[1] Science Panel Questions Big-Ticket Items In BPA's Next F&W Budget
An independent science panel has raised some very big questions about the merits of many of the big-ticket items--mainly hatchery and fish supplementation programs--proposed for the next three-year funding cycle in the Bonneville Power Administration's fish and wildlife program.
In the past, many of the programs in question were funded without much controversy. But this time around, fewer than half of the 500-plus proposals the Independent Scientific Review Panel (ISRP) assessed were deemed worthy of at least partial funding.
The panel announced its review at this month's Northwest Power and Conservation Council meeting, minutes after Council members voted unanimously to authorize spending another $2.7 million to improve Idaho hatchery facilities for the Redfish Lake sockeye captive-rearing program. The vote supports an element of the last hydro BiOp that calls for doubling smolt production of the endangered sockeye population.
But it's a program the ISRP said should not be funded in the future because there is scant evidence the project has been doing any good.
Shortly before the Council voted to approve the funding request (out of the 2006 budget), Idaho's new governor, James Risch, made an appearance to plead for more sockeye money. NOAA Fisheries supported the request as well.
The ISRP has raised questions about captive broodstock programs before, a concern that that has persisted with the panel's new membership. In November 2004, the group reviewed several programs in the Columbia Basin, including the Redfish Lake project, wondering how long the captive rearing project that had been so successful at raising sockeye to adulthood could keep going before inbreeding produced deleterious effects to the stock.
Noting the few fish that returned to the lake from outmigrations (ranging from 257 in 2000, to only 11 in 2003), the panel said it was uncertain if the program was working as a "life raft" protecting the stock until downriver conditions improved enough to boost returns. Redfish Lake in Idaho is nearly 900 miles from the sea.
The panel's latest review was even more pointed. Responding to a suite of four sockeye proposals authored by IDFG, the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, and NOAA Fisheries (which called the project a success as a safety net and a tool for restoring the run), the ISRP tried to be tactful when it explained why the proposals ($14.2 million over the next three years) ended up in the "not fundable" category.
"The ISRP respectfully interprets these results differently," it said. "Clearly the Snake River sockeye ESU has been preserved in captivity and has not been extirpated. However, at this time it appears the ESU is extinct in the wild and reintroduction efforts have not proceeded easily or successfully. There is no reported successful full-cycle reproduction in the wild and then production of subsequent adults."
About 18 percent of the 540 proposals from 140 sponsors ended up in the "non-fundable" category after the panel judged their scientific merits. But the ISRP didn't stop there. It had plenty of questions about more than 200 other proposals, including big-ticket items such as the $31-million proposed hatchery below Chief Joseph Dam sponsored by the Colville Tribes.
While acknowledging that the proposed hatchery would, as advertised, be used to both augment harvest and supplement natural runs, the panel noted that "supplementation remains an unproven strategy for rebuilding naturally producing populations." The panel recommended that "pilot studies precede the massive construction project, which will consume a significant portion of the Fish and Wildlife Program budget without a significant level of population and natural production response."
The ISRP was also critical of the future of other supplementation efforts, and was opposed to funding three years' worth of planning ($749,000) by the Umatilla Tribes for a Walla Walla River hatchery in northeast Oregon. The ISRP said the proposal was likely a fish-farming operation that would conflict with actions to boost natural productivity of the river, especially if the Carson stock of mixed spring chinook lineage was used as the hatchery's broodstock.
And the panel still had questions on whether the supplementation effort in the Grande Ronde ($14 million over three years) that was OK'd at last month's Council meeting was warranted. But this time they wanted a better explanation for the $5.5 million in funding for the proposed monitoring and evaluation of the effort over the next three years. They called on the sponsors "to work together to provide a compelling logic path or set of evidence that it is justified in terms of benefit to the targeted populations and subbasins."
The ISRP recommended that more experiments be developed to determine the value of supplementation--whether hatchery-raised fish can really boost wild fish numbers without reducing fitness of the wild population. Outgoing ISRP member Rick Williams told Council members that this issue was "one of, if not the, critical uncertainty."
