[1] La Nina May Take Another Bow Before Next Summer
NOAA climate scientists say most of their models are now suggesting that La Nina conditions in the equatorial Pacific will continue through next April.
In a Dec. 29 update, NOAA said negative sea surface temperature anomalies had strengthened across parts of the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. The agency's Jan. 5 message was much the same.
Earlier in December, the agency had reported that most SST forecasts had predicted ENSO-neutral conditions through the first half of 2009, with an El Nino event likely developing between December 2008 and March 2009.
Meanwhile, Aussie climatologists have not ruled out another La Nina episode, either. According to a Dec. 23 update from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, "for the first quarter of 2009 the majority of climate models forecast neutral conditions, but with a cooler than normal equatorial Pacific. Historically, it is unusual for La Nina thresholds to be reached during the southern summer, though this did occur as recently as the summer of 1999/2000."
The Jet Propulsion Lab announced Dec. 9 the latest sea-surface height data from a joint US-French satellite that showed both El Nino and La Nina absent from the tropical Pacific, while the Pacific remained locked in the cool phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. JPL said the data was based on 10 days of data centered in mid-November.
Bill Patzert, a NASA-JPL climatologist, said the cool phase of the PDO will have significant implications for shifts in marine ecosystems, and for land temperature and rainfall patterns around the Pacific Basin.
"In its present cool phase," said the JPL release, "higher-than-normal sea-surface heights caused by warm water form a horseshoe pattern that connects the north, west and southern Pacific. This is in contrast to a cool wedge of lower-than-normal sea-surface heights spreading from the Americas into the eastern equatorial Pacific. During most of the 1980s and 1990s, the Pacific was locked in the oscillation's warm phase during which these warm and cool regions are reversed."
University of Washington climate scientist Nate Mantua said water temperature anomalies in the North Pacific have remained strongly negative since the La Nina faded last spring. "Historically," said Mantua, "this situation has been associated with favorable ocean conditions for the return of US West Coast coho and chinook salmon, but it translates into low odds for abundant winter/spring precipitation in the Southwest (including Southern California)."
Mantua said the cool phase will likely persist through the winter and perhaps longer.
Reports have come from observers up and down the coast that reflect the abundant conditions offshore. Blue whales were observed feasting on tons of krill (small shrimp) off the Golden Gate, which is a good sign for improved conditions for Sacramento River fall chinook, whose numbers have crashed for the past two years.
Closer to home, NOAA Fisheries researcher Bill Peterson, based in Newport, Ore, said the PDO in 2008 was the most negative it has been since 1955.
"The year 2005 was one of the worst in history, as delayed upwelling caused a food shortage, that led, among other things, to the collapse of the Sacramento River chinook salmon run," said Peterson. "In contrast, 2008 has been one of the best years on record and though it's a generality, cold water usually means good things for salmon."
In a press release from Oregon State University earlier this month, Peterson said they usually see cold water conditions for a few months once upwelling begins in late spring and early summer. "Since April of 2007, though, we've been in a constant 'summer-state' ocean condition, which is something we've never seen in more than 20 years of sampling. And we're not sure why."
Peterson said the cold water has drawn a huge biomass of northern copepods south from the Gulf of Alaska, zooplankton species with high fat reserves that provide a great diet for anchovies, herring and other fish which become prey for salmon, ling cod and creatures.
The abundant feed has improved seabird populations along the Oregon coast, Peterson said.
When the PDO is in a warm phase, different copepod species thrive, but they don't retain lipids like the northern types, and therefore have much less nutritive value and adverse effects on fish and bird populations.
Chinook returns to the Columbia River next spring are expected to show the benefits of that cooler regime. Basin biologists expect about 300,000 springers to show by June, a couple hundred thousand sockeye in early summer and around 500,000 fall chinook.
