[1] Important Fall Chinook Study In Limbo

An important study trying to determine the biological value of barging Snake River fall chinook will likely be derailed this year because too few fish were captured last year to provide broodstock for a new crop of study fish.

Officials of state and tribal fish agencies told members of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council last week that returning hatchery fish from Lyons Ferry Hatchery were culled at Lower Granite Dam for the study, but current sampling rates didn't allow technicians to capture enough broodstock to satisfy all their production needs. Those needs are prioritized through the U.S. v. Oregon process and included the provision to provide over 300,000 young fish for the transportation study. Unfortunately, fish needs for that study rated 12th on a list of 17 priorities, even though the study was rated a high priority in the current fish and wildlife program.

Corps of Engineers spokesman Witt Anderson told Council members the fish agencies' offer to provide 185,000 production hatchery fish for the study won't be worth the expense because these fish are much larger than the "surrogate" fish that researchers planned to use, which are raised to be smaller, closer to the size of wild fall chinook. These surrogates average only 74 to 77 cm. long, compared to the 69 cm. for wild fish and 96 cm. for well-fed hatchery fall chinook.

Anderson said the regular hatchery fish bear little resemblance to wild fish, and most migrate through the hydro system before wild or surrogate fish. In fact, most hatchery fish head downstream before the summer spill program in the lower Snake even begins.

But representatives of lower Columbia tribes said using eggs for producing regular fish had priority over the research. And they also complained that no long-term study design for that transportation research had yet been agreed upon by all parties.

After a plea by Washington Council member Larry Cassidy for the parties to "get it going," Columbia River inter-Tribal Fish Commission representative Bob Heinith said they have been trying to come to agreement over a study design for the past two years. "But we all want to be on the same page when we take off on this thing," said Heinith. "And we're not, and we have some significant issues, no facilities in place to embark on a full-scale surrogate program, the Nez Perce are concerned about marking fish--the smaller the fish you mark the more you're going to affect the SAR [smolt-to-adult return]."

But Anderson said the study, which began in 2005 to investigate SARS for transport versus inriver fish, has other elements as well. Post-release performance of the Snake/Clearwater surrogate fish and hatchery-reared fish will also be examined, along with scale analysis of returning adults to determine their life history. In the past few years, researchers have discovered that many fall chinook have a reservoir-type history and don't migrate much during the summer season when spill is in place.

Anderson also said the 2004 BiOp proposed the study's implementation once RSWs were in place at lower Snake dams, but the summer spill ordered by BiOp judge James Redden in 2005 and in place since then was not part of the original study plan. As for agreement over a long-term study design, he said the parties "aren't quite there." That may be a trifle optimistic, since it was reported that the Corps has already told other parties involved they will not support any plan that includes a comparison with a downriver stock.

For now, the Corps has asked for a mere 30,000 surrogate fish to investigate passage survival. "We think you need those surrogate fish to do a good analysis," Anderson said. "It's not worth the investment to just fund production fish this year."

Anderson said the Corps is continuing to discuss wild-fish capture issues with the Nez Perce Tribe, hoping that the study will be part of the next BiOp's proposed action scheduled to be completed at the end of July. His agency supports a review of the final study design by the Council's independent science board.

The Corps is implementing improvements at the adult fish trap at the dam, to improve broodstock collection, which is complicated by the large numbers of steelhead which are migrating upriver at the same time. Those improvements are expected to be completed by March, but whether the parties agree on a study design remains to be seen. They've been wrangling over these questions for months already in the BiOp remand process.

CRITFC staffer Stuart Ellis, explained the tribes' concern to Council members. "The tribes, and, I think, some of the other U.S. v Oregon parties," Ellis said, "were reluctant to go through the kind of agony of modifying things once again to make do to get another year of studies started without everybody having a full understanding of how these data are going to be analyzed."

He said the tribes are anxious to get agreement on a long-term study design, and said it would be "fantastic" from a tribal perspective if it were achieved before the BiOp is completed. But he said the tribes still have issues with the study over fish numbers, how well surrogates match wild fish, and questions about some data that shows surrogate migration similar to the timing of wild stocks. He also made mention of a downstream comparison, but didn't say whether it would be a deal-breaker.

WDFW staffer Guy Norman explained the logistics of fish sampling efforts at the dam that led to the shortfall, even though he said more fish were trapped and hauled back to the hatchery from the dam than the year before. Unfortunately, nearly half of the trapped fish turned out to be jacks (precious males that return a year early). Norman said consensus could not be reached by U.S. v. Oregon parties to amend the priority list "to entertain at least some level of the transportation program."

By session's end, some Council members still weren't satisfied why the study had stalled. "Frankly, I haven't heard a compelling explanation yet," said Council chair Tom Karier.

