[1] Politicians Get Earful On Salmon Harvest, Canadian Interceptions
With salmon recovery plans nearly completed for several Northwest regions, some stakeholder groups are wondering if stocks can actually recover if half of the fish are still being caught before they reach their spawning beds. Canada is a major culprit, they told a Congressional panel a couple of weeks ago.
But U.S. representatives to the Pacific Salmon Commission say they will come out "swinging" in the next round of negotiations with Canada over the interception of ESA-listed stocks by British Columbia fishermen. The only problem is that those talks aren't going to start until 2008.
Those were just two bits of information gleaned from two days of hearings held in Vancouver, Wash., and Tacoma on Oct. 11-12 by three Northwest congressmen, Norm Dicks (D-Wash.), Brian Baird (D-Wash.) and Greg Walden (R-Ore.). They conducted a whirlwind tour where they heard from long-time harvest critics, supporters and tribal fishermen, along with agency officials like regional NOAA Fisheries administrator Bob Lohn.
Lohn told the Vancouver panel that harvest rates on Snake River fall chinook were "painfully large." But the following day he said the measures in place were adequate to recover the listed stocks, noting that the Snake falls have been returning "well above" interim recovery goals for the past few years, an observation he said was "unimpressive" to the judge who ordered summer spill at lower Snake dams.
It was clear that the politicians were reacting to increasing pressure to take a closer look at harvest actions before the region is saddled with expensive habitat fixes of unknown benefit.
Oregon's Walden seemed amazed that the government allowed incidental take at all. "When I go out pheasant hunting, I don't get to take a spotted owl if my aim is off," he said.
The Tacoma panel heard from attorney Svend Brandt-Erichsen, who represents a coalition concerned about Canadian interceptions of listed U.S. stocks that may sue federal agencies to reopen consultation over the U.S.-Canada salmon treaty. The coalition has also called on the Customs Service to enforce regulations that would keep U.S. sports fisherman from returning home with chinook caught in B.C. because they might be from an ESA-listed U.S. stock.
In a letter received Oct. 3, the Customs Service told the coalition that they would refer the question about ESA imports to NOAA Fisheries.
In its notice-to-sue letter, the Salmon Spawning and Recovery Alliance said Snake River fall chinook make up less than 2 percent of the Vancouver Island catch. However, that's more than 50 percent of the ocean catch of the listed stock, and equals the number of Snake River falls in all the in-river Columbia fisheries.
The letter also reported that the Canadians catch many chinook bound for Puget Sound streams, where chinook are listed under the ESA for protection. According to the letter, between 1985 and 2002, B.C. fishers landed more than 55 percent of the Skagit River chinook caught in all fisheries, and just last year caught 70 percent of the natural-origin chinook bound for the Nooksack.
The alliance says these interceptions can be reduced if Canadians develop a mark-selective fishery for chinook like they have for coho, along with more terminal area fisheries.
But it may be hard to get Canadians interested in developing a chinook fishery that targets hatchery fish, said Larry Rutter, NOAA policy analyst and a U.S. commissioner to the Pacific Salmon Commission.
Rutter said he was concerned about "growing sentiment against Canada." Furthermore, he said, some of the DNA data used by Brandt-Erichsen's alliance are wrong, and developed by a lone Canadian rather than vetted in a bilateral process.
The alliance says nearly 90 percent of the chinook caught by Canadian fishermen off Vancouver Island are of U.S. origin.
Rutter said a bilateral effort to look at the interception issue was launched last February, and noted that Canadians "won't be greatly swayed" by arguments to cut back because they know that most are hatchery chinook from the lower Columbia, even if they are part of the listed evolutionarily significant unit (ESU).
Canadians are also cool to mass-marking because they feel the problems raised by marking all hatchery fish the same way coded-wire-tagged fish are identified (clipped adipose fin) are not solvable, Rutter told the congressional panel.
The coded-wire tag (CWT) database goes back many years, and has been used to determine which fisheries catch which stocks. But mass marking hatchery fish could undermine assumptions used until now by analysts on both sides of the border and could raise questions whether hatchery fish can still be used to represent wild stocks and if the hatchery stocks are caught in the same proportion to wild stocks as in previous years if only marked fish are kept.
