[1] New Report Supports Earlier Analysis Of Canadian Harvest Changes
A new report from the Pacific Salmon Commission supports a presentation made over a year ago on the impacts recent changes in Canadian chinook harvest practices have had on ESA-listed stocks in the Northwest.
The July 2005 presentation to the Northwest Power and Conservation Council that highlighted the use of DNA analysis to determine the stock composition of commercial catches off Vancouver Island was found to have some minor flaws, but the basic message is still the same. It's still made up of nearly 90-percent U.S.-bound chinook, and while shifts in harvest timing have likely reduced impacts to some ESA stocks, they have increased the catch of others, principally in Puget Sound.
B.C. commercial fishers, out of concern for their own weak chinook and coho stocks, now take most of the summer off. They expend most of their effort to catch chinook in the spring months and after August, which means their impacts on U.S. stocks are not correctly estimated by the model the salmon commission uses.
It also means they don't catch as many ESA-listed chinook bound for the Snake River, but land more early-returning chinook bound for Puget Sound.
However, the latest report also shows that the earlier commercial harvest off Vancouver Island means they catch more lower Columbia tules than the PSC model has historically estimated, which translates into a higher impact on the ESA-listed, lower Columbia chinook, which has never commanded much respect. NOAA Fisheries has OK'd a harvest rate of up to 49 percent on the stock, about three times the rate allowed by the feds this year on the non-listed, but battered, fall chinook run in the Klamath River.
The 2005 presentation by PSC chinook technical folks estimated that almost 45 percent of the chinook caught by the West Coast Vancouver island troll fleet was made up of fall stocks from the lower Columbia. The latest report has pared that back to 28 percent to account for a group of fish not mentioned in the first report--fin-clipped fish that data collectors were unable to assign to any specific stock.
Nevertheless, this collection of mystery fish made up about 12 percent of the catch in the 2003-2004 harvest year. The report says they are definitely hatchery fish from the U.S., but without a coded-wire tag, they have no way of telling just where they came from.
Dell Simmons, co-chair of the PSC technical committee, and a NOAA Fisheries biologist, told NW Fishletter last March that he thought they were tules from the lower Columbia,
But last week, another CTC member, Gary Morishima told NW Fishletter that he thought the fish were from Puget Sound hatchery stocks, where most hatchery fish are marked to keep sports fishermen from bringing down the government. It gives them a chance to keep fishing, and keep marked fish, while reducing impacts to wild stocks, since they are required to return the unclipped ESA-listed chinook back to the water.
The new report also trims the amount of Puget Sound fall fish that were caught off Vancouver Island from 19.4 percent to 17.7 percent, while doubling the Canadians' share of upper Columbia summer/fall stocks to 9.3 percent.
But the Canadian DNA analysis doesn't have enough samples to accurately gauge impacts on stocks that make up less than 5 percent of the catch. However, it does say that impacts on Puget Sound listed fish like Nooksack and Skagit spring chinook are higher than those observed in previous years.
The report also says impacts (troll and sport) on listed Snake River falls averaged only 2.8 percent in 2003-2004, about one-fifth of the rate seen from 1988 to 1994. It does show a 4.4 percent harvest rate on the Snake fish for 2004, the last year for which data is available.
In other documentation, the PSC has estimated that Alaska accounted for about 21 percent of the catch (from Lyons Ferry Hatchery CWT data) in 2003, northern B.C. fishers for about 9 percent. The U.S. troll fishery took 15 percent, sport 17 percent, net (Columbia River treaty plus non-treaty) 35 percent. But the PSC says overall effort has been reduced enough since the mid-1990s for escapement of the stock to rise from 48 percent to nearly 78 percent in 2003.
The report will be discussed at the salmon commission's executive meeting in October, and decisions may be forthcoming on the CTC recommendations for updating the harvest model to reflect the huge change in the timing of the Canadian harvest. Between 1999 and 2004, over 90 percent of the commercial troll catch off Vancouver Island was taken between September and the following May. From 1985 to 1995, almost 90 percent of the catch was taken from June through August.