However, during the session, no one mentioned the fact that last summer, when the problem was first recognized, staffers from the NOAA Fisheries Science Center in Seattle had made suggestions to the agencies involved on how to boost sampling rates and trap more chinook without affecting run reconstruction formulas used by the U.S. v. Oregon participants. -Bill Rudolph

[2] Columbia Fall Chinook Runs Expected To Be Down, But Coho Up

Columbia Basin harvest managers estimate this year's upriver bright run heading for the Hanford Reach will be about 77 percent of the 10-year average, or about 182,000 chinook (counted at river mouth). That's about 48,000 fewer fish than returned last year, which came in about 10 percent shy of their wintertime prediction last year.

Only about 22,000 Bonneville hatchery tules are expected, only about 25 percent of the 10-year average--and about 6,000 less than last year.

While about 55,000 lower river hatchery chinook are estimated to return next summer, along with about 10,000 wild ones. When 38,500 Bonneville upriver brights and Pool Upriver brights are added, the tally reaches 337,200 fall chinook returning to the river, about 67 percent of the recent 10-year average.

Counts of fall chinook at Bonneville Dam over the past 20 years have ranged from 113,000 in 1992 to the bonanza years of 2001-2006 when counts ranged from about 400,000 to well over half a million.

Managers expect more than 564,000 hatchery coho to return to the Columbia River this year, with over 400,000 of them in the early run. Last year, about 408,000 showed up.

Another 29,000 coho are expected from coastal hatcheries, with Oregon coast natural coho numbers expected in the 255,000-fish range. Last year, the natural run came in about twice as good as managers had expected, at 116,000 fish. -B. R.

[3] Spill Boosters Take On Status Quo

Bonneville Power Administration customers and the state of Montana have responded to BiOp judge James Redden, after some plaintiff groups said that fish would be better off if dissolved gas standards in the Columbia and Snake rivers were relaxed.

Earthjustice attorney Todd True discussed relaxing the gas caps in remarks last month filed with the court that explained why lead plaintiff National Wildlife Federation would not seek more changes to hydro operations this year.

But without the support of the Corps of Engineers and the five Basin tribes--which have already assented to 2007 operations in an unusual agreement with BPA--enviros were reduced to speculating that more spill would help fish if gas caps in downstream dam forebays were raised. They admitted the court was not the right place to get the gas caps relaxed.

Using an estimate from an analysis produced by the Fish Passage Center last summer, True said another 4.4 million acre-feet could have been spilled for fish passage if TDG caps were bumped to 120 percent in dam forebays from the current cap of 115 percent, mandated by the 2004 BiOp.

That's still 5 percent above Clean Water Act limits, and one of the reasons Oregon granted a waiver in the past. Both Washington and Oregon have agreed to the higher caps, including 120-percent TDG in dam tailraces.

But Oregon is in the process of extending its waiver for another five years, and salmon managers are using the process to stump for bumping up gas levels in dam forebays.

NWF told the judge that the forebay caps have kept the court from ordering more spill.

Montana and BPA customers said their own analysis of last year's spill regime showed that the Corps spilled 23 percent more water than the judge had ordered. They said the plaintiffs' complaint relied on a memo from the Fish Passage Center that didn't count the actual spill.

They also pointed out that daily spill statistics really don't mean much since it is the cumulative effects of spill operations that determine survival levels during the three- or four-week period that fish are passing through the hydro system.

But even if the FPC's 4.4-Maf calculation is correct, the defendant-intervenors say that's just a drop in the bucket compared to the 90 Maf the court had ordered to be spilled, and any relaxation of the standards would result in increased risks to fish.

They noted that NWF was very concerned about adverse effects of spill when it had sued the Corps of Engineers a few years ago for not complying with dissolved gas and temperature standards (NWF won at the district court level, but lost on appeal), citing NWF language in that case, that gas levels below dams could reach 170 percent and cause "near-instantaneous death" to fish.

Montana and the customers noted that Redden's court had no jurisdiction to change gas caps, and that's why the argument is spilling over into the waiver process at Oregon's Department of Environmental Quality.

The defendant-intervenor groups also took issue with NWF comments about adding more flow, countering with the comments of the independent science panel from a few years ago, which found the old flow/survival paradigm "no longer supportable."

Montana and the customers told the judge that the feds' research has "consistently shown that survival of salmon and steelhead from smolt to adult . . . is largely dictated by ocean conditions."

They said the research also demonstrated that life-cycle survivals were as high in the late 1990s as the 1960s before the Snake dams were built.

The defendant-intervenors pointed out that the FPC report, used by the NWF to argue that runs are continuing to decline, has come under increased scrutiny due to "scientific concerns" and other criticism from the same panel that questioned the value of flow augmentation.