The Vancouver hearing gave both dam bashers and supporters a forum. Bonneville Power Administrator chief Steve Wright said "dams are harvesters, too," because of cumulative mortalities at projects, but he noted the significant improvements in survival over the years, while the exploitation rate (ocean and in-river combined) of listed Snake fall chinook hovered in the 50 percent range, down from about 80 percent in the late 1980s.
Wright cited 2001 remarks from an independent science panel used by NOAA Fisheries to review recovery actions, who said they were "somewhat mystified concerning the scientific justification for current allowable harvests, especially the continuation of substantial or high allowable harvest rates on listed salmonid ESUs."
He also outlined BPA involvement in reducing harvest impacts to listed stocks by supporting select area fisheries, live capture methods, buying large-mesh nets for tribal fishers and supporting removal of ghost nets.
But ODFW fish division director Ed Bowles told the panel that 80 percent of juvenile salmon were killed by federal dams, according to the hydro BiOp's incidental take statement, while adult impacts such as inriver harvest have been reduced seven-fold.
Congressman Walden questioned Bowles, who said his mortality numbers came from the take statement, and that he did not know the measurements. Walden said he wanted more information.
Terry Flores, director of Northwest River Partners, a new coalition of BPA customer groups and river users, pointed out that 90 percent of the Snake fall juveniles are actually barged through the hydro system, where direct survival is 98 percent. In her written testimony, Flores said her group wasn't interested in putting the fishing industry out of business, nor did they want to get involved in the debate between sportsfishing, commercial and tribal fishers. "We do know that harvest reforms must be enacted," she said. "Endangered fish simply will not recover while they are continuing to be caught at today's high harvest rates."
But some fishermen and conservationists didn't blame the dams for everything. Native Fish Society director Bill Bakke said removing the lower Snake dams would not save the fish, and more immediate problems along the coast needed fixing
Others, like Gary Loomis, president of Vancouver, Wash.-based Fish First, a group of sportsfishing enthusiasts and other interested parties dedicated to improving wild fish runs in the Lewis River system, said they could live with the dams. Loomis said what is needed most is more native spawners in streams, a sentiment echoed by Ramon Vanden Brulle of Washington Trout at the Tacoma hearing a day later.
Dicks told spectators that the recovery goals developed in the Shared Strategy process in Puget Sound will be looked at again. Todd Woolsey, from the Puget Sound ESA Business Coalition, said his group feels that recovery actions should first focus on delisting the chinook and chum stocks currently under ESA protection, and then develop ways to reach sustainable harvest levels. He said a big assumption in the Shared Strategy process is that constraints to habitat are the biggest problem and further harvest cuts are not necessary. -Bill Rudolph
[2] Salmon War Surfaces At Boise Fish Conference
Venerable Idaho fisheries scientist Don Chapman once said that when you threaten to take away someone else's water in Idaho, you run the risk of getting "gut shot."
Chapman, who spent most of his career studying various aspects of fish survival for Northwest utilities, may be risking the same fate after threatening to take away someone else's dams when he called for breaching the four lower Snake dams at a conference in Boise.
He was one of six panelists who discussed the future of salmon recovery at the conclusion of a two-day symposium in Boise sponsored by the Northwest Power and Conservation Council and the Idaho Council on Industry and the Environment. Topics discussed at the Oct. 4-5 meeting included hydro operations, hatcheries, hydro litigation, water flows and fish survivals, economics, and dueling data.
First raising the specter of global warming and its adverse affects on future fish runs in a newspaper interview last month, Chapman said Idaho's wild fish will need all the help they can get when global temperatures go up and the fish, especially the state's famous wild steelhead, will have to adjust to severely compressed spawning and rearing habitat.
"Assuming society wants to save them," Chapman said, the stocks would need higher survival rates than they have now. He also called for a reduction in mixed-stock fisheries that catch too many of them, including harvests by lower Columbia tribes. He said a tribal fishery could be developed that spares ESA-listed stocks at Bonneville Dam by sorting fish electronically as they pass the dam.
Chapman was passionate in his description of the unique nature of the wild fish and was critical of recent "record runs," which he said weren't records at all, because they were mainly composed of hatchery fish. He also took issue with the recent attempt in Congress to gut the ESA and the "silly attempt" to end funding of the Fish Passage Center.