And 2010 returns may be even better, since they are likely to reflect the great juvenile numbers seen in this year's offshore surveys. Researchers found 2.4 times more juvenile chinook in 2008 than in any other trawl surveys over the past 13 years, but less coho than they had hoped. -Bill Rudolph
[2] Salmon Go Acoustic At Research Confab
At last month's annual rendezvous of salmon recovery researchers in Portland sponsored by the Corps of Engineers, the take-home message was clear--the benefits from modifying dam passage for fish was small potatoes compared to the huge vagaries they encounter in the ocean.
But the message was delivered by someone who had invited himself, Canadian scientist David Welch, whose acoustic tag research has attracted a considerable amount of both flack and kudos, for its attempts at tracking juvenile salmon survival in the ocean.
Using a tag that's considerably larger than the one the Corps uses in its research, Welch is able to track fish down the Snake, into the Columbia and out in the ocean all the way to Southeast Alaska.
The Corps' tags are small enough to be implanted in young fall chinook, but don't work well in salt water and their battery life is much shorter. But the Corps hasn't been interested in monitoring fish survival past the estuary.
However, BPA funding has kept Welch's work going, despite recommendations from fish and wildlife managers to reduce it. They have long held that because he tags only a few hundred fish, his work doesn't represent the run at large.
But he has collected enough data to debate that point.
When he reported his 2008 preliminary findings last month, they corroborated his 2006 results that showed survival of his acoustic-tagged smolts from both the Snake and Yakima rivers tracked with survivals of PIT-tagged fish from 2006 and 2008.
And perhaps more importantly, his data shows that those in-river survival rates appear to be "roughly" the same above and below the hydrosystem. Welch said ocean survival may actually be worse than in the hydro system.
The results did not show any differential mortality between fish from the Snake compared to Yakima smolts, which traverse four fewer dams. The Snake fish actually had higher survival per distance traveled.
About 11 percent of the inriver migrating Snake smolts were detected off NW Vancouver Island, 9.3 percent of the barged Snake fish, and 10.7 percent of the inriver migrating Yakima fish, about 1,500 kilometers from their starting point.
That means about 20 fish from each inriver release of 200 fish were detected off Vancouver Island.
He concluded that the lack of any benefit from transporting juveniles through the hydro system "likely occurs because transport moves smolts between two environments with roughly similar rates of survival."
Welch didn't include his 2007 results because of tagging problems that year.
Welch came under fire recently for publishing results in a peer-reviewed journal PLOS-Biology that showed evidence that survival of migrating juvenile chinook in the undammed Fraser River was similar to that seen in the Snake and Columbia--where test fish passed eight dams.
The Fish Passage Center recently posted a critical review of Welch's paper on its Web site. Some state and tribal agencies have also criticized Welch's earlier findings that have raised doubts about "latent mortality" of fish that pass more dams or are barged.
NMFS PIT-tag researchers have shown no clear benefit to wild Snake spring chinook stocks from being barged through the hydro system, but even FPC results have shown some benefits to hatchery spring chinook from transportation.
NMFS research has also shown great swings in survival to adulthood from fish that migrate only a week or two apart--with migrating inriver fish usually showing better SARs [Smolt-to-Adult Return Rates] early in the spring and barged fish showing better SARs later in the season.
These findings have led NMFS to conclude that later ocean entry usually coincides with better overall survival.
Welch's group used only two release groups from the Snake and Yakima rivers, so his findings do not cover the time-spread that could capture a whole season's worth of ups and downs related to SARs.
Federal scientists have speculated that these fluctuations are due to fast changes in ocean conditions like upwelling, or the appearance of heavy salmon predators like hake or mackerel when waters are warm.
Welch said survival through the estuary was much better than previous years. This was backed up by the Corps' own acoustic research, reported by Geoff McMichael, of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland.
McMichael said his group's preliminary 2008 survival estimates for spring chinook ranged from 65 percent to 94 percent, with fall chinook about the same. He said most spring chinook losses occurred in the lower 35 kilometers of the river. -B. R.
[3] Mixed News Over New Bird, Barging Results
The Corps of Engineers' attempt to re-engineer breeding grounds for salmon-munching birds in the Columbia River estuary has been a partial success, according to Oregon State University researcher Dan Robey.