It's been a long time coming, since they've noted the results derived from CWT data have not meshed with the harvest model for the past six years. Even the latest report was held back for months at the salmon commission's policy level.
During the model's base period (1979-1982) used to determine the relative impacts of current harvest, about 60 percent of the catch took place between June through August. That has obviously changed, said CTC member Morishima, who said development is under way to make the model more receptive to changes in harvest patterns. He said Alaska fish managers have already developed techniques to capture recent spatial or temporal harvest changes in their predictive model.
But Morishima echoed the report's caution about using data from the small sampling size in the current DNA data. He pointed out that the samples were taken mainly from wild fish, which biases the results. He said a much larger sampling effort would have to be designed and implemented before an accurate assessment of the stock composition could be completed.
Meanwhile, Seattle attorney Svend Brandt-Erichsen said the latest PSC report only reinforces the arguments in two lawsuits that are taking on different aspects of ESA issues and current salmon harvests.
Brandt-Erichsen said litigation by the Salmon Spawning and Recovery Alliance that calls for the Customs Service to enforce the federal law banning the import of endangered species has been moved from federal district court to the Court of International Trade, where a briefing schedule has been set.
The alliance, made up of two conservation-oriented angler groups and the Snohomish County PUD, along with the Native Fish Society and the Clark-Skamania Flyfishers, want the government to enforce regulations that would keep U.S. sports fishermen from returning home with chinook caught in B.C. because they might be from an ESA-listed U.S. stock.
Another lawsuit filed by the group in Western Washington District Court wants to force the U.S. into immediate reconsultation over terms of the U.S./Canada salmon treaty in hopes of reducing impacts on listed U.S. stocks. Parties are still waiting for district court judge Ricardo Martinez to rule on a motion by the feds to dismiss the case.
The alliance said in their notice-to-sue letter that Snake River fall chinook made up less than 2 percent of the Canadian's Vancouver Island catch, but that's more than 50 percent of the ocean catch of the listed stock, and equals the number of Snake River falls caught in all the in-river Columbia fisheries.
The letter also reported that the Canadians catch many chinook bound for Puget Sound streams, where chinook are listed under the ESA for protection. According to the letter, between 1985 and 2002, B.C. fishers landed more than 55 percent of the Skagit River chinook caught in all fisheries, and just last year caught 70 percent of the natural-origin chinook bound for the Nooksack.
The alliance says these interceptions can be reduced if Canadians develop a mark-selective fishery for chinook like they have for coho, along with more terminal area fisheries.
They sent another notice-to-sue letter to NOAA Fisheries in January that calls for reconsultation over the federally approved harvest plan for Puget Sound chinook. Washington state fish managers have recognized increasing impacts in recent harvest reports, citing data that shows Canadian sport and commercial harvest on weak Puget Sound stocks has been up to 36 percent higher than they had expected.
The increased harvest by Canadians is allowed under the abundance-based management regime instituted under the salmon treaty between the two countries, but state officials have said the effectiveness of harvest cuts on the U.S. side of the border have been reduced by the bump in the Canadian catches.
But the politics get more complicated the further north one goes. U.S. hatchery fish, mainly from the Columbia River and caught by Canadians, are part of a deal that allows Alaskans to catch a lot of Canadian fish in return.
A preliminary DNA analysis of the 1999 Alaska troll fishery found that over 20 percent of their harvest was made up of B.C.-bound chinook, with another 22 percent made up of upper Columbia summers, falls, and Snake River falls, about 25 percent from Oregon and Washington coastal stocks, with another 21 small groups making up nearly 18 percent. The state's own hatchery system supplied only about 7 percent of the chinook caught in the troll fishery.
Re-negotiation over interception issues in the treaty is scheduled for 2008, but Brandt-Erichsen says talks should begin now. While state fishery officials are concerned, they don't seem inclined to push for an earlier resolution. -Bill Rudolph
The following links were mentioned in this story:
NW Fishletter 200, August 4, 2005
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