Besides dam breaching, which several other panelists said was "out of the realm of possibility," the most contentious topics seemed to be related to flows and fish harvest.
With the Sept. 29 announcement by environmental groups that they will seek to merge the biological opinions on upper Snake and lower Snake operations, Idaho water users were quick to characterize the action as a way to use a friendly judge to wrestle more water from farmers who rely on projects run by the Bureau of Reclamation.
NOAA Fisheries and the Bureau of Reclamation released the upper Snake BiOp last March, and their analysis of the storage projects found that none of the water stored there was needed for fish migration by listed stocks downstream.
Boise attorney Scott Campbell, who represents water users, said if environmental groups file a supplemental complaint there will be a new fight "to the death," and he promised a cross claim against NOAA Fisheries that would address the taking of endangered fish in the harvest sector.
Rebecca Miles, chair of the Nez Perce Tribe, said war was always the last resort for her tribe, but if the lawsuit by environmental and fishing groups threatens the recent agreement over Snake River Basin water, the tribe would go to court to keep it in place. "It's time to take a fresh look at what the SRBA achieved," she told the group.
The agreement calls for an additional 60 kaf of upper basin water to be used for fish flows, in addition to the 427 kaf that Idaho already gives up every year to aid fish migration in the lower Snake. About half that amount must be purchased from willing sellers, said Jim Yost, natural resource advisor to Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne.
"The reality is," said attorney Campbell, "I have worked, and my clients have worked, over five and a half years, against the Nez Perce Tribe, and then with the Nez Perce Tribe, to form an agreement which all of us could support. It got through Congress, it got through the Idaho Legislature, it got the approval of a vast, disparate group of individuals and entities. And now that very agreement, where cooperation and a future to improve habitat, to improve the circumstances of the resource, is in jeopardy because of the lawsuit in Portland."
Campbell said he couldn't understand how environmental plaintiffs could justify that. But environmental spokesman Tom Stuart, a board member of the Boise-based conservation group Idaho Rivers United, said the groups weren't out to get more water as their previous lawsuit tried to do, nor does it try to overturn the Snake River agreement.
Stuart said the new lawsuit simply wants the upper Snake and lower Snake BiOps to become one, "with a comprehensive baseline analysis from the headwaters to the ocean."
Campbell responded by telling Stuart that either he didn't understand the lawsuit, or one of the group's attorneys had misrepresented it. "Because, if you are saying your suggested supplemental complaint does not directly attack the Nez Perce settlement, you haven't read the Nez Perce settlement or you haven't read the lawsuit, because in fact, it does exactly that."
Campbell told Stuart that if the upper Snake biological opinion is set aside, "that is the basis for the whole thing to fall apart. If you and your attorneys perceive that somehow this supplemental complaint does not attack that, you're either completely misinformed, or you're lying. I don't know which, but one or the other applies."
Whether adding more water really helps migrating fish was discussed by another panel. The University of Washington's Jim Anderson explained that flows and survival, especially for spring chinook, may correlate at some low level, like those found during the drought year 2001, but there is scant evidence for any within-year benefits from flow augmentation.
Citing an analysis by his group, Columbia Basin Research, that was completed for Idaho water users two years ago, Anderson claims that fish survival correlates with water temperatures, not flows. As rivers heat up, so does predator activity, he says, and fish survival goes down. He said he has published a peer-reviewed article on the issue.
Ken Pedde, retired deputy regional director of the Bureau of Reclamation, presented a table that showed how much water it would take to increase water-particle travel-time by 10 percent in both the Columbia and Snake, the amount environmental groups had asked for to improve conditions for fish this summer. Pedde said another two million to three million acre-feet would be needed in the Columbia and 0.4 million to 0.6 million-acre-feet in the lower Snake.
To accomplish that in the Columbia, Pedde said, the extra water would have to go into storage, where "space may or may not be available." But it would involve putting water in a space normally reserved for flood control, which would increase the risk of flooding. Such storage could also have potential effects on power generation and for reducing flows to aid listed chum salmon below Bonneville and fall chinook at Vernita Bar in the Hanford Reach.
