[1] NMFS MEMO SPELLS OUT BARGING SUCCESSES :: A NMFS memo has outlined preliminary results of the 1995 PIT-tagging program at Lower Granite Dam, which tested the value of barging spring smolts downstream past lower Snake and Columbia River dams. Nearly a quarter-million fish were tagged for the study.

According to the Aug. 1 memo from NMFS Coastal Zone and Estuarine Studies Division director Mike Schiewe to regional director Will Stelle, "On average, twice as many adult fish returned from juveniles transported to below Bonneville Dam compared to those released into the tailrace of Lower Granite Dam."

Schiewe said now that all 2-ocean-age fish (two years at sea) have returned and 3-ocean-age fish will be back next year, his group expects a similar response from them. "Further," the memo states, "based on previous return patterns, we expect that the total return of 3-ocean-age fish will be roughly equivalent to the total return of 2-ocean-age fish; however, the proportion of hatchery and wild fish in the 3-ocean-age component will be the reverse of those in the 2-ocean-age component." That means NMFS is looking forward to a significant return of wild fish next year.

Adult return rates from the 1995 study are showing that transported hatchery and wild fish are coming back to Lower Granite at 0.44 percent and 0.25 percent, respectively. But when the 3-ocean-age fish return next year, NMFS says that the total return rates should go up to 0.51 percent for transported hatchery fish and 1.8 percent for transported wild fish.

Schiewe's memo said the adult return rate for wild fish is conservative "because roughly 15 to 20 percent of the hatchery smolts were either not fin-clipped or were poorly fin-clipped, and thus were indistinguishable from wild fish when PIT-tagged at the dam."

Another interesting note from the memo: when current adult return rates are adjusted to make them comparable to estimates made before the Snake dams were built, the estimated return rate for transported wild fish goes up to 2.3 percent, which is within the pre-dam return range.

The memo said that the study has found "virtually no difference" between fish tagged as parr at hatcheries and hatchery fish collected and tagged at the dam, which discounts the notion that the fish handled at the dams are not representative of unhandled fish passing the dam, as argued by state and tribal fish managers.

The study also found that return rates were lower for fish never detected passing through a smolt bypass system "than for those detected passing through one or more of them. Thus," concludes the memo, "concerns about the transportation study design and smolt bypass systems appear unfounded."

As of July 21, 702 fish were recovered in the study: 604 hatchery fish and 98 wild ones. The good returns reflect improved migrating and ocean conditions in 1995 from the previous several years. - Bill Rudolph

[2] HOUSE SUBCOMMITTEE SCRUTINIZES FEDS' SALMON POLICY :: The House Subcommittee on Fisheries Conservation, Wildlife and Oceans held hearings in Washington DC on July 24 and in Boise on Aug. 15 to look into the salmon recovery process of the National Marine Fisheries Service.

"There is growing concern in the region," said subcommittee member Mike Crapo (R-ID), "that NMFS has not recognized the power of a consensus decision-making process for salmon recovery. There is much concern that NMFS is developing a public policy that will not recover the salmon while failing to take into account the other interests of the region." The hearing included testimony from two tribes, business, environmental interests and state governments. The second hearing in Boise was held to accommodate more testimony and included remarks from regional NMFS director Will Stelle.

With the latest results from this year's barging study under his belt, Stelle told the Aug. 15 meeting why his agency nixed Idaho's salmon plan last spring. Since the Idaho Plan called for barging less fish, Stelle said it was a tactic NMFS couldn't go along with, because "the clear weight of scientific information indicates that this river system as currently configured kills fish and that collecting and transporting fish around the eight dams is a safer route of passage than leaving them in the river."

In his "best professional judgment," Stelle said to "intentionally" leave more fish in the river would kill more fish and be entirely contrary to his obligations under the ESA. He pointed out that preliminary returns from the latest barging study are showing that transported fish return "at nearly twice the rate of in-river fish."

He told the subcommittee that in-river mortality was lower than previously measured, "about 50 percent for spring/summer chinook compared with rates as high as 70 to 80 percent in the 1970s," and said that these results suggest there is no delayed mortality of transported fish as Idaho and others had claimed.

As for flow augmentation, Stelle said his agency is interested in continuing to add to Idaho's annual contribution of 427,000 acre feet of water on a "willing seller, willing buyer basis" that is consistent with the state's water law. For the long term, the NMFS policymaker warned Idaho citizens who might become complacent if lower Snake dams were removed that "dam removal might eliminate a significant need for flow augmentation in certain times, but it may not completely eliminate it. Fish migrate in summer and fall, and fish need a river."

