[1] Summer Chinook Run May Set Record
Harvest managers have been pleasantly surprised by the strength of this year's summer chinook run in the Columbia River, and have upgraded it accordingly. On June 29, they bumped up their estimate from 49,000 fish to nearly twice that--93,000--then back to 87,000 on July 5 (to river mouth).
Buoyed by increasing hatchery returns to the upper Columbia, the run's upgrade means more fish for both sport and commercial fishers, tribal and non-tribal.
Sporties' allocation below Priest Rapids Dam got a big boost--from 1,325 fish to nearly 5,000 fish, based on the draft harvest plan for the Upper Columbia. Lower Columbia commercial gillnetters should get an equal amount.
Treaty tribal fishers in Zone 6 above Bonneville Dam are expected to have landed more than 11,000 chinook by the end of July. Non-Treaty tribal and sportfishers above Priest Rapids should also share in the bounty, as nearly three-quarters of the non-treaty share is reserved for them.
Hatcheries in the upper Columbia region release about 3.5 million smolts annually, more than half of them yearlings, and most mass-marked. But there is still a wild component to the summer run that spawns in the Columbia, Wenatchee, Okanogan, Methow, Similkameen, Chelan and Entiat rivers.
Through the 1980s, the runs averaged about 20,000 a year, and about 15,000 annually in the 1990s, but since 2000, more than 60,000 summer chinook have returned each year. -B. R.
[2] Lake Washington Sockeye Run Passes 200,000-Fish Mark
Seattle's urban sockeye run started a little late, but has picked up considerable steam in the last two weeks, as amazed tourists gawk at gobs of sockeye passing the Ballard Locks on their way to Lake Washington's Cedar River. By last weekend, nearly 224,000 fish were estimated to have passed the locks, about 13,000 above the pre-season forecast.
Numbers are running 500 percent better than last year at this time--when only a tad over 46,000 fish had been counted by the middle of July. But state and tribal fish managers won't open fishing unless they expect more than 350,000 fish, their escapement goal for the Cedar, which flows into a lake near the Boeing plant in Renton. "The estimate," say the managers, "is based primarily upon fry production from the spawners in 2002. Since lake and marine survival rates are highly variable from year to year, the actual return to Lake Washington could be higher or lower than 211,000."
Last year's run was only about 60 percent complete by the middle of July and ended up about 75,000 or so.
In 2004, nearly 400,000 fish went past the locks on their way to they river.
But something happened on the way to their spawning grounds. About half of those fish never made it, likely succumbing to extremely warm water temperatures in the Ship Canal and Lake Union, where it reached nearly 72 degrees F. in the middle of July. The surface temperature is around 70 degrees F. at present.
WDFW biologist Steve Foley told NW Fishletter that even with the numbers better than expected, it's not likely to reach the point where a recreational fishery will take place. He said the 350,000-fish escapement number was developed years ago, but it may be a good buffer for potential losses from high temperatures in Lake Union and the ship canal. The sockeye run was planted in the Cedar in the 1930s with broodstock taken from Baker Lake in the North Cascades. It languished for many decades, and was pretty much written off until it suddenly blossomed in the early 1970s.
A team from the Muckleshoot Tribe is acoustically tagging some fish to track their progress to get a better idea of possible bottlenecks to their spawning grounds. No real evidence of the 2004 debacle was ever obtained, though by August, some fish were observed dying near the locks from high water temperatures. Foley said by late summer, some places on the sockeye's urban path will be warm from top to bottom, unlike today where temperatures 25 feet below the surface are still in the 65-degree range.
British Columbia's Fraser River, where 17 million sockeye are expected to return, is already experiencing hot water that could adversely affect returning salmon. River discharge was 30 percent below normal and the water was 3 degrees C. above the average two weeks ago, according to a press release from the Pacific Salmon Commission, but has since cooled to 17.7 degrees C. However, the water is expected to heat up to 19 degrees C. (66 degrees F.) over the next week.
Down on the Columbia, the small sockeye run headed for the upper Columbia and Lake Wenatchee is nearly complete. So far, about 36,000 fish have been counted this year, about 16 percent above the original estimate to the mouth of the river. Columbia River managers have since boosted their prediction to 40,000, which is a little better than half of last year's run size.
Last but not least, Idaho's Redfish Lake sockeye run is still hanging on by a thread, after millions of dollars have been spent on a captive broodstock program. Twelve sockeye have been counted at Lower Granite Dam on the Snake River, about 430 miles from the sea and still only halfway home. -B. R.