The threat of more lawsuits extended to the harvest area, where keynote speaker, Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne, called for reducing commercial salmon harvests to let more ESA-listed fish return to native streams. He said the feds should look at the high interception rates of U.S. fish by Canadians off Vancouver Island.
The following day, that theme was fleshed out by Seattle attorney Eric Redman, who represents a coalition that has threatened to sue the federal government if it doesn't reopen consultation over the U.S./Canada salmon treaty. Redman said harvest rates in U.S. fisheries are also too high, and he called for reductions to U.S. non-tribal harvests, to cut the catch of listed salmon by using more selective fishing methods. He said tribes should be offered incentives to reform their fisheries as well.
Economic Study Panel
The economic benefits of recreational fishing went under the knife when University of Idaho economist Jay O'Laughlin reported on his own analysis of a recent report released by Idaho Rivers United that said a restored fishery in that state could add more than half a billion dollars in economic benefits to the region.
O'Laughlin estimated that the economic benefits of a restored salmon and steelhead fishery would be similar to his estimate for the benefits in 2001, when large numbers of salmon returned to state waters. But it added up to about $50 million in income to the Idaho economy, an order of magnitude less than the benefits estimated by Boise economist Don Reading, in an analysis commissioned by IRU.
The market rate value of the power generated by the four lower Snake dams is about $350 million a year, according to BPA vice president Greg Delwiche, while actual revenues added up to about $250 million in 2004. He said about $50 million is spent on debt service and another $50 million in operations and maintenance costs for lower Snake fish mitigation, including hatcheries every year.
Fish and wildlife costs now make up 25 percent to 30 percent of BPA's total costs, Delwiche said, noting that a long-term solution to the fish recovery "challenge" must balance stakeholder interests. But a solution that lies in the political center of things may be hard to pull off. Delwiche wondered if stakeholders "were so relentlessly mean, vindictive and polarized, that those interested in solutions fear retribution for occupying a lonely, but sensible, centrist position."
Terry Flores, director of Northwest River Partners, a coalition made up of river users and BPA customer groups, reported on a poll her group conducted last May that found the general public was "not very aware" of salmon issues. Respondents were split nearly evenly on the question of whether fish runs were going up or down.
She said there was no consensus on how much the region was paying for fish and wildlife mitigation, with 43 percent of respondents saying that BPA's fish costs were less than 5 percent of its total expenditures, the reality is more like 25 percent to 30 percent. Most said they didn't want dams replaced by generating plants that used fossil fuels, and that solutions posed by environmental groups were too extreme.
Perhaps the most optimistic note was sounded by Corps of Engineers' biologist Rock Peters, who said preliminary results of 2004 and 2005 survival studies of juvenile salmon passage at Bonneville Dam show that spring chinook routed through either Powerhouse II, the bypass system, or the new corner collector showed higher survivals than passage via spill. His main caveat was that when fish passed through the spillway during the day, their survival was much less than at night, which was likely due to higher predator activity during daylight hours. -B. R.
[3] 'Speeching' Won't Avoid Breaching The Dams, BiOp Judge Warns
Federal District Court Judge James Redden issued his final remand order of the 2004 BiOp on Oct. 7, warning that breaching the four dams on the Lower Snake River would become a possibility if the final remand is not successful. The mention of breaching surprised some attorneys, because it wasn't included in the draft order the Judge sent out earlier in the week.
Redden said the remand "requires NOAA and the Action Agencies to be aware of the possibility of breaching the four dams on the lower Snake River, if all else fails. The cooperation of the political branches (i.e., money) may mean such an action will be unnecessary. If it must be considered, an extension might be required to study its impact and to prepare for its implementation. This should be incentive enough to all those who oppose breaching the dams to make sure this remand succeeds. 'Speeching' the dams will not avoid breaching the dams. Cooperation and assistance may."
Redden said the possibility of breaching the dams didn't mean another "vast" study is needed. But he also said he disagreed with federal attorneys who argued that it would be improper for him to issue an order that specifically identified the steps needed by the agencies to produce a valid biological opinion.
He ordered the agencies to file quarterly reports during the year that he has given them to craft a new BiOp, with the first one due in 90 days. His list of things that need fixing includes:
Improper segregation of the elements of the proposed action NOAA deems to be non-discretionary.
Correct the improper comparison, rather than aggregation, of the effects of the proposed action on the listed salmon and steelhead.