The IRSP did call for funding another three year's worth of work trying to unravel the value of supplementation of lower Snake fall chinook by identifying genetic differences between truly wild fish and those whose ancestors came from Lyons Ferry Hatchery. Most folks think the fall stock has benefited from the introduction of hatchery fish over the past decade, and redd counts are up significantly. But fish biologists are still unsure how much of a contribution that hatchery fish from Lyons Ferry are making to the wild run.
In other places, supplementation efforts have succeeded for some populations, such as the Quilcene River summer chum in the Puget Sound area. However, some restoration programs for listed stocks have a sunset clause of 12 years (three to four generations), mainly to avoid potential adverse hatchery/domestication effects. But that rule of thumb doesn't seem to be followed in the Columbia Basin. -Bill Rudolph
[2] Ocean Conditions Improve For This Year's Outmigration, So Far
Ocean conditions off the mouth of the Columbia River have improved significantly over last year, and that should mean better spring chinook returns two years from now, two NMFS scientists told the Northwest Power and Conservation Council.
But as far as 2007 is concerned, they don't expect much in the way of spring chinook. This year's jack counts are about 30 percent lower than last year's number, one indicator of fewer fish next year. But other factors play important roles in determining counts, said Ed Casillas, research scientist with NMFS' Northwest Science Center in Seattle.
Casillas' group studies the near ocean between Newport, Ore., and the tip of the Washington coast. Researchers trawl for juvenile salmon, measure temperatures, salinity, plankton biomass, spring wind shifts and upwelling. The group also keeps track of fish populations such as hake that eat juvenile salmon, and others like anchovies, sardines and herring that predator species may eat instead of salmon.
Another important factor, Casillas noted, is the size of the freshwater plume off the coast that's created by the Columbia River. It changes from day to day, depending on flows and wind conditions, and can play an important role in the survival of young salmonids from week to week.
Casillas said 2006 was setting up to be a positive year for salmon, but it was too early to say for sure. El Nino conditions have eased, water temperatures are considerably cooler than last year, and strong upwelling was in evidence in May, a condition that brings nutrients to the surface, a necessary precursor to plankton blooms that fuel young salmon.
Casillas told NW Fishletter that trawl surveys earlier this spring had shown some of the highest juvenile salmon numbers he's seen since his group began keeping track.
But lately, he said, the weather seems to have slipped back into an earlier mode, with prevailing southerly winds, a situation that generally puts the kibosh on upwelling. He said the scientists were going out again to survey juvenile populations again. Until he gets the results from that cruise, Casillas said he would make no prognosis on spring chinook futures.
One thing is for sure, last year the researchers encountered the fewest young spring salmon in their trawl surveys since they began the offshore project in 1998, and only about one-fourth the numbers they observed in 2004. -B. R.
[3] New Cracks Show In Collaborative BiOp Effort
Federal agencies released a glowing mid-June report on their progress toward recovering salmon populations in the Columbia River. It included an upbeat rendition of the collaborative effort now underway between tribes, states and feds to develop a new hydro BiOp under the orders of U.S. District Court judge James Redden.
But the report fails to note the growing dissension in some of the workgroups dealing with the 10-step process looking at different factors that limit improvement of the ESA-listed stocks, and what can be done about it.
Some state, tribal and federal participants are still raising questions about flows and fish survival that NMFS scientists answered nearly three years ago in the process of writing the 2004 BiOp, which Redden threw out last year.
Though participants in the work groups are supposed to keep their discussions among themselves, some complaints have surfaced. Two memos recently posted on the Fish Passage Center's Web site showed how unhappy some state, tribal and technical folks are with the current state of affairs.
The memos air concerns about the new passage model being developed to estimate fish survival, both through the hydro system and in the ocean. The model will eventually be used to weigh the benefits of different hydro operations to reduce expected "gaps" in survival between current operations and what is needed in the future.
The memos argue that the feds are setting up the new model to be "insensitive" to management options like breaching or drawdown scenarios, because the feds wanted to measure survival per distance. The critics said flow and distance factors wouldn't change if breaching options were modeled, but water travel time would because reservoir cross-sections would be a lot smaller, which is what the feds want the model to focus on.
