Weak salmon run shuts down Northwest US fisheries
SOURCE DATE: May 11, 2005
AUTHOR: Felicity Barringer
The New York Times
www.nytimes.com/2005/05/11/national/11salmon.html?pagewanted=1WASHINGTON, May 10 - Tens of thousands of adult salmon that were expected to swim up the Columbia River this spring are missing, and their mysterious absence has led state and tribal officials to shut down the commercial fisheries in the river, the Northwest's muscular thoroughfare, for the first time in five years.
The unexpectedly low early run of chinook salmon, containing some of the first of 11 endangered fish species to return to the Columbia and Snake River systems each year, has defied usually reliable predictions and shut fisheries that had expected a plentiful harvest.
The collapse in the numbers is so bad that Idaho, Oregon and Washington have ended commercial fishing, and last week the four Indian tribes with treaty rights to harvest the salmon did the same. Though tribal fishermen can still sell a limited catch to other tribe members, their subsistence fish harvest has been sharply curtailed.
At last month's annual "first salmon" ceremony, held near the Columbia dam at The Dalles, Indians from the nearby Celilo village, were short of fish. They were forced to rely on some fish donated by coastal fishermen; some came from the frozen remains of last year's catch, said a spokesman for the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission.
Experts say it is too soon to tell exactly why this first run is low - or late. Possible explanations include an unusually large collection of hungry seals and sea lions below Bonneville Dam, a cyclical warming trend in the northern Pacific and a disruption in the food chain somewhere along the chinook's migratory route through the ocean.
Most environmentalists and some tribal officials, however, are convinced that federal dams, the major engines of the Northwest's electricity grid, are at the root of the problem. The slow-moving, sometimes overheated reservoirs behind the dams disorient fish bred for fast, cold currents, and dam machinery can be lethal, particularly to outbound juvenile fish.
"We need to figure out what happened," said Charles Hudson of the intertribal commission, which represents the four tribes with fishing rights.
"But there is no question," Mr. Hudson added in a phone interview, "that year in and year out, the hydro system is the biggest killer of fish."
The drop-off comes as a federal district judge in Portland is poised to rule on whether a Bush administration plan to maintain the dams is compatible with the government's obligations under the Endangered Species Act. The possibility of breaching the dams to help the endangered fish had previously been suggested as a last resort.
Four federal dams on the lower Columbia provide an average of 2,350 megawatts of electricity a year, enough to power two cities the size of Seattle. Upstream on the Snake River, another four dams provide nearly as much power.
About 20 months ago, President Bush stood above one of these, the Ice Harbor dam, and said, "The good news is that salmon runs are up," adding, "We can have good, clean hydroelectric power and salmon restoration going on at the same time."
More than a year later, his administration disclosed last November that, while it intended to spend $600 million a year on salmon recovery, building structures or paying for barges to help the fish swim around the dams, the dams would now be considered an immutable part of the landscape. There would be no question of breaching them.
This year, fish were supposed to arrive in ample numbers. The consensus of fisheries experts was that 254,000 spring chinook would pass Bonneville Dam, the first of the eight federal dams along the lower Columbia and lower Snake Rivers. With three weeks left in the run, only 52,000 fish have passed the first dam.
Late last month, it seemed that the peak of the run had passed; about 4,150 fish passed Bonneville Dam on April 25, and then the numbers began dropping. Late last week, there was a brief resurgence, with more than 6,000 fish counted on Thursday. But by Monday the number had dropped to less than 400.
There are many possible reasons for this, environmentalists and federal officials agree. But environmentalists said that if the Bush administration could credit its salmon recovery effort for four years' worth of well-stocked runs, it could not then just blame the oceans when the numbers were bad.
Bonneville Power officials and the administrator of the Northwest regional office of the National Marine Fisheries Service said the salmon run might be late because the river was slow to warm.
"There are two theories," Bob Lohn, the regional administrator, said. "One is that something devastating has happened to the run. Two is that the run is very late."
John Skidmore, a program analyst for Bonneville Power, said, "In any natural world, you're going to have variabilities." He added, "That is not to say that we're not concerned that the returns are off, but it's not a complete anomaly."
But what adds to experts' worries about this year's Columbia River spring chinook run is its variance from expectations.
Most of these salmon are the offspring of adults that went upstream in 2001, a year with a magnificent run of nearly 400,000 fish.
At a minimum, this run could have been expected to be better than average, and not a return to the low runs and closed fisheries from the late 1970's to the late 1990's. Last year's count of early-returning fish from the brood, called jacks, provided much of the basis for the forecast of 254,000 fish.
It is highly possible, Mr. Lohn said, that "something happened to these fish in the ocean."
"That something could include an unexpected collapse of some part of the food chain," he said, or that "there was an unexpected by-catch of these fish" while they were still under the high seas.
For Clifford Shippentower, a member of the Umatilla tribe and a wholesaler who has been fishing the lower Columbia for 30 years, this year's run is an unwelcome reminder of the quarter-century of commercial fishery closings that continued until 2000.
In those years, Mr. Shippentower could fish only for himself and other tribe members. He had anticipated a much better season this year.
"We kept waiting for the fish to show up, and it never did," he said in a telephone interview.
The sports fishing industry alone lost an anticipated $10 million in revenues, an industry spokesman said. The chinook salmon, a prized delicacy, will be hard to find in the region's markets.
Beyond the commercial loss of both hatchery and wild fish, which together makes up the annual runs, this spring's unpleasant surprise is bad news for the effort to bring back wild salmon.
Jim Martin, the retired head of the Oregon fisheries department, said 2001's generous contributions to the long-term effort to bring back wild salmon were lost in one generation.
Or as Buzz Ramsey, the Northwest regional sales manager for Luhr Jensen, a major fishing tackle company, said: "A lot of people had declared the salmon crisis over. Last year's disappointment and this year's disappointing run shows we're really not over it."
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Topic: Columbia River Chinook. Hope this is not going to happen on the Fraser (Read 2004 times)