Correct flawed determinations as to whether the proposed action destroys or adversely modifies critical habitat.
Correct the failure to consider the effects of the proposed action on both recovery and survival of the listed species in determining whether the proposed action is likely to jeopardize the continued existence of listed salmon and steelhead.
Correct the past reliance on mitigation measures that are not reasonably certain to occur and/or have not undergone Section 7 consultation.
The judge called on NOAA Fisheries and the action agencies to collaborate with the states and tribes in the development of the next proposal for dam operations, the clarification of policy issues and "reaching agreement or narrowing the areas of disagreement on scientific and technical information."
Redden said if NOAA Fisheries concludes that action agencies aren't making sufficient progress in developing a proposed action that avoids jeopardy to the listed stocks, they must tell the court. They must issue a "failure report" similar to the mechanism in the 2000 BiOp, which would trigger additional measures, "including the breaching of dams, that may be necessary to achieve a no-jeopardy finding.
Federal agencies got their wish last week when Redden granted their request for an evidentiary hearing on interim dam operations. In an Oct. 17 minute order, Redden spelled out the ground rules that will include two days of hearings on Dec. 12-13, with oral argument slated for Dec. 15.
He said plaintiffs, federal defendants, states, and tribes may each present testimony of two expert witnesses. Other intervenors and amici will get a witness apiece, one arguing for, and the other arguing against motions. Redden will allow cross-examination of witnesses.
Plaintiff environmental and fishing groups are expected to ask for significant changes to current hydro operations that the current BiOp, invalidated, but still in place, mandates to help ESA-listed fish transit the Snake and Columbia rivers. They are likely to call for 24-hour spill at all major dams from April through the end of August, some extra flow augmentation, along with reduced fish barging. Motions must be filed by Nov. 1. Redden also called on David Leith, Oregon's attorney in the litigation, to contact the Independent Science Advisory Board for a list of neutral experts who may be willing to serve on a panel to evaluate testimony, but the judge said it wasn't necessarily going to happen. He said he would decide whether to appoint an expert or a panel of experts by Nov. 1. -B. R.
[4] Tribes Write Senators To Save Fish Passage Center
Four lower Columbia tribes have asked Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to use his influence to remove language in a Congressional appropriations bill that will de-fund the Fish Passage Center in 2006. In an Oct. 3 letter to McCain, chair of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, the tribes said they couldn't recall a congressional proposal "that has sided so blatantly for the interest of one group over another."
The Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission fired off a missive to the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, calling for its deliberations on the future of the Fish Passage Center to be made public. The Oct. 10 letter charges that Council staffers "have been conferring with [the Bonneville Power Administration], the University of Washington and certain congressional offices on alternatives to reconfigure the operations of the FPC that are inconsistent with [the Council's] Fish and Wildlife Program."
The CRITFC letter "respectfully" requests that the NPCC staff not be permitted to take part in discussions to "disband" the FPC or substantially amend its duties until the Council adopts a policy following procedures that are required by the Northwest Power Act.
Doug Marker, director of the Council's fish and wildlife division, said they had no response to the letter at this time.
At this month's NPCC in meeting in Eugene, Ore., Council members decided to call upon the independent science panel used jointly by NOAA Fisheries and the Council to review the controversial summer spill program backed by lower Columbia tribes and plaintiffs in the ongoing litigation over the hydro BiOp. The Council also wants the panel to look at the possible effect of over-wintering juvenile fall chinook on the analysis.
A preliminary analysis by the Fish Passage Center suggested the court-ordered summer spill program ending Aug. 31 was extremely beneficial to migrating juvenile fall chinook. The FPC memo has been criticized by utility groups, but will also be reviewed by the panel. However, the panel said it won't be able to complete the review by Nov. 30, as requested by the Council, but said it could finish the task by the end of January.
On Oct. 5, the FPC responded to remarks from the Northwest River Partners, a coalition of BPA customers and river users, that said the FPC analysis represented a broad range of uncertainty and completely ignored fish survival once the smolts reached the Columbia River. The FPC said survival data in the mainstem Columbia was difficult to obtain because of pit tag detection limitations below Bonneville Dam.
