[1] Late Spring Chinook Run Beats Pre-Season Estimate By Nearly 40 Percent
By May 30, non-Indian sport and commercial fishermen had only caught about half their allotment of spring chinook after lengthy closures kept them off the water, but a late shot of fish has helped gillnetters reach their full share.
With spring fish numbers going downhill, harvest managers thought non-Indians would have trouble catching the rest of their share, pegged at 2 percent of the upriver run (57 percent for sport, 43 percent commercial). But improved fishing last week coupled with a slightly reduced forecast increased the commercial fishermen's impact to its limit and may have gone slightly over. Sport fishers will still be allowed to chase springers in the lower Columbia through June 15.
Managers kept mainstem fishing closed this spring until the run finally showed serious signs that it was going to appear at all. Now the count at Bonneville Dam stands at more than 103,000 springers, which beats last year's tally by nearly 30 percent. It's a surprise ending to a run that has turned out to be the latest on record. Next year's run may be considerably smaller since jack counts are down 30 percent from last year's numbers.
But once the numbers of returning chinook began to perk up, managers breathed a collective sigh of relief and updated their pre-season run size estimate by about 40 percent, from 88,000 to 125,000 chinook (to the river mouth). On June 5, they downsized it to 120,000.
Far upriver on the Snake, the numbers of spring chinook reaching Lower Granite Dam has topped 19,000, with another 5,000 or so heading that way. Last year, the spring run was about 26,000-fish strong. With the count running until June 17, this year's run is likely to end up close to that. Spring chinook jacks in the Snake are also running about 22 percent behind last year's number.
Over at Priest Rapids on the mainstem Columbia, the spring count is only 7,489 chinook. Last year, over 11,000 spring chinook had been counted by now.
On the Willamette, chinook numbers have improved considerably over the past few weeks, but the 24,000-fish count (as of May 30) is only about half of the pre-season estimate. However, chinook will trickle up the Willamette for months more. By this time last year, only about 30 percent of the run had been counted at the falls.
Despite the late start, it's still on track to reach or eclipse the pre-season estimate of 46,400. But jack counts in the Willamette are way down. Only 130 jacks had been counted by the end of May, compared to last's year's 905, an 85 percent drop. -Bill Rudolph
[2] Yawning Survival Gaps Face BiOp Writers
A technical team charged with analyzing ESA-listed salmonids in the Columbia Basin has released an interim analysis that estimates just how far the region must go to bridge gaps between current fish numbers and healthy, viable populations.
In the best scenario they developed, they said Snake River spring chinook would still need an overall 29 percent boost in numbers to achieve a level that the technicians say would reduce extinction risk over the next 100 years to less than five percent.
The Interior Columbia Technical Recovery Team [TRT] has spent the past several years getting to this point, after sorting out stocks from one ESU to another and developing the viability analysis used to determine these gaps. But they say up front that their analysis needs several generations of data, so the "observed gap" between current status and viability goals don't necessarily reflect fish survival and productivity under current hydro operations.
This so-called "gap" analysis is the third step in a 10-step process to build a new collaborative BiOp. Once the gap analysis is finalized, the next step for the BiOp writers is to parse out mortality between the 4 H's of habitat, hydro, harvest, hatcheries, and the ocean, followed by development of a list of both federal and non-federal actions that can be implemented to fill the gaps.
The TRT pointed out that changes in early ocean survival rates can strongly affect estimates of the gaps, so they created three scenarios in their analyses--one using the past 20 years of data, which includes some of the poorest ocean conditions on record, another that uses the past five years' of returns, which reflects better hydrosystem conditions, and a group of scenarios that reflect different early ocean survivals. The report also said the TRT was developing a way to incorporate potential latent mortality effects from hydro passage.
The TRT report said restoration and protection measures along with other salmon recovery action measures could reduce the gaps, but they have not developed scenarios to address these issues because the data about rates and consequences of changes "are not robust." They cautioned that the effective survival needed to achieve goals may be more or less than the gaps generated by the TRT's analysis. The TRT analysis said improvements in hydropower called for in the 2004 BiOp would help but wouldn't be enough for stocks to achieve viability criteria.
But critics say the TRT's use of the basic assumptions behind population viability analysis, which was originally developed to analyze endangered birds and mammals, doesn't take into account the huge natural variation in salmon populations. And critics say the risk-averse assumptions that the TRT has built into their model aren't based on science at all, but are more related to what the team feels should be included.
