[1] Lawsuits Target Canadian Interception Of US Chinook
Two lawsuits filed this week in Seattle District Court take aim at the catch of ESA-listed chinook north of the US border. Charging that federal agencies are not following their own regulations, a coalition of two fish conservation groups and Snohomish PUD called the Salmon Spawning and Recovery Alliance, along with the Native Fish Society and the Clark-Skamania Flyfishers, have mounted a two-pronged attack against status quo harvest arrangements.
The first suit calls for enforcement of a US law that prohibits the importation of endangered species. Many US sportsmen bring home chinook caught in BC recreational fisheries, but the only way to tell ESA-listed wild fish from unlisted hatchery stocks would be to only allow fish with clipped fins across the border.
The other lawsuit calls for immediate re-consultation over the US/Canada salmon treaty to examine impacts of Canadian fisheries on listed stocks, especially chinook listed in Puget Sound. The treaty doesn't call for re-consultation on the issue until 2008, but the coalition says the situation needs immediate review because the high harvest levels jeopardize the nearly completed recovery plans for the weak stocks. That's a fact already acknowledged by NOAA Fisheries in some cases like the Nooksack River chinook stock in northern Puget Sound.
"Canada's fisheries catch a significant share of the ESA-listed salmon runs returning to the Columbia River system and to Puget Sound," said Gary Loomis, president of the alliance, in a Nov. 14 press release. "With these actions, we are asking the US government to exercise its power and influence, so that more native salmon can return to our rivers to spawn."
The alliance says nearly 90 percent of the chinook caught off BC's Vancouver Island come from US waters, and 70 percent of the catch is from areas like the lower Columbia, where chinook are listed for protection. Much of the Canadian catch is made up of marked hatchery fish from the Columbia, but there is no attempt to reduce impacts to wild stocks by keeping only the fish with clipped fins.
The filing takes to task a 1999 biological opinion written by NOAA Fisheries that found Canadian fisheries do not jeopardize the listed stocks. "Information that has become available since 1999, as well as changes in NMFS policy, support revisiting that opinion," says the filing, which points to recent DNA analysis of stock composition of BC fisheries off Vancouver Island that has estimated such large impacts to US stocks. The DNA analysis was first publicized during a presentation on harvest policies at the July meeting of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council (See NW Fishletter 200). The analysis showed that about half of the catch off the west coast of Vancouver Island was made up of fall chinook stocks from the lower Columbia, while another 19 percent were bound for Puget Sound.
The Snake fall chinook made up about 1.5 percent of the Vancouver Island catch, or 2,500 individuals, but that's about 21 percent of the number of Snake falls that made it over Lower Granite Dam by the end of 2003.
But the DNA analysis came in for some criticism at a congressional field hearing on harvest issues last month in Tacoma. NMFS policy analyst Larry Rutter said some of it was wrong, but didn't elaborate much, noting that it had not been vetted through the bilateral committee that is the traditional route for harvest issues under management by the Pacific Salmon Commission. Rutter was unavailable for comment.
WDFW's Phil Anderson said there might be questions about what time of year the DNA analysis was conducted. If it was done during the winter, the stock composition could be quite different from that during the summer months, when most of the harvest effort is focused.
But NMFS harvest analyst Dell Simmons, who took part in the presentation before the Power Council last summer, said the data was taken from the full fishing season in 2003. However, he said there was a "flaw" in the way the results were developed. Simmons said the analysis used a combination of coded-wire-tag and DNA data and a mistake was made in handling the CWT data. "But that probably doesn't make much difference," Simmons told NW Fishletter. He said the final numbers should be pretty close to the results presented last summer. Simmons said they were working to fix the problem. -Bill Rudolph
The following links were mentioned in this story:
NW Fishletter 200, Aug.4, 2005
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