I think in general the feeling is still optimistic, and things are better now than they were five years ago," said Brian Gorman, a spokesman for the National Marine Fisheries Service, the agency in charge of federal salmon recovery efforts. "We are steadily making improvements. We may not be making them as fast as some people would like, but we really are going in the right direction."

The review was not entirely negative. The board, which convened five years ago to advise the power planning council and the fisheries service, found that the plans accurately describe the plight of many wild runs of salmon and steelhead. The plans also offer a sound scientific foundation for restoring salmon, the scientists said.

In particular, they praised the plans for recognizing that widespread restoration of rivers and streams is needed if 12 runs of wild salmon and steelhead listed under the federal Endangered Species Act are to be saved from extinction. Each of the four plans says that purely technical fixes, such as building hatcheries or barging young fish past dams, will be inadequate.

But the board found the plans too vague. Even when proposals were specific, the plans lack clear institutional arrangements for carrying them out, the panelists said.

The board reviewed a plan that the governors of Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana released last year, along with the power council's fish and wildlife program for 2000. The two federal plans the scientists reviewed are the National Marine Fisheries Service's rules for operating federal dams without jeopardizing salmon, called the 2000 Biological Opinion, and a multiagency strategy for the Columbia River Basin known as the All-H Paper.

Eric Bloch, one of Oregon's two appointees to the power council, said the review makes clear that the state and federal governments must improve their salmon recovery plans. Gov. John Kitzhaber thinks the federal government must commit more money to Columbia Basin salmon, he said.

Last December, the federal government decided it would not remove four dams on the lower Snake River to help salmon, a proposal it had been studying since 1995. Instead, officials said the federal government would increase efforts to protect and improve tributary rivers and other salmon habitat.

The scientific review was completed and presented to the fisheries service in August but was not presented to the council until Wednesday because of scheduling problems, council officials said.

Loudenslager, the review board chairman, said he was encouraged that the fisheries service and power council accepted the scientists' criticism. "We didn't hear from administrators of either organization that our assessment was completely off the wall. That's a good sign."

The board's review is posted on power council's Web site at www.nwcouncil.org. Click on Independent Science. You can reach Jonathan Brinckman at 503-221-8190 or by e-mail at jbrinckman@news.oregonian.com.