Speaking at the Corps' four-day marathon research review in Portland in early December, Robey said an alternative colony site developed for Caspian terns at Crump Lake in Warner Valley attracted 430 nested pairs, including five terns branded at the estuary 500 km to the northwest.
But the old "build it and they will come" adage didn't hold for a new site created near Eugene. Not one tern nested there this year, though nine different ones showed up late in the nesting season.
Robey also said the Corps studied another tern nesting site in San Francisco Bay for possible expansion, where more than 800 breeding pairs already hang out. About 10 percent of their diet is made up of migrating juvenile salmonids--mostly hatchery-reared, non-ESA-listed fall chinook smolts from netpen release sites in San Pablo Bay.
With that much salmon in the Bay terns' diet, fish managers are concerned that moving some birds from the Columbia could adversely impact ESA stocks from the Sacramento River Basin.
Meanwhile, the tern colony at the mouth of the Columbia has kept growing, though not by much over last year's count. In 2008, 10,800 nesting pairs were counted on East Sand Island, where they had been relocated from an upriver site at Rice Island a few years ago.
The terns' diet seemed to be similar to that in previous years--about 29 percent juvenile salmonids. The researchers hadn't finished crunching 2008 numbers, but they said total consumption was probably similar to 2007, when the terns gobbled up an estimated 5.5 million smolts.
But terns haven't been the only avian headache for the Corps in that stretch of the river. Nearly 11,000 pairs of double-breasted cormorants also nested on Sand Island this year.
The population was down about 20 percent from 2007. However, the scientists reported that breeding success was pretty high, at about 2.3 chicks per breeding pair. An estimate of salmonid impacts is still in the works, but researchers expect it will be similar to 2007's, when the cormorants ate more than 9 million salmonids.
That year, most of the cormorants' diet of young salmonids was made up of subyearling chinook (5 million), along with coho (2.7 million), steelhead (1.3 million), and spring chinook (1.1 million).
Recent tagging efforts have also shown that other cormorant colonies in northwest Washington and southwestern British Columbia have contributed new recruits to the site in the Columbia estuary. The Corps is developing another program to move some cormorants from the Columbia.
In another presentation during the meeting, NOAA Fisheries scientist Doug Marsh reported on the latest results from fish transportation studies. Most of the spring chinook and steelhead are back from the 2005 outmigration. Adult returns were meager, due likely to poor ocean conditions that greeted the juvenile fish when they reached the ocean in 2005.
Marsh said only 28 wild adults returned from nearly 13,000 that were PIT-tagged and barged downstream, which represented a SAR [smolt-to-adult return rate] of 0.22 percent. That's down nearly 10 times from results just a few years ago, when ocean conditions were very good.
Only three wild non-detected (fish that passed dams via spillway or turbines) spring chinook returned to Lower Granite this year, out of 748 tagged fish--a SAR of 0.40 percent.
Nearly 6,000 wild fish that went through bypass systems at dams had a SAR of only 0.12 percent.
Marsh also said that fewer transported and bypassed chinook made it back through the hydro system as adults compared to inriver migrants, about 80 percent compared to nearly 100 percent, respectively.
Marsh also said the chinook transported as juveniles took longer to make it back through the hydro system as adults.
As for wild steelhead, they seemed to benefit from barging, with a SAR of 0.38 percent, while bypassed inriver migrators returned at only 0.11 percent. None of the 200 or so non-detected juveniles evidently returned.
The bypassed steelhead also made it back through the hydro system as adults at nearly a 100-percent rate, while about 60 percent of the transported fish successfully made it all the way back to Lower Granite Dam.
Marsh noted that fish tagged in 2006 and 2007 have already shown evidence of much higher survivals of jacks and two-ocean returns (fish that stayed in the ocean two years) than the 2005 outmigration, but SARs for the 2006 migration year won't be known until three-ocean chinook return next year. -B. R.
[4] Feds Back Down From Their No-Spill Spring Barging Strategy
NOAA Fisheries said it will go along with an independent science panel's recommendation to spill more water and barge fewer fish next year, even though it will likely kill more of them in the long run.