Also they say the TRT's definition of extinction--a population of less than 50 individuals--doesn't jibe with reality when stocks in some Idaho creeks have actually gone to zero, then rebounded into the hundreds the following year.
Under the rosiest conditions the TRT analyzed, coupled with ocean survivals resulting from similar conditions in the past 50 to 100 years, they estimated that the Snake River Spring/Summer Chinook ESU would need a 29 percent overall improvement to achieve less than a five percent risk of extinction over the next 100 years.
Using hydro survivals based on the past 20 years, they said the springers would need a 45-percent improvement in survival to reach that 5-percent risk level in a 100-year time frame.
When a more pessimistic suite of ocean conditions was analyzed (like those encountered by the basin's salmon populations entering the ocean between 1980 and 2001), the gap goes up to 68 percent using the last 5 years' of hydro survivals, and up to 88 percent using the last 20 years' of hydro survivals.
To reach high viability, defined as less than a 1 percent chance of going extinct in the next 100 years, the TRT said it would take a 150 percent improvement in survivals for the Snake springers.
For some other listed stocks in the interior Columbia, the gaps are less severe, with ESUs like the Middle Columbia and Snake River steelhead, there may be no gaps at all.
But stocks in the upper Columbia may need more help than any of the others, according to the TRT analysis. Upper-C spring chinook suffer from a 53 percent gap at best and steelhead from that part of the basin need more than a 300-percent improvement in survival to reach the 5-percent risk level under the most optimistic analysis. Using data from the past 20 years shows that the steelhead may need more than a 500-percent improvement.
Finding ways to reduce those gaps depends in some measure on improving survival through the hydro system, but some say there isn't much room for improvement in mainstem river corridors. And controversy over how much fish mortality can be pinned on the the hydro system is heating up, with several recent papers being circulated that examine different aspects of the topic. One article currently undergoing peer review posits that the latent mortality from dam passage may not really occur at all, while another recently published paper suggests that further improvements of the in-river survival of migrating smolts may have little effect on population viability.
That paper, published this year in the peer-reviewed journal Conservation Biology and authored by four scientists from the NMFS Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, says that their sensitivity analyses show that "the survival of transported fish was deemed far more important for population viability but far fewer resources are directed at addressing how to improve this survival." -B. R.
[3] Niners Hear BiOp Appeal From All Sides
Parties in the ongoing litigation [NWF v. NMFS] over the 2004 hydro BiOp squared off June 1 in San Francisco before a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The panel heard the arguments, asked some questions, thanked the participants, then gave no indication when they would decide the appeals.
The crux of the debate centered on how to interpret a section of the Endangered Species Act that deals with the jeopardy analysis of the ESA-listed fish stocks.
Plaintiff environmental and fishing groups, supported by a district court decision last year, argued that federal agencies that operate federal dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers must ensure the analysis of those operations considers all adverse effects of the baseline, including mortality from dam passage and other sources.
In the 2004 BiOp, NOAA Fisheries changed the way it analyzed the effects of dams on fish by putting the existence of dams in the environmental baseline, and estimating effects of proposed operations compared to a hypothetical "reference" operation that maxed the operations for the benefits to fish. The result was a no-jeopardy decision.
During oral arguments last week, environmental attorney Todd True called the latest jeopardy analysis a big departure from the earlier BiOps, and the state of Oregon said it was futile and stupid to separate the dams' existence from their operation.
The groups were echoing points from their earlier successful challenge to the 2004 BiOp, when they convinced U.S. District Court judge James Redden that the jeopardy analysis was flawed. Redden sent the BiOp back for another rewrite, and called for extensive collaboration with states and tribal agencies, where it now sits in legal limbo. A new document is expected by next February.
In their latest brief before the appeals court, federal attorneys argued that the ESA's jeopardy analysis never meant that the agencies responsible for running the dams should bear the responsibility for mitigating the effects of the dams' existence, since the projects were all constructed before the law was written, anyway.
The feds also argued that plaintiffs had misconstrued ESA Section 7 language to assert that baseline action and cumulative effects must always be added together when making a jeopardy determination. They said such a state of affairs would hamstring federal efforts by constricting agency choices to either do nothing at all, force the undertaking of a huge action to correct all previous adverse effects, even from non-federal "actors," or seek an exemption through the intervention of the God Squad.
The feds argued that the ESA "does not create affirmative obligations on the part of federal agencies to turn back the hands of time or compel agencies to undertake conservation measures."
