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Methow Valley News September 30, 1999 Endangered Species Coverage My Turn ~ by Solveig Torvik Reprinted with permission, Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Why would the people we pay to save salmon willfully destroy 116,000 salmon eggs? The spring Chinook run up the Columbia River consisted, as usual, of a smattering of vanishing wild salmon and much more plentiful hatchery fish. Hatcheries exist to make amends for the
dams’ destruction of natural salmon runs. The one at
Entiat belongs to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; the
one on For reasons no human can explain—blind stupidity, the call of the wild—a couple of dozen Entiat fish took it into their heads not to go home. Instead of making a left turn into the Entiat hatchery, they kept swimming upstream to the Wells Dam. There, Methow hatchery workers scooped them up with 390-plus Chinook artificially spawned in the Methow River. Rather than spawn and die naturally, these Methow fish are killed for their eggs and their bodies tossed into the river to provide nutrients. The Methow runs are so depressed that the National Marine Fisheries Service, in an act that sparked outrage, this summer shut off irrigation water to make more water available for salmon. Return of 100 wild spawners is a good year in the Methow. The Entiat strays yielded 116,000 eggs. Methow hatchery manager Bob Jateff wanted to use the Entiat eggs to supplement the Chinook population in the Methow; he says 95 percent of them would have lived to be released. But the NMFS officials, who implement Endangered Species Act-driven measures to save wild salmon stocks, refused to let the Entiat eggs be put into the Methow River. The rap on hatchery fish is that they’re inferior to the real thing. Even so, they manage to overwhelm wild fish, the object of billion-dollar a year restoration efforts and profound political angst. The hatchery stocks in the upper Columbia are not natives, and that worries many biologists. Hydroelectric dams, habitat, harvest and hatcheries are cited by NMFS officials as the "4-H" obstacles to recovery of wild stocks. Their biggest fear is a population crash due to loss of natural stocks. "We used the Johnny Appleseed approach with fish eggs," laments Steve Smith, NMFS inland hatcheries branch head. "We used to spread them all over the place." But NMFS contends individual stocks in each river must be kept separated to ensure natural genetic strains survive. Thus NMFS didn’t want Entiat fish to co-habit with Methow fish. So why not simply haul the eggs back downriver to the Entiat hatchery? Because it didn’t want them. Entiat got so many fish back this year—724 fish, or seven times more than expected—that it has no room for them, according to Entiat hatchery manager Bill Edwards. A "surfeit" of salmon in the
midst of a salmon crisis? Hello? If their fish are so inferior, why do any of them survive, hatchery managers wonder. Have they become better adapted for survival in the ecological cesspool that now masquerades as the Columbia River? Is it that they’re spared having to spend much time in its fish-unfriendly mainstem? Or is it that there are so many more hatchery juveniles that it’s an unfair contest? "Their ability to adapt is amazing," Edwards proudly says of his fish. But the Columbia mainstem is too far gone ecologically and poses too great an obstacle for the wild fish to ever recover, he thinks. He hesitantly ventures a heresy: "If you would just homogenize all the runs, can you imagine all the money the government would save? We don’t dare argue it. It’s politically incorrect because it’s contrary to ecosystem management"—a theory, he argues, is "based on an unaltered environment" long since vanished from the Columbia. Edwards complains that hatchery fish and the people who make them get no respect: "When the fish runs are poor, the hatcheries did something wrong. When the fish runs are good, the ocean conditions were good," he says. This is a good year, and NMFS types
suspect climate-driven ocean conditions have more to do
with it than anything. But big hatchery fish are exactly what champions of natural fish dread because they pose an even bigger threat to their smaller wild cousins. Worse, there’s no evidence that hatchery fish are as good at reproducing and maintaining the population in the wild over time as wild fish, argues NMFS’ Smith, whose office gave the order to destroy the Entiat eggs. And it’s what happens to fish over time that should concern fish eaters. As for destroying the excess non-native eggs, that’s "something that happens in hatcheries all the time," says Smith. "All over the Northwest people see hatchery fish being killed (without using their eggs) while people are having to sacrifice their water (for fish restoration)," Smith adds, alluding to the furor in the Methow. He admits destruction of hatchery fish is hard to understand when so much effort is going into saving wild salmon. "But they’re different fish," he rightly reminds. The high cost of saving wild salmon spawns criticism. So it’s worth knowing that hatchery salmon are no bargain either: Each one produced by the Entiat hatchery this record year costs $300, according to Edwards. "Please don’t look at it that way," he pleads. "I try not to think about it because I know it’s not good. It would be a million dollars worth of adults if we could get 10 percent back." He got less than 1 percent. "If this ($300) is the value of each (hatchery) fish but they are not valuable enough to keep and raise and the decision is made to bury them, then how valuable are they?" he asks. It’s a fair question. Somebody ought to answer it. Solveig Torvik is a member of the editorial board of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and is a part-time resident of the Methow Valley. Opinion | Sports |
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