James Grunke of the Orofino Chamber of Commerce said his community has been the "sacrificial lamb of salmon recovery efforts," because nearby Dworshak reservoir is the primary source of water for the "ill-conceived" flow augmentation strategy developed by NMFS. Grunke said the Corps of Engineers has broken promises made to the community to maximize recreational opportunities in return for destroying the productive steelhead habitat of the North Fork of the Clearwater River. Grunke said NMFS has never shown that water releases from Dworshak have had any measurable benefit to increase salmon returns after five years of the flow augmentation experiment.

"We, in Orofino," said Grunke, "view every effort made by the NMFS as a complete failure, and that the only result has been the decimation of the area economy."

Stelle said his agency was working to improve the decision-making process and has devoted a great deal of time to developing some options for dispute settlement. As for settling the major questions of how to save the salmon, he said the PATH (Plan for Analyzing and Testing Hypotheses) process, which "includes the best analytical minds the region has to offer," will estimate the results expected from the major strategies of drawdowns or refinements of the current system. Stelle said the process would hopefully get the region to an answer "as close as possible" while understanding the risk inherent in the remaining uncertainty.

But other testimony was not so positive about the PATH path. Written testimony by Doug DeHart, Chief of Fisheries for Oregon Fish and Wildlife, commended NMFS for its role in establishing the PATH process, but said the federal government "is falling short of fulfilling the expectations it created..."

DeHart said that NMFS has only recently committed its scientists to the process, but hasn't explained how the PATH findings will be used in the decision-making process. "On the other extreme," wrote DeHart, ""the Bonneville Power Administration has engaged fully in the PATH process by hiring a battery of consultants. However, at times, BPA's participation has been less than constructive. There have been high profile incidents when its participants have not met agreed to deadlines and/or have submitted volumes of material for review at the last moment. This has hampered efforts to complete assignments in a timely manner that will best inform the important regional decisions that lie ahead."

But DeHart said NMFS was not the problem, and that "the focus should not be on assigning blame or spending valuable time and resources on constructing new processes in which we may better argue and debate the issues at hand. The need is for us to collectively analyze the risks to salmon of the various recovery strategies available to us and to act on that information." -B.R.

[3] NWPPC STAFF MAKES F&W BUDGET RECOMMENDATIONS :: Northwest Power Planning Council staff last week recommended a deferral that could affect at least $32 million in proposed fiscal 1998 spending on fish & wildlife projects. The recommendation came during the Council's Aug. 27 work session in Spokane, after the staff completed its review of the Independent Scientific Review Panel's report and the close of the public comment period.

The staff recommended following the ISRP's key recommendation for a moratorium on new production facilities such as hatcheries until there is a better scientific understanding of the impact of hatchery fish on wild fish stocks. That would cut about $19 million from the budget. But staff did not agree with the ISRP's other main recommendation to do away with $12 million for the Yakama hatchery. "We consider the Yakama project to be a work in progress, not a new project," said the Council's John Harrison.

Staff also recommended putting in a placeholder for the estimated $13 million slated for habitat enhancement for anadromous fish. Tribes and the Columbia Basin Fish & Wildlife Authority are currently developing criteria on which to judge and prioritize such projects, staff pointed out. Since that analysis is due sometime in October, staff said the Council should wait until the analysis is complete before deciding on the spending.

Under the Fish Cap Memorandum of Agreement, there is room for an estimated $127 million of spending on F&W program projects. CBFWA came to the council with proposals totaling $148 million. The staff's recommendations are designed in part to winnow that total to the $127 million available.

The Squawfish Program Faces Budget Cuts in FY98

With respect to the Council's law enforcement budget, the ISRP did not propose elimination, but said the evidence shows that illegal harvest is not a significant cause of mortality. And it questioned a program to reduce the predator squawfish as merely treating a symptom.

Council staff recommended scaling back the $3.7 million squawfish program to its most effective components and reducing the amounts for the least effective methods. The bounty program is considered an effective squawfish elimination program, but dam angling is not. Staff also recommended scaling back the full scale monitoring and evaluation program.

Both the ISRP and staff are concerned that the Council's $4 million law enforcement program "has gone beyond its original mission" of providing funds for enforcement of habitat violations, Harrison said. Staff made a range of recommendations on this matter also, but some Council members seemed to feel the program is too large and may be beyond the Council's legal mandate.

The Council will take up these recommendations at its next meeting in Helena, MT, Sept. 16 and 17. -Ben Tansey

[4] DAM BREACHING COULD PUT BPA IN BIG FINANCIAL HOLE :: BPA would be unable to meet its debt obligation if all four lower Snake River dams and John Day were breached, Power Council members were told last week.