[3] Good Hydro Survival For Juvenile Salmon
NOAA scientists made their annual pilgrimage to the Northwest Power and Conservation Council last week to announce their latest survival findings for fish traveling through the federal hydro system. The news was mainly good, if you like dams.
Fish survival in the Snake River above the hydro system was pretty close to what they found in the hydro system itself. Last spring, 58 percent of the inriver juvenile spring chinook made it from Idaho all the way past Bonneville Dam, the best results since they started pit-tagging fish and sending them downstream, they said.
But the region may not be able to wring much more fish survival from dam modifications. The researchers said they couldn't correlate hydro survivals with adult returns and ocean conditions, which likely far override any tweaks at the concrete. They also mentioned another take-home point that feds seemed to have neglected in the past--the dams can't be blamed for all the juvenile fish death in the hydro system, much of it is perfectly natural.
This year's 58-percent survival is a bit better than last year's, said NOAA's Steve Smith who led Council members through the numbers. He said 2006 was the second-highest flow year since 1993, when the pit-tagged survival studies started.
Smith said the survival of hatchery fish to Lower Granite Dam still depends a lot on how far they have to swim, and the fish start dying as soon as they leave their particular hatchery, long before they encounter any dams. It's a process that continues through the reservoirs as well, after the fish enter the hydro system.
In 2006, average hatchery survivals were up from the year before--about 2/3 of the fish from the hatcheries have survived to Lower Granite in the past eight years.
Better conditions greeted fish once they entered dam country, as well, with more of them shooting over dam spillways in 2006 because more water was spilled this year than 2005, when little spill occurred during the early spring because of low flows.
In early spring, young fish spent nearly 30 days getting from Lower Granite all the way downriver to Bonneville Dam. However, as flows increased, the fish showed some of the shortest travel times researchers had ever seen, about 10 days, on average, Smith said.
In contrast, during the late spring of 2001, the second lowest flow year on record, the fish were still taking about 25 days to get through the system. Last year, travel times ended up about average.
Smith noted that the inriver migrants have made up a lesser portion of all fish that reached Lower Granite Dam over the years. Most have been barged--up to 90 percent in years like 2001, and in the 60 to 70 percent range when flows were about average.
Between Lower Granite and Little Goose dams, the next project downstream, that inriver group of spring chinook has averaged about 92 percent survival (1993-2004), and steelhead has averaged 90 percent.
From Lower Monumental to McNary, survival averaged about 84 percent for chinook and 71 percent for steelhead between 1995 and 2004. A large colony of Caspian terns near Pasco, Wash., on Crescent Island is likely responsible for eating a lot of steelhead, Smith reported. In 2001, 23 percent of the pit tags used for steelhead ended up on the island.
For 2006, Smith said, the 58-percent juvenile chinook survival to Bonneville Dam is the highest they have ever seen. For steelhead, the estimate was 37 percent, higher than the recent past.
Council Chair Tom Karier asked what was responsible for the higher survivals this year. Smith suggested that it could have been faster travel times due to a combination of higher flow and spill provided throughout the system. He said his agency thinks all those things are related.
But Smith said mortality through the hydro system was close to that measured outside of it. He "hadn't done the math yet," but if one calculated the "per-km" mortality from the hatcheries to Lower Granite, it would be very similar to the mortality found in the hydro system, he told council members.
Smith said the researchers found that each time a fish is detected passing through a dam bypass system rather than over a spillway or through a turbine route, about half a day is added to its journey through the hydro system. This works out to a couple of more days if the fish is routed through four bypass systems, which makes the trip 17 days long instead of 15.
Those extra days add up to more mortality, and researchers have been looking into the factors that affect fish travel time. Smith said information contained in the February 2005 tech memo on dam effects said travel time seemed to decrease as the season progressed, yet, after about May 1, flow seemed to be more important to reduce travel time than time of departure.
But for steelhead, the date the fish migrated seemed unimportant, while flow reduced travel time both early and late in the migration season.
Smith also used the occasion to make a few critical comments about the "broken-stick" survival model exhibited in the tech memo. Excluding low fish survivals from the low-flow year 2001, he showed a graph with no real connection between flow and survival. However when the 2001 data was added, the "broken stick" was apparent.
But Smith said the tech memo contained a "survival-versus-date" graph using the 2001 data that showed higher survival at relatively lower flows. The missing link in all this was a temperature factor.
He said findings developed while creating a new passage model for analyzing potential BiOp scenarios has caused them to go back and try to parse out reservoir survival of spring chinook from that at the dams. They have found several factors to consider, including the length of the reservoirs, temperature, a small negative influence of travel time on survival, and a positive linear relationship between flow and survival through the reservoirs.