They said that plaintiffs cannot change Congress' intentions by reinterpreting the regulations or imposing a standard not required by the law. The feds also argued that the District Court erred by telling NMFS it must conduct a separate analysis of the effect of dam operations on recovery, in addition to the jeopardy analysis.
In an earlier BiOp--the 2000 document the court also threw out--federal authorities did try to assess the likelihood of listed fish stock recovery over the next 100 years.
That's the approach both the judge and the environmental groups are pushing for now, but the feds say that it was "a unique and previously untried method," and would require speculation about the future implementation of actions needed to recover the fish. Besides, they said in their brief, the judge had already found such speculation improper since he had whacked the 2000 BiOp principally because it did not ensure such actions were "reasonably certain" to occur.
The feds were backed up by the state of Idaho, which filed an appeal brief taking both the National Wildlife Federation and the state of Oregon to task. Both had "blurred the hard edges of the issues," Idaho said, and wrongly interpreted ESA language to mean that any action proposed for mitigating dam losses must also make up losses from other non-federal actions if the cumulative effects appreciably reduced the stocks' likelihood of survival.
The Niners' panel also heard from the Columbia/Snake River Irrigators Association that had appealed Judge Redden's decision tossing out their own challenge to the 2004 BiOp, alleging that it was based on "junk science."
Irrigators' attorney James Buchal argued that the feds had overestimated dam mortality because their analysis left out a factor for natural mortality due to the death of some juvenile fish during their downriver migration, regardless of dams located in their path. He also said the feds' basic analysis was flawed because it failed to account for the effects of temperature on the survival of juvenile salmon, which is the factor that correlates best with fish survival. -B. R.
[4] Redden Combines 'Faulty' Snake-Columbia BiOp Consultations
Federal District Judge James Redden ruled May 24 that the Snake and Lower Columbia River mainstem BiOps should be merged.
Redden found fault with the Snake River BiOp, even as he has previously characterized the Lower Columbia opinion as insufficient. Whether this new ruling ends up with two separate BiOps or one joint Section 7 document, the judge left to the decision of the federal parties.
"I look forward to a consultation that employs a valid, comprehensive analytical framework," Redden wrote in his order. "Rebuilding salmon to healthy, harvestable levels will come in large part from addressing the impacts of the down-river dam operations that do the most harm to salmon. Even so, the water of the upper Snake water projects and its uses must be an integral part of the analysis. There must be a comprehensive evaluation of the effects of water use in the upper Snake River and the down-river operations."
Plaintiff Michael Garrity of American Rivers said in a statement that the joint consultation would help point up the need for lower Snake dam breaching.
"This will clarify the true cost of trying to recover Snake River salmon with the lower Snake River dams in place, and bring the trade-offs into focus," he said.
NW RiverPartners said the joint consultation was unwieldy and even counterproductive. "This will cause the number of parties and issues to increase dramatically, and make developing a scientifically sound, effective and legally defensible Biological Opinion or Opinions even more challenging," the group said in a prepared statement.
Parties have talked about possible clarification motions or even appeals. -Cyrus Noe
[5] Power Council OK's New Supplementation Effort For Grande Ronde, But Questions Remain
Despite continuing concern by scientists whether the strategy really works or not, the Northwest Power and Conservation Council voted 5-3 last month to approve more than $16 million to fund new facilities and upgrades to supplement ESA-listed spring chinook stocks in Northeast Oregon's Imnaha and Grande Ronde rivers.
The upgrade and new facility is expected to add another 500,000 smolts a year to the ESA-listed spring chinook run in the Snake River, and depending on conditions downriver, from 40 to 4,000 more returning adults every year. Co-sponsors include the Nez Perce Tribe, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Department.
In a May 9 press release after the vote, Council chair Tom Karier called it a crucial opportunity to significantly reduce the risk to an endangered species, but just a few days ago, the independent science panel that reviews F&W proposals for scientific merit questioned the value of the project and whether adding hatchery fish to the wild run would really work.
"While not unique to this proposal or NEOH in general," said the June 2 ISRP [Independent Scientific Review Panel] review, "a repeated theme throughout the Columbia Basin is how supplementation could achieve restoration goals without creating other problems and risk."
The panel said the proposal sponsors had pointed out that the fish declines were mainly caused by downstream variables and mortality, but they didn't show how supplementation "can overcome such downriver effects."