The memos, signed by representatives of Oregon and Idaho state fish agencies, along with the Columbia Inter-Tribal Fish Commission and USFWS, "strongly" disagree with NOAA Fisheries on other basic issues, including the elimination of some dubious survival data that had high error bounds.
The fish managers said dumping the low-quality data reduced the contrasts in flow and spill effects compared to another method that used the full data set but gave the uncertain data less weight in the analysis.
"The likely result is that COMPASS will be insensitive to changes in flow and spill which have been shown to be important factors affecting survival," said the memo to NOAA scientist Rich Zabel, who is leading the modeling effort for federal agencies.
The complaints seem to have paid off. Later, the same memo says they were pleased to find out that the feds had told a panel of independent scientists that they had decided to use the inverse-variance method in their current round of modeling.
But the state and tribal fish folks were still griping because the feds were looking at juvenile fish survival using per-unit-travel-time as the dependent variable. The critics said the variable in the model should simply be survival because it is highly correlated with water particle travel time [WPTT], more so than with fish travel time and distance traveled.
The joint memo argued that the data shows that Snake River fish survival decreased after the dams were built, but the distance did not change. They said water travel time should be used as an independent variable because it accounted for both flow and reservoir volume, "and because water travel time is a reasonable surrogate for fish travel time, there is a biological connection with survival that does not exist with distance."
But federal scientists have heard this argument before. In the previous collaboration after Judge Redden tossed the 2000 BiOp, NOAA fisheries developed several technical memos dealing with dam operations and effects on fish. In a lengthy memo on dam effects, federal scientists discussed many of their points of disagreement with state and tribal managers after it became clear the collaboration would not create a scientifically based framework for analysis that was accepted by all parties.
NOAA Fisheries looked at the WPTT issue in its February 2005 technical memo on the effects of dams on listed fish. They found that except for the extremely low flow year 2001, fish travel time through the hydro system in recent times has varied by only a few days. But before the lower Snake dams were constructed, the fish took 40 percent to 50 percent less time to migrate downriver through the system.
Looking at each year, they said median travel time for groups of PIT-tagged yearling Chinook salmon generally decreased as the migration season progressed, "as flows have generally increased and as WTT has decreased."
But they noted that water velocity "is clearly not the only driver of travel time in all years: in 1998, and especially in 2002 and 2003, the early part of the migration season featured relatively long periods of nearly constant flow. In these years, nonetheless, median travel times for yearling Chinook salmon decreased throughout the period, even without change in flow. This result suggests that physiological characteristics of juvenile fish (possibly the degree of smoltification) or physiological responses to day length or moon phase might have influenced migration rates more than flow."
When all was said and done, after translating flow into a water particle time index gave them a similar relationship with fish survival as did flow, one they termed "weak and inconsistent."
When water temperatures reach 13 degrees C, fish survival for spring chinook drops regardless of flows, and survival data from 2001 fits temperatures much better than any other variable, the feds said.
But one of the states' and tribes' May memos even included a January 2006 document from Earl Weber of the Inter-Tribal Fish Commission that suggested the water temperature variable be thrown out of the new model.
The critics also said the new model would probably underestimate the value of removable spillway weirs at dams because it would not detect the reduction in forebay delay that fish likely benefit from.
The fish managers were dubious that the model could even perform as advertised, being able the separate dam mortality from reservoir mortality. They also suggested (again) that some weight-of-evidence process be put in place to permit assessments of alternate survival hypotheses or models of inriver passage survival. "Without such a framework that allows for differences in opinion when the data are questionable," they wrote, "the resulting projections will not account for the true range of potential outcomes."
The pugnacious fish managers even took issue with a recent review of the new COMPASS model by the group of independent scientists [Independent Scientific Advisory Board] who weigh in on regional salmon issues for the NWPPC and NOAA Fisheries, and said the COMPASS model overstated the association between low flows and poor survivals. The managers claimed that other low flow years besides 2001 showed very poor survivals, notably 1973 and 1977.
It's unlikely that the fish-agency folks who wrote the memos will be placated by any final pronouncements from the ISAB. Cynics in the process say that the fish folks are just working on a paper trail that could be used in more litigation over the BiOp process. -B. R.