Council staff presented this finding during the council's session in Spokane. The Council, harking back to a key issue raised last year during the Regional Review, wanted to assess BPA's potential future losses and benefits, given a wide range of hydropower operations and market conditions, including the "worst case scenario" of breaching all five dams.

The Corps is currently studying what the best way to alter the river system would be to most enhance salmon survival. That study is not due until spring of 1999. In addition, the Council's economic advisory board is also looking into feasibility of drawdown scenarios and their secondary impacts.

The worst case scenario, the council's John Harrison said, is the loss of generation at John Day and the four Snake River dams. "What they came up with is that the answer depends in large part of the market price of power."

Assuming a 16 mill undelivered price of electricity over the next 30 years, staff concluded BPA could sustain an energy loss of about 1000 aMW, and the that the levelized benefits over 20 years would be zero. The four Lower Snake River projects produce about 1200 aMW; John Day about 1250 aMW.

"You could interpret that to mean Bonneville breaks even," said Council system analyst John Fazio. But that's not the complete picture, he said: for the first 10 years, the agency would be in the hole by between $200 million and $300 million. Things only begin to improve as the $500 million annual WPPSS debt begins to fall off in 2012. Once the debt is paid in 2017, BPA would start to see a benefit.

"If you take the average over the long period, BPA can break even," Fazio said, but only if it defers a portion of the $800 million Treasury payments during the first 15 years or gets its power subscribers to pay more, or does one or the other of these in conjunction with further cost cutting. If market prices rise, of course, the financial pressure on BPA would be reduced.

Harrison was critical of media reports saying that this meant the staff was endorsing drawdown or breaching of the Snake River projects. "This by no means is the total cost of those decisions," he emphasized. "Drawing down the Snake River projects or breaching John Day would result in multiple other mitigation costs related to transportation, navigation, recreation, flood control and others. No one knows what those numbers are and all of them would have to be figured in before a decision to take out any dams.

"This is a piece of the puzzle," he continued. "We are steadily progressing to a decision on the Lower Snake River and John Day projects, but we aren't there yet and won't be for a while." The Council will want to wait to see the results of the Corps study first, he said. -B.T.

[5] FISH PASSAGE OK AT BONNEVILLE :: After three days of testing last week, the Army Corps of Engineers said it will operate three turbines as needed at Bonneville Dam's Powerhouse 2. The eight turbines at the powerhouse have been off line since late July, when debris from high flows knocked several grates out of place in an auxiliary waterway, potentially trapping an unknown number of fish. (See related story, NW Fishletter 41.) Concern about additional potential harm to fish passage kept the powerhouse shut down until the Aug. 25 testing started.

The Corps ran two to three units at Powerhouse 2 through Aug. 27, when fish managers evaluated the data collected and a diver was sent down to check for debris and stability of the replaced grates. "There were no show stoppers, as it were," said the Corps' Cindy Henriksen; all the grates were in place and there seemed to be less debris.

The Corps operated three units as needed through the end of August, Henriksen said; at that point the fish flush obligations of the biological opinion requirements were met, and the project returned to normal operations.

Right now, there isn't enough flow to run all eight turbines. But later in September, when some units at Powerhouse 1 will be taken off line for maintenance, more units at Powerhouse 2 could be brought into service. -Jude Noland

[6] EL NIÑO TAKES HEAT FOR ALASKA RUN FAILURE :: The effects of this year's El Niño are already being felt far afield from the ocean pastures where mackerel and tuna are roaming off the Washington coast. The building warm event is being blamed for a Bristol Bay sockeye run that came in far below expectations of Alaska fish managers. Even the East Coast isn't immune--commodity markets showed a rise in wheat prices to their highest level in three months on fears that the El Niño would cut production overseas by reducing rainfall levels in Australia and Argentina.

The latest El Niño Advisory reports that the overheated ocean is as hot as its ever been in the past 50 years (For an animated look at how the latest El Niño compares with the past three warm events, including the 1982-83 blockbuster, click on this NOAA site that maps sea surface temperature anomalies).

Closer to home, the building climate phenomenon is expected to bring a warmer, milder winter to the Northwest, but more than normal precipitation to California and southern US states.

The famed Bristol Bay sockeye run in Alaska was 15-20 million short of forecasts when only 19 million fish returned. The decline has puzzled fish managers who said test fishing, a reliable indicator of run strength for the past 11 years, had shown no indication that the return was below forecast. But when all was said and done, many fishermen and processors went home with nearly empty pockets.