The ISRP review said, in a separate review, it had judged that a new production facility was not warranted until data and evaluation showed that supplementation could really help to rebuild wild populations. "It is uncertain where gains will come from as the downstream effects are expected to hit released fish as well."
At last month's Council meeting, NOAA Fisheries' Rob Jones said his agency supported the NEOH project because it could help preserve the spring chinook run until their productivity improved, and after that, could help the run become self-sustaining. Jones also said the project would help meet federal compensation obligations from dam construction and operations.
But BPA wants to get that in writing--to make sure the $16 million gets the proper credit before it spends the money--credit in the next hydro BiOp for adding more fish to a listed run.
Bob Austin, BPA Fish and Wildlife division's deputy director, said when BiOp credit is acknowledged and a water supply permit is received for the project, his agency will pay for it. As for the ISRP concerns over the value of supplementation itself, Austin said those will be addressed as well.
BPA has already spent more than $9 million since 1987 on various planning exercises for the prospective hatchery in NE Oregon while co-managers struggled to develop a production strategy that satisfied requirements for the ESA, Oregon's wild fish policy, the Lower Snake Compensation Plan, and treaty requirements through the U.S. v. Oregon process.
The project's progress was further delayed after the U.S. Forest Service made a preliminary determination that the proposed facility on the Imnaha River would adversely affect the free-flowing river after a consultation under the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.
By January 2004, the sponsors re-tooled their project by jettisoning the proposed Imnaha rearing facility and decided to raise half the Imnaha stock at a new facility on the Lostine River and the other half at a modified Lookingglass Hatchery. -B. R.
[6] Northwest Dams Compare Favorable To Others, BPA Study Says
The overall costs of operating Northwest dams compare favorably to similar facilities in North America, according to study released last week by the Bonneville Power Administration.
The study, performed by an Atlanta-based consulting firm, comes as BPA reviews its costs in preparation for the new rate period that starts in October. The purpose of the benchmarking study was to determine how Northwest dams stacked up against others of similar size in the region and North America.
"The majority of the Northwest hydro stations benchmarked in this study had similar costs within their relevant peer groups and compared favorably to North American averages for operations and for maintenance of plant, waterways, and dams, and buildings and grounds," according to a press release issued by BPA.
Bonneville's customers have been urging the agency to cut their baseline budget costs.
The release said that the study found no trend indicating that the majority of Federal Columbia River Power System stations were less or more costly than other regional stations. However, federal facilities "have a significant opportunity for reducing operations costs through automation," according to the release. Such automation is being considered.
The study compared 29 dams: 12 from the U.S Army Corp of Engineers, four from the Bureau of Reclamation, three from Chelan County PUD, three from Tacoma Power, five from Seattle City Light, and two from Grant County PUD.
Plant maintenance administrative support functions of most federal and nonfederal stations in the Northwest were at or below averages for similar facilities surveyed nationally, according to the BPA press release.
Public affairs and regulatory costs, including fish and wildlife, recreation, taxes and licensing made up nearly half of the benchmarked costs, according to the press release.
In this area, many Northwest dams are at or above North American averages due largely to fish mitigation, recreation and visitor operations, the release said.-Steve Ernst
[7] Botulism Kills Millions Of Fall Chinook At Ringold Hatchery
The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife reported last week that the agency lost about 20 percent of its upper Columbia hatchery production, most likely to an outbreak of botulism in its huge nine-acre pond at Ringold Hatchery near Pasco, Washington.
The 3.5 million upriver bright smolts affected by the outbreak were raised at Bonneville Hatchery and transported to Ringold in mid-May. They had been scheduled to be released this week.
The pond used by the fall chinook contained waste from spring chinook released earlier this year, part of a one-time contract with the Umatilla Tribes. The waste likely contributed to low levels of dissolved oxygen in the pond's water, which coupled with warm temperatures, gave the natural botulism toxin a chance to grow, said John Kerwin, WDFW hatcheries division director.
He told NW Fishletter that the nine-acre pond at Ringold is the largest in the state and it's tough to manage, being unlined, with no way to keep birds out. He said his agency hopes eventually to be able to build three smaller ponds in place of one large one--that would be lined and able reduce bird predation. "But there's no wiggle room in Mitchell Act funding for hatcheries," he said.
Kerwin said the loss would have an impact on fisheries. As for the dead smolts, they will be covered in lime and buried on site, while the pond will be drained, limed and allowed to dry out for the rest of the summer. -B. R.
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Publisher: Cyrus Noë, Editor: Bill Rudolph
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