"We'd really like to see the feds' analysis," said PNGC VP Scott Corwin. "For an organization to claim that it's not 'advocating,' this latest memo certainly shows they are becoming advocates." -B. R.
[5] Latest Survival Study From Fish Passage Center Ignores NMFS' Concerns
With the release of its latest fish survival study, the Fish Passage Center is likely to provide more ammunition for critics who say the agency has played too much of an "advocacy" role in the region.
In the past, some utility groups and federal scientists have locked horns with FPC over its sometimes shaky statistics and unabashed support of flow and spill measures throughout the Columbia and Snake hydro system. With an attitude like that, they say, it has no business doing research.
The situation reached critical mass earlier this year when Idaho Sen. Larry Craig added language to a Congressional spending bill that jerked 2006 funding for the beleaguered agency. The language remains in the bill as it goes into conference, and supporters say there is no chance it will be stricken.
That's why some think the latest FPC study is on a fast track to finality, so that it can be used by plaintiffs in the ongoing remand of the hydro BiOp, where they go before a judge in December to argue for more changes in hydro operations.
One big issue is whether the 200,000 hatchery fish pit-tagged every year truly represent the wild stocks of concern. Since most Idaho hatchery stocks in the study show higher survival rates than wild stocks, it was an important question raised in the last incarnation of the study, released in final form in April and covering the migration years 1997-2002.
But it's not much of an issue in the latest draft of the Center's 2005 comparative survival study [CSS] released Oct. 10, which continues to echo old themes from past FPC reports. However, the latest draft fails to acknowledge questions raised by federal scientists in the past year or two.
A NOAA Fisheries memo finished in February deals specifically with some of these issues. It was produced to update scientific findings on the hydro system effects on listed fish after the 2000 BiOp was thrown out by Oregon federal judge James Redden. Known as the "effects" memo, it was part of a court-ordered collaboration between state and tribal co-managers, and federal agencies, during the remand process developed by the court.
Both the feds and FPC agree that survival data for the past 10 years doesn't show much benefit for barging wild spring chinook from the Snake River, though it does seem to pay off more for hatchery fish that are transported downstream.
The FPC report says barging produced "little or no benefit" for wild spring/summer chinook except during the drought year of 2001. However, a review of the appropriate table included in the report shows that barged fish did have better adult returns in five of the ten years included in the analysis.
The feds characterize their own results for wild fish as inconclusive, but say over the last 10 years that barging didn't seem to either help or harm the stocks compared to inriver migrants.
One big difference is that the federal analysis uses a 95-percent confidence interval, the standard for peer-reviewed scientific work, while the CSS study uses a less precise 90-percent confidence interval.
The federal memo pointed out that pit-tagged wild fish may not represent the wild run at large, and actually may underestimate overall survival rates. The feds say it's likely that smaller juvenile chinook are guided into bypass systems at dams more easily than larger smolts, who may use spillways or turbine routes to cross the dams. Since only bypassed fish are captured for pit-tagging at the dams and smaller fish generally have lower survival rates than larger ones, the feds say results based on survival rates of pit-tagged fish may bias overall return rates toward lower values. But it's a situation the CSS report doesn't even acknowledge.
Both groups agreed that barging was a huge benefit to the wild Snake springers in 2001, when flows were the second worst on record. In fact, the latest FPC report says on average, the smolt-to-adult return rate [SAR] for the transported fish was about 1.3 percent, while the SAR for inriver migrants was only about 0.14 percent.
But the CSS study doesn't mention how the FPC felt about barging in 2001 before the results came in.
According to a February 2002 FPC memo, research showed a "considerable interaction between flow and survival in the estuary," and the agency thought transportation wouldn't help. "Despite the high proportion of Snake River fish transported from the 2001 out-migration, it is unlikely that significant numbers of adults will return from this migration year because of the estuarine conditions," said the memo. "Yet, NMFS stated in their presentation that, since over 90% of fish were transported in the Snake River, it will offset poor river conditions."
The latest CSS draft also fails to recognize another fact that federal scientists have often mentioned in recent years: the high variation in survival rates to adulthood of different groups of marked chinook that may migrate just a few days apart. The feds say rapidly changing conditions in the near-ocean could play an important role in this puzzle. For instance, when sudden upwelling begins off the mouth of the Columbia, the ocean can change from a gin-clear state to a murky brown from plankton blooms, giving chinook a much better hiding place from predatory birds and fish.