Lastly, they took issue with NWF's claim that this year's adult returns are likely to be as bad or worse than 2006, noting that the 2006 forecasts were far lower than the eventual run. They pointed out that the low forecasts that NWF relies upon also showed that returns to the Willamette in 2006 were the lowest since 2000.

The Willamette has a chinook run that doesn't have to deal with the hydro system at all. Such low returns, they said, were likely explained by ocean conditions.

But the judge didn't take kindly to the lecture, since he had already had a request from irrigators to add a recent report from Canadian researcher David Welch to the record, one that purports to show little evidence of delayed mortality of Snake River chinook.

In a Feb. 5 order, Judge Redden said recently received information from a large number of groups raised some concerns for him.

"I urge the other parties to resist responding and, indeed, I discourage parties from filing 'motions' and/or 'responses' that appear to be an inappropriate attempt to educate the court on issues that may arise in the future but are not now pending before the court in any adversary context," he wrote.

The gas-cap controversy will be moving to Oregon's DEQ where the Corps of Engineers has already filed documents for another waiver that calls for maintaining the status quo gas caps, but keeping them in place year-round.

The Corps' analysis has already drawn criticism from state and tribal fish agencies, who posted their comments on the FPC Web site at the end of the year. They said dissolved gas monitors in some forebays and below Bonneville are susceptible to erroneous readings, and should be moved.

The agencies estimated that the 115-percent-forebay/120-percent-tailrace TDG criteria "can result in substantially fewer fish passing over the spillway at many projects as compared to managing spill based on 120-percent tailrace TDG criteria."

Critics said the most effect would be seen at Little Goose Dam on the lower Snake, where 18 percent fewer spring chinook would pass the dam via spill if the current forebay criteria was maintained, and at Bonneville Dam where 7 percent more spring chinook would pass via spill.

State fish agencies from Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, along with the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service all signed the technical staff memo.

Northwest RiverPartners, the coalition of utilities and other river users, has filed comments with the DEQ that includes a recommendation for maintaining the "115/120" gas caps, but they don't agree with the Corps' proposal to extend the waiver beyond the April through August fish passage season.

RiverPartners also went on record against issuing a temporary waiver for spill in March at Bonneville Dam. A three-year interim agreement with USFWS and BPA has run its course over the March spill program for aiding millions of fall chinook released from Spring Creek hatchery above the dam, and both sides are back to square one.

The fish and wildlife agency supports a waiver for 10 days of spill while the power agency calls for use of the dam's corner collector for passing the fish, citing research that showed safer passage than the spillway provided.

But USFWS claims it has evidence that fall chinook using the spillway in 2004 had a better smolt-to-adult return rate than those passing the dam via the corner collector. -B. R.

[4] Lower Columbia Tribes List Gripes Over BiOp Remand

The four lower Columbia Basin tribes say their views aren't getting much respect in the ongoing BiOp remand process, according to their comments included with the latest remand update released Feb. 2 by federal agencies.

The news is jarring, considering that less than two months ago the four tribes--the Yakama, Umatilla, Warm Springs and Nez Perce--joined with the Colvilles in a one-time deal with the Bonneville Power Administration and the Corps of Engineers that will govern dam operations this year. BPA sweetened the deal by shelling out more than $5 million to fund tribal projects that had been rejected during the Northwest Power and Conservation Council's F&W funding process.

The federal agencies' status report says progress is being made, though in the most general of terms. It described a collaborative effort to develop an "ESU matrix approach," which will organize information and link actions to "ESU viability gaps," fish-speak for trying to figure out ways to improve population numbers and productivity.

Overall, the report was optimistic, though it did mention there were still areas of disagreement over the process, policy choices, the science and specific elements of the proposed action.

The tribes were blunt about the process. They said they would still work at it, hoping for changes in future products, "while maintaining a healthy degree of skepticism as to potential outcomes."

They also expressed concern "that much of the effort put into the process by non-agency collaborators has been given little recognition in the current Action Agency product," adding, "While this may be rectified in future drafts, the current posture is highly troubling."

The tribes said they were troubled that current and final products "may not bear much resemblance to solutions that the tribes contemplated at the outset of the collaboration." They also complained that the status report doesn't address their misgivings, which include a lack of clear and enforceable methods for closing survival gaps and for reversing the "trend toward extinction" of ESA-listed fish stocks.

They also worried that contributions of hatchery fish towards recovery weren't being recognized, nor were the agencies developing a clear designation of a jeopardy standard.

And they were still complaining there had not been a "definitive discussion" about the issue of latent mortality--the hypothesis that says passage through the hydro system causes fish to die later, especially fish that use turbine bypass systems, and that barged fish are even more susceptible to later mortality than those that travel inriver.

