[4] West Coast Steelhead Status Re-Determined

The federal government has finally announced its ESA-listing determinations for 10 steelhead populations on the West Coast. As expected, all maintained their "threatened" status, except for upper Columbia steelhead, which was downgraded from "endangered" to "threatened."

The process for updating the status of listed salmon and steelhead stocks began in 2002 after a federal judge ruled that NOAA Fisheries should have offered the same protections to the hatchery component of ESA-listed Oregon coastal coho as it did the wild part of the stock.

Since then, the salmon listings have been revised to include some hatchery populations, but the added stocks were not counted with wild components to enable any of them to be de-listed as some critics of the original policy had hoped. The Pacific Legal Foundation has filed a recent lawsuit taking issue with this federal decision.

Steelhead stocks gave the federal policymakers a bigger headache than salmon did, since not only hatchery stocks were involved, but also the resident-fish form of steelhead known as rainbow trout, which are genetically identical to the ocean-growing steelhead.

The final determination differed from the agency's proposal in June 2004, when the feds said they were going to use their ESU [evolutionarily significant unit] policy in the analyses. But the US Fish and Wildlife Service did not agree with this approach, and asked NOAA Fisheries to make its listing determinations consistent with both agencies' policy on distinct population segments because of the difference between the anadromous and resident life histories.

The new listing determinations include only the ocean-going steelhead populations. Only one population--the Southern California DPS--is now listed as endangered. Four other stocks in California are threatened, along with three Columbia River stocks (lower, middle, upper), one in the upper Willamette, and another in the Snake River. -B. R.

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