Don Rogers, University of Washington research professor, said it was likely the run's decline was due to two factors. "We believe the poor return was due to the highly unusual weather, both the warm water temperatures associated with a building El Niño event, and the very calm wind conditions that were totally beyond previous experience," said Rogers. He said that other factors could be responsible, such as low river flow leading to poor ocean survival, or a change in fish distribution at sea. The University of Washington's Fisheries Research Institute is looking into the big fish flop and plans on releasing a preliminary report in October.

Alaska Gov. Tony Knowles had different ideas. He urged federal officials to look into the possibility of harvest interceptions by Russian fishermen in the eastern Bering Sea. But Bristol Bay wasn't the only place in Alaska that was having problems. Fishermen in Prince William Sound quit fishing three weeks earlier than usual because of unusually poor returns of coho. Other regions, from Kodiak and Cook Inlet to Southeast Alaska, were showing evidence of declining abundance.

This may be bad news for Alaska, but it could be good news for the rest of the Pacific Coast. A recent paper in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society describes a recurring pattern of ocean-atmosphere climate variability in the midlatitude North Pacific that may explain these fishy puzzles. According to the paper, "There is evidence of reversals in the prevailing polarity of the oscillation occurring around 1925, 1947, and 1977; the last two reversals correspond to dramatic shifts in salmon production regimes in the North Pacific Ocean." The paper, authored by Northwest researchers Nathan Mantua, Steven Hare, Yuan Zhang, John Wallace and Robert Francis, goes on to say that "the most critical implication concerns periods of low productivity, such as currently experienced by WOC [Washington-Oregon-California] salmon. Management goals, such as the current legislative mandate to double Washington state salmon production (Salmon 2000 Technical Report 1992), may simply not be attainable when environmental conditions are unfavorable. Conversely, in a period of climatically favored high productivity, managers might be well advised to exercise caution in claiming credit for a situation that may be beyond their control." The decline in Alaska salmon harvests this year that became evident after the paper was published in June may be a signal that another dramatic shift is underway, but Mantua said ocean-atmosphere signs are still ambiguous.

Stocks from the Columbia River and the West Coast may get a boost in abundance, but the authors say climatic influences may be "masked or overwhelmed by anthropogenic impacts," since most of these fish are produced in hatcheries and come from "significantly altered" watersheds. -Bill Rudolph

[7] FALL CHINOOK COUNTS JUMP IN LOWER RIVER :: Fall chinook counts were tracking close to last year’s numbers when 33,744 fish were counted at Bonneville by Aug. 28, but the bonanza really began showing up soon after. In the next six days, almost 90,000 more chinook showed up.

The fall forecast from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife has been pegged at 321,500 fish, almost half are upriver brights, destined for the Hanford Reach area. Last year, more than 203,000 fall chinook were counted at Bonneville.

More than 200,000 steelhead have passed the dam this year, exceeding last year’s count and the 10-year average. Many fish were holding below The Dalles until cooler weather got them moving upstream. By Sept. 3, more than 65,000 had passed The Dalles.

The Indian fishery has opened in Zone 6 (above Bonneville Dam) on Aug. 27 and this year a court order allows tribal fishermen to sell steelhead directly to the public.

Up the Snake, 11,423 steelhead had passed Lower Granite Dam, with about 1,700 wild ones, recently declared threatened under the ESA. Meanwhile, in the Columbia, about 3,900 steelhead have been counted past Priest Rapids with no wild fish reported yet, another stock that was recently listed as "endangered" by NMFS.

The mid-Columbia sockeye run has pretty much run its course with nearly 48,000 fish passing Priest Rapids, close to the 10-year average and up more than 60 percent over last year’s return. -B.R.

Subscriptions and Feedback
Subscribe to the Fishletter notification e-mail list.
Send e-mail comments to the editor.

Link/Document Annex
Works Cited

LINKS/DOCUMENTS FROM NW FISHLETTER 042:: Below are listed links and documents referred to in the text of NW Fishletter issue 042 .

• Coastal Zone and Estuarine Studies Division, National Marine Fisheries Service, Seattle, WA.
• NW Fishletter 41
• Staff Memo, Aug. 26, 1997, Northwest Power Planning Council
• El Niño Advisory, Aug. 13, 1997
• Animated Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies, NOAA-CIRES Climate Diagnostics Center
• A Pacific Interdecadal Climate Oscillation With Impacts on Salmon Production, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, June 1997

THE ARCHIVE :: Previous NW Fishletter issues and supporting documents.

© 2005 Energy NewsData