"But the temperature effects appear to be larger," he told the Council. He said mortality of spring chinook is really high when waters reach a 14- to 15-degree C. range, "which is what we saw in 2001."
The scientists couldn't say why increased flows improved survival, but speculated that it may have something to do with increasing turbidity or improving fish travel time past potential predators.
A question arose about the value of more dam improvements. Smith said NOAA Fisheries has attributed about 17-percent fish mortality to the four lower Snake dams. He said if every fish could be routed through the most benign passage route (usually a removable spillway weir), mortality could be decreased to 9 percent. He added that this was not realistic.
Realistic improvements might improve overall spring chinook survival through the four-dam stretch to about 88 percent from the current 83 percent, Smith said.
Some Council members seemed a bit startled that the feds were showing a positive flow/survival relationship. Idaho's Jim Kempton pressed the researchers for more information.
Smith said the COMPASS model is addressing a number of possible hypotheses, while the tech memo had pointed to a "slight, still positive relationship between survival and flow." He said the new model may have a slightly greater influence of flow, but it may not be the hypothesis that ends up with the most support.
NOAA researcher John Williams reminded the Council that the researchers had already pointed out that "there is natural selection working on these stocks from the time they are released, or released from a hatchery, until they got to the dams--distance made a difference. When we empirically measure an estimate of survival, that's the empirical estimate of what the survival is, but we can't derive a hundred percent of all the mechanisms by saying it's just because it passed through the dam.
"Certainly," Williams continued, "some of those fish going downstream were going to be in the process of dying just like they were upstream of the dam."
Williams said salmon start out with 5,000 eggs, and only two adults are expected back from then, so "there's a continual process throughout the whole part."
Smith said the same principle applies to the analysis of barged fish--some of the fish they put in barges would have died if they had been left in the river.
The researchers said they didn't have enough time to present information on the latest transportation results, but if they had, it would have been another good news day for the Council.
NOAA Fisheries researcher Doug Marsh had pointed out at a November 2005 Corps of Engineers research review that adult wild chinook from the 2002 outmigration showed more than a 60-percent survival benefit from being barged at Lower Granite, with steelhead showing better than a 300-percent benefit.
Williams explained another element of NMFS' latest research--using coastal upwelling indices to help predict adult returns, a result suggesting "that the ocean conditions, to a large degree, are overriding anything that we're seeing in the way of changes in survival in the hydropower system."
Another issue Williams mentioned was the growing evidence that pit-tagged fish returning as adults are coming back at a lesser rate than untagged fish. He said smolt-to-adult returns of wild spring chinook from 1998 to 2002 were above 2 percent (a common yardstick for SARs needed for recovery), but if you looked only at pit-tagged returns, there was only one year that showed a SAR above 2 percent.
Williams also said using data from the Fish Passage Center's Comparative Survival Study, the unmarked portion of the run returned at a rate about 40 percent higher than the tagged population.
He cautioned that pit tags were good when looking at comparing fish going through two treatments, but were not an effective way to measure the "absolute" rate of return. He said the mechanisms are not known for this discrepancy, but the tags may be shed at some point, or less likely, unread as adults. He suspected that something about pit tags was decreasing the fitness of the fish.
NOAA scientist Bill Muir pointed out the importance of ocean conditions in the spring chinook's life cycle. He exhibited graphs that showed a fairly consistent range of juvenile survivals in the hydro system in recent years, ranging from about 26 percent in 2001, to 60 percent. SARs of those fish, on the other hand, ranged from about two one-hundredths of a percent in 1993 to about 1.6 percent in 2001--"a 75-fold variation."
Muir said there was no statistical relationship between the hydro survival of juveniles and their adult return rates. The same held for steelhead.
He noted that once the fish get through the hydro system, there is still a lot of mortality yet to happen. He said nearly 100 percent of the barged fish make it to below Bonneville, yet, on average, 99 percent die before they return.
As for latent mortality to fish that is attributed to their passage through the hydro system, since it occurs outside the researchers' realm, "it's a little hard to get a handle on," Muir said, adding that they need to develop a better understanding of it.
But he did say that researchers have found that the time when juvenile fish enter the ocean "seems to very important." Ultimate survival varied dramatically from one week's entry time to another, according to a graph he presented to the Council.
Muir said the last four dams added to the hydro system have significantly increased the time it takes them to reach the ocean. In average flow years, he said, it takes 10-12 days for a fish to get through it with four dams in place. Now with twice as many projects, it takes twice as long.