The theme of migration timing is important to federal scientists. They say it can generally explain why different stocks in Idaho, both hatchery and wild, can have such different SARs. The rule of thumb is that the later migrating stocks have higher survival rates because estuary and ocean conditions are better as spring rolls along. It's never mentioned in the CSS report, though that report does show data indicating that some Idaho hatcheries may have three times better SARs than others.
The highly variable survival rates exhibited within season is not something that the CSS study can capture, since all migrating fish from each group are lumped together.
The D Factor
The feds' incremental approach also found little to support a single number that could characterize the annual difference in survival between transported fish and inriver migrants. The CSS report touts the infamous 'D' factor, or differential delayed mortality that generally reflects that barged fish die off at higher rates than inriver fish once both groups are past the dams, a theoretical argument that has been going on for years.
The feds say an annual D value is nonsense due to the varying ocean conditions, and that in most cases, later ocean entry improves the survival of juvenile barged fish. In fact, the latest BiOp called for barging at lower Snake dams to begin a few weeks later than in the past, a change that reflected the feds' expanded view of the importance of taking ocean conditions into account.
But the CSS report doesn't parse the delayed mortality into increments that are less than a year long, and never mentions the feds' memo that noted the inconsistent results. Averaged over years and across migration seasons, the feds said that adult survival of transported wild and hatchery fish averaged two-thirds that of in-river migrants. Also, fish did better when transported from Lower Granite Dam than from Lower Monumental.
The report also found that wild springers transported from Lower Granite had similar average survivals as inriver fish. But in some years it was higher, and in other years it was lower.
Another bone of contention between the two viewpoints is the validity of upriver/downriver comparisons, an issue that came to life in the mid-1990's when regional scientists got together in the PATH process to assess uncertainties associated with salmon recovery in the Columbia Basin.
The CSS study said SARs of transported chinook from Idaho's Dworshak and Rapid River hatcheries were lower than from the downriver hatchery at Carson, just above Bonneville Dam. They say that shows barging did not mitigate the mortality associated with hydro passage from 2000 through 2002.
But this conclusion failed to account for differences return rates between stocks, a finding that can be gleaned from one of its data tables. So far, return rates from the 2003 outmigration (2-ocean fish that returned in the spring of 2005) of Idaho's McCall hatchery chinook are nearly three times that of the downriver Carson stock. The draft report failed to note that other downstream hatcheries had been dropped from reports from past years because of poor adult returns.
Instead, the CSS report focused on wild chinook returns to the John Day River, which, it claimed, were two to four-and-a-half times higher than transported wild fish from the Snake from 2000 to 2002.
In contrast, the feds' memo cites fisheries literature (Myers et al. (1997)) "that found no correlation between freshwater survival rates among salmon populations more than a few hundred kilometers apart. As just one example of differences between John Day River spring Chinook salmon stocks and the wild stocks from the Snake River basin, the former have a relatively narrow migration window, based on PIT-tag detections at Bonneville Dam, while the latter, representing the untagged population, have a very extended migration based on estimated timing of transported PIT-tagged fish to below Bonneville Dam."
The feds noted that hatchery fish from McCall, "which have demonstrated the highest SAR for hatchery fish in the Snake River, also showed a narrow migration window similar to those wild fish from the John Day River. As noted earlier, migratory timing can have a large influence on adult returns. Thus we believe it is likely that poor correlation in freshwater survival could exist between upstream and downstream stocks. Not surprisingly then, salmon populations from distinct Columbia River basin regions responded differently to large-scale climate patterns (Levin 2003), and poor correlation existed between productivity patterns of upstream and downstream Columbia River stocks (Botsford and Paulsen 2000)."
But the NMFS scientists recognized differences of opinion, and added an appendix written by the Idaho Department of Fish and Game to their memo that explained why upstream/downstream comparisons should be used to determine "latent mortality" of upstream stocks.
The latest CSS study doesn't return the favor, nor does it even recognize that a difference of opinion exists. But it may not be able to duck the truth for long, since federal scientists say they will submit comments on the draft. The FPC has issued a Nov. 10 deadline for remarks. -B. R.
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