[4] Summer Chinook Season Begins Right On Schedule
A couple thousand chinook have been pouring over Bonneville Dam every day to signal the start of a decent summer run. And right on schedule, not like the spring run, which turned out to be much better than anticipated, but showed up later than any other spring run on record.
The summer stocks are mostly headed for the upper Columbia, and fishery managers have estimated about 49,000 of them will enter the river this year. That's about 80 percent of last year's run size.
Since the summer run is not listed for ESA protection, about 20,000 are eligible for harvest, split evenly between treaty and non-treaty fishermen. A few listed sockeye and summer steelhead will be mixed in with the summer chinook. The allowable non-treaty impacts to ESA-listed sockeye are 1 percent, and 2 percent for summer steelhead.
Most of the non-treaty harvest will take place above Priest Rapids Dam where the sport fishery and the Colville/Wanapum tribal fisheries will each be allowed 3,750 fish. (The Colvilles and the Wanapum are not parties to the U.S. v. Oregon process, so their share is taken out of the non-treaty allocation.) The remaining 2,650 fish will be evenly split between sport and commercial fisheries below Priest Rapids.
Last year, the lower Columbia commercials saw their first targeted opening on the summer stock since 1964. The reopening still sticks in the craws of some fish advocates since the fishery is allowed to keep unmarked fish. A few late-running ESA-listed springers are probably mixed in with the summer stocks, but according to the University of Washington's DART Web site, only two pit-tagged wild spring chinook heading for Idaho had logged in at Bonneville Dam after June 12.
The non-treaty gillnet fishery in the lower river began June 26, while the treaty fishery above Bonneville in Zone 6 has already begun with platform-caught fish opening on June 8. Tribal gillnets hit the water in June. The tribes are also expected to harvest about 1,000 sockeye.
Harvest managers expect about 31,000 sockeye to come back to the Columbia this year, with nearly 8,000 headed for Lake Wenatchee, 23,000 for the Okanogan watershed and 21 precious sockeye estimated to be headed 900 miles upriver to Idaho's Redfish Lake. About 12,000 sockeye had been counted at Bonneville by June 22. -B. R.
[5] Enviros Want Judge To Reconsider Upper Snake BiOp Decision
Plaintiffs in the Upper Snake BiOp litigation (American Rivers v. NOAA Fisheries) have asked Oregon District Court Judge James Redden to reconsider part of his May opinion that threw out the Upper Snake BiOp and ordered the feds to look at the Bureau of Reclamation' water storage operations in the context of other federal actions in the lower Snake to help ESA-listed salmonids.
Plaintiffs wanted both upper and lower Snake BiOps to be joined, but Judge Redden ruled that it was up to federal agencies whether they wrote one or two opinions to satisfy his ruling.
Now plaintiffs say Judge Redden should order that a single opinion be written to cover both operations, because of a June decision in the Ninth Circuit Court (Defenders of Wildlife v. EPA) that said that different actions should be analyzed together, if together they might affect the listed species.
Redden has said that the federal agencies had the discretion to write one or two biological opinions as long a they complied with Justice Burger's admonition to "halt and reverse the trend toward species extinction whatever the cost." (TVA v. Hill).
But plaintiffs say that the Niners' decision means that that an action like the upper Snake operations may have multiple causes "and still be related to another action under the "but for" test of Sierra Club v. Marsh, as long as that other action (operation of the downstream dams) is one of the causes for the upper Snake project operations."
So far, the state of Idaho has responded, and they say the plaintiffs have got it backwards, and that the case environmental attorneys cite does not provide any legal basis for reconsidering Redden's opinion.
On June 14, Judge Redden ordered that all parties submission of proposals for a remand structure will be due a week after he rules on the plaintiffs' request for partial reconsideration. -B. R.
[6] 103 House Members Ask Feds To Look At Dam Breaching
A congressman from Wisconsin was sounding off last week about the failure of federal salmon plans on the West Coast. Rep. Tom Petri (R) said the plans had failed local communities, taxpayers and salmon. "It's time for all options to be put on the table," he said in a June 22 press release from the Save Our Wild Salmon coalition.
