[1] Council Gets Update On Sea Lions, Hatchery Review

With sea lions preparing to mount another assault on the spring chinook run below Bonneville Dam, NOAA Fisheries scientist Garth Griffin said the federal agency has run out of money to study them.

In a presentation at the Mar. 15 meeting of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, Griffin said an annual $750,000 appropriation has dried up. It was used by the feds to work with states to study marine mammal populations and develop non-lethal ways to reduce predation by sea lions and seals on depressed salmon stocks.

In the past few years, some sea lions have moved upriver to the dam from the mouth of the Columbia where commercial gillnetters have long complained about the mammals stealing fish from their nets. Last spring it was estimated that sea lions had digested more than 3 percent (nearly 3,000) of the 82,000 adult spring chinook that showed up at the dam.

To put that into context, the 2005 non-Indian (sport and commercial) impacts to the upriver spring chinook run were estimated at slightly less than 2 percent of the upriver run, while the tribal catch in Zone 6 above the dam made up nearly 6 percent.

But Griffin said that 3.4 percent doesn't include impacts from Astoria to the dam.

Already this year one slender sea lion even slid past the $1 million grate barrier and "acoustic" fence constructed by the Corps of Engineers to keep them out of the fish ladder at Bonneville Dam.

Griffin characterized the culprit as a "scrawny, little, energetic guy with bad hearing and a large appetite" who knew the fish ladder from last year. The acoustic device was malfunctioning at the time, Griffin said, so biologists aren't sure if it will keep him and his pals out when the fish show up.

Protected by law since the Marine Mammal Act was enacted in 1972, marine mammal numbers on the West Coast have tripled since then. The California Sea Lion is population now estimated at about 250,000 individuals. Steller Sea Lions make up another 31,000, and the Harbor Seal population in Oregon and Washington adds up to about 25,000 more pinnipeds.

Biologists are even thinking of using lethal options to reduce predation by marine mammals during the fish migration, after sea lions decimated a steelhead run near Seattle in the 1990s.

By 1999, after the years-long debacle at the Ballard Locks, a few sea lions were actually shot by local tribes, who said they were part of their historical diet. NOAA recommended to Congress that year to amend the MMA to selectively reinstate lethal take protection for gear and catch.

States may now apply for authorization to "lethally take" individual pinnipeds that are "having a significant negative effect" on an ESA-listed salmonid stock or one that is being considered for listing.

But with a hundred or so sea lions below the dam, Griffin said if you shoot 20 of them, if they were the "wrong 20," the problem predators would still be there, since only five to 10 of them are the bold ones that do the lion's share of the damage.

The lack of federal funding this year will hamper the branding program that identifies individual marine mammals. The MMA says they must be identified before any problem animals can be removed.

Griffin said hazing had limited effectiveness last year, since the animals just moved from one side of the river to the other. But just getting the mammals to move around may have increased salmon passage, though the data to support this action is very limited.

This year, hazing will still be used as soon as the sea lions arrive at the dam, and personnel will try to keep the marine mammals from using the locks. The feds will try to get the jump on the situation, unlike last year when the sea lions arrived early and the fish showed up late.

Griffin said the sea lions have even figured out how to catch sturgeon after the salmon have gone by. He said states are very concerned about impacts to white sturgeon below Bonneville, where the largest population in the world resides.

It was reported during the Council discussion that Washington fish managers may soon ask for authorization for "lethal take" of some sea lions at the dam. On Mar. 17, fish agencies from both Washington and Oregon announced they would ask the feds to remove "selected problem animals" in future years if expanded hazing activities this spring prove unsuccessful.

In other Council news, facilitator Jim Waldo told members that it will take a couple of years to complete the new Bush administration initiative to review Columbia Basin hatchery operations. The review, announced in January, will look at the effects of hatchery programs on ESA-listed stocks in the Columbia Basin.

Waldo said hatcheries have two basic uses. "You're either doing it for a conservation purpose or for a harvest purpose," he said. The new assessment will determine program value, and benefits and risks by measuring how each hatchery's stock goals fit into all the stock goals for each area.

A second major effort of the initiative, Waldo said, is to work with basin hatchery managers to develop a performance-based system with three main elements. First will be the assessment of the future value by using the AHA tool, the All-H Analyzer developed by consultants who built the EDT model that has been used to estimate potential sub-basin productivities.

Next comes action, followed by outcome assessments and creating a way to measure improvements brought about by human actions only, factoring out elements like ocean conditions that managers have no control over. Waldo said the performance system, including the assessment of outcomes could be completed within a year.

The third main element will be an environmental impact statement for the Mitchell Act hatcheries. Waldo said it will differ from the one being fashioned for Puget Sound hatcheries because of difficulties encountered while writing an EIS about a system that is undergoing change. "That's the big problem with the Sound hatcheries that EIS writers are struggling with now," he said.

He said they will propose to NOAA that the overall hatchery effort and the Mitchell Act hatcheries be tied together "so there is a close fit," though it would take a bit of work to figure out how to accomplish that. But if it's successful, he said, the effort could provide the template for other hatchery managers when they have to fulfill similar requirements.

Waldo said he looked forward to working with the Council on issues that bring hatchery management into the habitat-based sub-basin planning effort. However, one of the biggest challenges will be to overcome the "process fatigue" on the Columbia, in order to find a way to do things "once, right" so folks don't have to keep doing the same thing over and over again, he said.

The Council completed a lengthy hatchery review in 2004 for Congress that included recommendations for coordinating hatchery programs with other salmon recovery efforts. But that effort came up short of actually implementing any reforms. -Bill Rudolph

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