To reduce travel time, Muir said increased flows would help, but only in a limited way, because of the large reservoirs in the system. More removable spillway weirs would help, too, since fish use them during the day, but tend not to use regular bypass or turbine routes during daylight hours.
He said the region may be overfocused on the effects of flow within the hydro system where it can be measured, and that flows downstream may be adding "quite a bit of benefit." He said the benefit would be hard to quantify, "but I think it's still there." -B. R.
[4] Montana Flow Proposal Gets Shot Down Again
Montana's request to change reservoir operations in order to benefit its resident fish was turned down two weeks ago by Columbia Basin policy managers, the latest rejection in a decade of trying.
State representatives and Gov. Brian Schweitzer have pushed hard to modify old BiOp mandates that call for draining 20 feet from two of Montana's largest reservoirs every year to augment flows for migrating salmon hundred of miles downstream in the Columbia River.
Even though NOAA Fisheries said the proposal would not have large effects on anadromous fish downstream in the Columbia, some basin policy folks--principally the state of Oregon and representatives of three out of four lower Columbia tribes--refused to support Montana's proposals.
Oregon objected to the proposal's call for flattening outflows through September that would have reduced flows for fish in the Columbia by a few percent in July and August. Even though the change is likely not measurable, the state said it could have adverse effects on fish survival.
Montana has argued its case in regional forums for nearly 10 years, developing its case that a miniscule loss of juvenile salmonids (on the order of 7 per 1,000) was a small price to pay for improving the biological productivity of its reservoirs
Montana had also cited a 2004 review supporting the state's position that independent scientists who have examined the issue conducted for the Northwest Power and Conservation Council.
The independent reviewers questioned whether any adverse impacts to fish could be measured from 5 or 6 kcfs less flow at McNary Dam, or if the changes in flow could even be detected after the water was released from Montana, especially with all the other mainstem dam operations going on.
In 2002, NWPCC staffers had estimated less than a one-percent increase in fish mortality from the proposal, which has been an element of the council's mainstem program for some years now.
But even though the state of Oregon has supported the policy at the Council level, it could not support it this month unless the proposal somehow became flow-neutral.
Most lower-Columbia tribes felt the same way. Only the Nez Perce seemed conflicted.
And though NOAA Fisheries acknowledged that the Montana plan would likely do little to affect salmonids, it would only support the proposal if Montana had gained a large measure of regional support.
When it had become apparent that such a state of affairs was not going to occur, NOAA representative John Palensky said it was his agency's hope that the Montana proposal would get a full airing in the remand process underway that's writing a new prescription for hydro operations.
Action agencies, Bureau of Reclamation, BPA, and the Corps of Engineers all provided Montana some moral support, but without consensus among all policymakers, didn't really support the request, either.
Oregon representative Ron Boyce suggested that BPA might garner a little water from Canada this summer to make up for the flow losses, if the proposals were implemented. But BPA representative Kim Fodrea said Canada told the power agency that it was storing non-treaty water, so there would be nothing available for U.S. fish needs.
Boyce suggested that other options be studied back at the technical level among Technical Management Team members.
NOAA's Palensky tried to rally support for more discussion of possible options at the TMT level, but said he had already been cautioned "a lot" about deviating from the BiOp.
But Montana NWPCC member Rhonda Whiting said the state had already developed a series of alternatives, and that it was time to come up with a solution. She said her state had compromised as much as it can. "Our governor feels very strongly about this," she said.
However, parties had pretty much cemented their positions the week before at an hours-long conference call among policymakers on June 30, when Montana had only the Kootenai tribe and Idaho on its side and lukewarm support from NOAA Fisheries.
Some participants were clearly exasperated by the end of that discussion which weighed resident and wild fish needs, and pitted technical folks from Oregon against policymakers like Judi Danielson, Idaho member of the NWPCC. "I think it's almost disgraceful for policymakers to carry on this way, over and over and over, through the years," Danielson said at the end of the call. She said resident fish managers deserved an apology for the way they are treated when they ask for these kinds of operations.
Consultant Jim Litchfield, who has represented Montana through the Columbia Basin's technical and policy labyrinth for some years now, told NW Fishletter he thinks the state still has a good chance of getting the policy into the next BiOp.
One last go-round is scheduled for July 19 when river managers are set to argue over whether 600 KAF of Canadian non-treaty storage still available could be used to mitigate the proposed flow modifications from Montana. The water was held back this spring to reduce dissolved gas levels at federal dams. -B. R.