Petri, a lead sponsor of the Salmon Planning Act that has yet to get out of committee, along with Rep. Earl Blumenauer, (D-OR) have solicited the signatures of more than a hundred fellow House members in a letter to the federal government that asks the feds to look at all options for recovering salmon in the Columbia Basin as it writes its next salmon plan, including breaching lower Snake dams. That's also the gist of the Salmon Planning Act, which calls for looking at both biological and economic effects of breaching.
The June 20 letter to NOAA head Conrad Lautenbaucher called for the salmon recovery effort to be guided by the "best available economics and science," and include other options for study like breaching lower Snake dams and much more flow augmentation.
Blumenauer's remarks seemed to blame this year's draconian harvest cuts in southern Oregon and California on declining fish numbers in the Columbia River rather than the Klamath Basin, which is why the action was taken--to improve returning numbers of fall chinook to the Klamath, a population that is not even low enough to be listed for protection under the ESA.
"I am deeply trouble by the signals Mother Nature is sending about salmon recovery," Blumenauer said in a June 22 press release from the Save Our Wild Salmon coalition. "This year's virtual closure of Oregon's coastal commercial salmon season and the declining condition of our oceans means that we must get serious about the health of the Columbia River Basin, our compliance with federal endangered species laws and our commitments to native Americans."
Twenty-four other California politicians signed the letter, but only three from the Northwest, Diane Hooley (D-OR), Jim McDermott (D-WA) and Adam Smith (D-WA). It also had the support of Save Our Wild Salmon, Taxpayers for Common sense, the Northwest Energy Coalition, Sierra Club American Rivers, and US PIRG.
The letter will not likely have any effect, since it was reported last week by participants in the BiOp remand that breaching lower Snake dams is not on their list of potential options to be addressed. A progress report on the creation of the new hydro BiOp is slated for July.
Meanwhile, two Republican members of the Washington delegation will take part in a July 7 field hearing in Pasco of the House Water and Power Subcommittee on "Electricity Costs and Salmon--Finding a Balance." Cathy McMorris (R-WA) has introduced, and Doc Hastings (R-WA) is an original cosponsor of the Endangered Species Compliance and Transparency Cost Act to give consumers information on how much of the federal government's ESA costs are passed on to the electricity consumer. -B. R.
[7] Pit-Tag Results Puncture Conventional Wisdom Of Dam Effects On Returning Salmon
Researchers in the Columbia Basin who have been analyzing adult fish survival through the hydro system say it is even better than they previously thought. By keeping track of pit-tagged fish between mainstem dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers, they have found that spring fish losses only amount to two or three percent over the eight-dam route between the lower river and Idaho, according to NOAA Fisheries spokesman Ritchie Graves, who presented the information at this month's meeting of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council in Boise.
Using data gleaned from radio-tagged fish, federal scientists had estimated per-project survival for spring chinook at around 98 percent in the 2004 BiOp, but the new information shows 98-percent survival or better for the four-dam stretch between Bonneville and McNary in the past couple of years, and about the same from McNary through Lower Granite on the Snake.
The earlier data derived from radio tags showed about 13 percent less overall survival for spring and fall chinook.
The latest survival results for summer and fall chinook were about 98 percent for each four-dam stretch of the river. Wild steelhead average about 88 percent survival between Bonneville and McNary and 94 percent between McNary and Lower Granite. Hatchery steelhead fared even better.
On the Upper Columbia the news was good as well. Hatchery steelhead averaged 94 percent survival for the eight-dam route from Bonneville to Wells Dam. That's almost 99-percent survival per project. Hatchery spring chinook averaged about 93-percent survival to Wells Dam. No results were available for wild fish.
The latest adult survival-rate information doesn't jibe very well with the conventional wisdom of fish managers who develop harvest rates for treaty and non-treaty fishers in the Columbia and Snake. According to their 2006 annual report on spring chinook, the managers had estimated overall 2005 survival between Bonneville dam and Lower Granite at only about 70 percent, while the new pit-tag results estimated better than a 98-percent survival. In the past 10 years, the fish managers had pegged loss rates up to 55 percent. WDFW biologist Cindy LeFleur said they are aware of major discrepancies between the newer data and her technical committee's results. "We're going to be looking into that," she told NW Fishletter last week. -B. R.
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