A report on the topic is expected soon by an independent science panel that heard about the subject from all sides at a workshop last December.

The tribes said they would file a separate status report before BiOp Judge James Redden to detail their concerns.

But complaints didn't come from downriver tribes alone.

The Spokane Tribe also questioned the status update, saying it didn't reflect the collaboration's products or the challenges they faced.

They felt the federal agencies' participation has "undergone a perceptible shift," a development they called troubling, and noted that the agencies are now developing draft comments that they share with other members of the policy working group. The Spokane tribe said the feds' work doesn't reflect the products missing from previous drafts, nor the substance of prior comments and discussions of them.

Meanwhile, the status report said the process is up to steps 5 and 6 of the 10-step process to complete a new BiOp by the end of July. Mainstem survival of juvenile fish has been initially assessed using the COMPASS model, which had earlier been criticized by some state, tribal and USFWS participants.

Sources said that USFWS higher-ups in Washington, D.C. told its own remand process representatives to quit complaining about it.

The report said sovereigns believed there were some key issues that still need to be included, such as ESU-level biological objectives for recovery of the stocks, including a new jeopardy standard, which NOAA Fisheries is suggesting be satisfied if a certain ESU is shown to be "trending towards recovery." -B. R.

[5] Value Of 2006 West Coast Salmon Season Down 62 Percent

A new report from the Pacific Fishery Management Council on the economic impacts of last year's West Coast salmon season shows just how devastating the harvest cutbacks were to fishermen's pocketbooks. The harvest reductions were put in place to allow more Klamath River chinook to spawn.

Despite the best prices for chinook in 25 years, the value of the West Coast fishery was down 62 percent from 2005 coastwide, with only $9 million in chinook landed by the troll fleets. Recreational angling was down on the ocean as well, nearly 30 percent in vessel-based trips. Adding both commercial and recreational segments, the report said the 2006 income impact amounted to more than $37 million, down nearly 50 percent from 2005, and nearly 90 percent less than glory years like 1979.

Coastal fishers may get more harvest time this year, due more to political pressure than any biological reason, since last year's drastic cuts allowed about 50 percent more natural spawners to return to the Klamath than managers had expected. About 30,000 actually showed up. This year's return is a mixed bag of news, with the returning 4-year-old component estimated from an all-time low abundance level of 26,100, and the 5's at 4,700 fish. Last year, the pre-season forecast included 64,000 4-year-olds and 2,200 5-year-olds.

But the Klamath may soon turn around in a big way. The good news is that the 3-ocean component is forecast to be the largest on record--515,000. Last year's age-3 component was estimated at only 44,000 fish.

The value of Columbia River fisheries was more than half that of the coastal fisheries, with commercial gillnetters hauling in nearly $3 million worth of chinook, coho and chum, up about 40 percent.

Tribal fisheries upriver of Bonneville Dam took advantage of the high prices as well, with about $2 million worth of salmon sold to commercial buyers, with an unknown amount sold "over the bank" to the public, up nearly 90 percent in value from the year before. The report said the tribes caught more than 900,000 pounds of fall chinook, down from 2005's 1.4 million pounds. But they caught 180,000 pounds of spring chinook as well, way up from last year's 67,000 pounds.

Washington tribal fisheries off the state's coast accounted for about $1.2 million, after harvesting 30,000 chinook and 32, 000 coho. -B. R.

[6] Washington Releases EIS On New Columbia Water Management Plan

Washington's Department of Ecology has released a programmatic EIS on its new program for breaking the log jam over new water usage from the Columbia River that has been stalled for years over questions of ESA fish protection and future withdrawals.

"A successful Columbia River water management program must benefit both the economic and environmental vitality of Eastern Washington," said Ecology Director Jay Manning, in a Feb. 15 press release. "We are putting the building blocks in place to secure new water to meet both of the needs."

Based on legislation passed last year that authorizes up to $200 million to pay for new water projects and allocations, the new plan calls for more conservation, buying up some existing water rights, expanding storage, and developing long-term agreements.

Other parts of the plan call for improving water delivery to the Odessa Subarea to save groundwater, more study of potential storage sites, giving more water to those users with interruptible rights and drawing up more voluntary water agreements. -B. R.

Subscriptions and Feedback
Subscribe to the Fishletter notification e-mail list.
Send e-mail comments to the editor.

THE ARCHIVE :: Previous NW Fishletter issues and supporting documents.

NW Fishletter is produced by Energy NewsData.
Publisher: Cyrus Noë, Editor: Bill Rudolph
Phone: (206) 285-4848 Fax: (206) 281-8035