[5] Feds File Third Progress Report On Remand
NOAA Fisheries sent its latest update to a federal judge on its progress in developing a new plan for operating the hydro system in the Columbia and Snake rivers.
Federal attorneys told the U.S. District Court's Judge James Redden that the government is continuing to make a good faith effort in the collaboration with sovereign entities, as Redden instructed. But they reminded the judge they still have the right to make the final call on areas of disagreement.
And they also noted that executive branch agencies can't bind Congress to make future appropriations for any given federal action, or to pay for recovery of species listed under the ESA. Redden has several times intoned from the bench that the government wasn't spending enough to save listed salmonids.
The Goals and Gaps Workgroup is compiling information on the so-called gaps between current listed fish populations and their "desired status," lofty goals that include a measure of sustainable harvest. But for some participants, it is still unclear how the group will address the conundrum of reaching a population goal sufficient to avoid ESA jeopardy, while also defining the further actions required to achieve full-blown recovery. So far, NOAA Fisheries says all seven ESUs have survival gaps and need both short- and long-term improvements to reach recovery.
The report also recognizes that some participants have raised questions about the interior Columbia's technical recovery team [TRT] and the way the gaps were developed. The team analyzed the health of listed ESUs with the help of a popular conservation biologist tool called "population viability analysis." But critics say it isn't especially suitable for animal populations such as salmon that have high natural variability, nor does it realistically portray recent upward trends in most stocks.
More discussion is slated over ways to update stock status to account for recent fish survival improvements not incorporated in the TRT estimates.
The latest report says a framework workgroup has completed an "interim" human impacts report that estimates the human-induced mortality levels of the seven listed ESUs in the interior Columbia Basin. One of the perennial questions still haunting BiOp writers is possible latent mortality effects from dams, which leads to wide-ranging estimates in the latest analyses as well, though no numbers were released with the report.
Another collaborative workgroup has been assessing habitat to develop a limiting factors analysis that will be used to weigh future actions to recover salmonids in the broader effort outside the hydro system.
Others are looking at hatchery and harvest issues to both reform artificial propagation practices and develop alternative harvest strategies that include the possibility of asking for a reduction in ceremonial tribal fisheries of spring chinook.
The latest report says preliminary results from the passage modeling workgroup are expected in a couple of weeks. A public split has grown between state and tribal representatives and federal scientists who are trying to quantify the fishes' life history both in and out of the hydro system.
Federal participants met with an independent panel of scientists in Seattle on June 30 to update the group on their progress. The panel has already given a provisional thumbs-up for the new effort and reportedly gave the feds another OK after the latest review.
States and tribes say that some of the model's built-in assumptions would shortchange the estimates of beneficial actions from such drastic options as breaching lower Snake dams.
But the breaching option, and another one that calls for assessing fish survival from operating dam reservoirs at spillway crest, will not be assessed, according to the latest remand report, despite letters to the feds from the environmental group American Rivers and lower Columbia tribes that called for adding these scenarios to the seven already planned for analysis.
In their response to the latest report, plaintiff environmental groups said the feds still haven't explained the new jeopardy standard that is under development, which "at least raises the specter of a repeat of the 2004 BiOp experience." The groups also complained about the federal agencies' refusal to consider any new actions "other than minor tweaks" to status quo hydro operations, or model scenarios that includes aggressive, non-breach strategies like spillway crest drawdowns, or removing the four lower Snake dams.
The groups told BiOp judge James Redden they would like to discuss opportunities to consider and evaluate additional hydro operation alternatives. Redden has scheduled a July 21 status conference in Portland. -B. R.
[6] Judge Turns Down Request For One Big BiOp
Oregon District Court Judge James Redden denied plaintiff environmental groups' request (American Rivers v. NOAA Fisheries) to reconsider part of his recent opinion that called for NOAA Fisheries to add upper Snake operations in its analysis of lower Snake ESA fish needs in the next hydro BiOp.
Judge Redden had ruled that the feds could write either one big BiOp, or two different BiOps as long as Bureau of Reclamation operations (primarily water storage for irrigated agriculture) on the Upper Snake were analyzed in a proper framework and not improperly segmented from downriver operations.
However, environmental and fishing groups want the feds to put upper and lower Snake operations in one big BiOp. They cited a recent court ruling that they said proved the two operations were interrelated under ESA regulations. But Redden said American Rivers didn't present any new evidence or argument to justify reconsideration. Redden said his May 23 opinion pointed out that BOR's provision for flow augmentation "was not enough to conclude that all of the BOR projects were part of, or interrelated to, the downstream FCRPS operations." -B. R.
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