According to documents filed Dec. 17 in the ongoing litigation over the hydro BiOp, the federal agency said it would back off from its maxed-out fish barging policy for two weeks in May. Spill at three lower Snake dams was originally slated to stop for a two-week period in May to corral more juvenile chinook and steelhead for the barges.
The maxed-out barging scenario was one of the fish operations spelled out in the new BiOp released last May. But the feds decided to change the operation after a Dec. 12 meeting with agencies and sovereign parties gave them all a chance to hear from a member of the Independent Scientific Advisory Board about the "spill versus transport" question before they weighed in on three options.
The ISAB had recommended in a recent report that some spill be maintained during the May barging season to accommodate its concerns. Board members were worried ESA-listed Snake River sockeye may survive better by migrating inriver than by being barged.
In its report, the ISAB did note it didn't have much to back up that hunch--only some sporadic data about descaling at dam bypass systems. Nor did the ISAB cite any conclusive research that backed up the recommendation of using spill as the default mode of passage at the dams.
The board also said more spill was probably helpful to lamprey migration. And by keeping more young salmonids in the river, it speculated that their sheer numbers might swamp fish predators and actually improve their overall survival.
The federal agencies discussed several spill/transport options at the Dec. 12 meeting. Option 1 was to implement the BiOp; Option 2 called for modifying the spill/transport policy for one year, and reevaluating after garnering another year of adult return data. Option 3 called for modifying operations for two years.
The feds were recommending the second option. In a declaration filed Dec. 17 by Corps biologist Rock Peters, the Action Agencies and NMFS said they had decided to implement Option 2.
"The process to arrive at this decision for spill and transport in 2009 exemplifies the effectiveness of the 2008 adaptive management provisions," said Peters in his filing, "and more importantly, the continued emphasis by the Action Agencies to collaborate on the best available scientific information, and solicit and consider the views of the sovereigns in the RIOG [Regional Implementation Oversight Group] process."
The RIOG is a creature of the new BiOp. It's something like the old Implementation Team, but now combined with the Policy Work Group, the collaboration of agencies and sovereigns that hashed out issues in the new BiOp.
The ISAB report had put the agencies between the proverbial rock and a hard place over the spill/transport issue. But the agencies were loath to neglect the science panel's recommendations after using previous ISAB findings to support their positions before BiOp Judge James Redden.
The feds had used other ISAB recommendations from earlier reports to back up the use of their fish passage model [COMPASS] and the way they treated the "latent mortality" question in their analyses of dam operations on ESA-listed fish populations.
In fact, according to a Dec. 17 declaration filed in Redden's court, NMFS hydro division branch chief Ritchie Graves pointed out that the COMPASS model estimated that average relative smolt-to adult return rates back to Lower Granite Dam would be reduced by about 1 percent for spring chinook and 6 percent for steelhead by modifying the barging plan next year.
But he pointed out that the "operational adjustment" wouldn't affect the overall conclusions in the BiOp across its 10-year time frame.
Furthermore, Graves said "the impacts of the operation are likely to be mitigated because ocean trends have been favorable in recent years and there is no indication at present that these trends will be reversed in 2009--meaning that SARs will likely be higher for 2009 outmigrants than the 'average' estimates in the COMPASS modeling would predict (about 0.9 percent for chinook and 1.8 percent for steelhead)."
Back in October, when the spill/transport issue was raised at the monthly IT meeting, the feds were singing a different tune. At the time, Bruce Suzumoto, assistant regional administrator for NOAA Fisheries, characterized the difference between the ISAB recommendation and the feds' original position as "trading uncertainty for real benefits."
The battle over the 2008 BiOp will continue Mar. 6, when oral arguments are scheduled in Judge Redden's courtroom. -B. R.
[5] Battle Over Spring Chinook Harvest Goes On
Fish and wildlife commissioners from Oregon and Washington will soon decide how to split up next spring's chinook catch on the Columbia River between sport and commercial fishers.
Last month, Oregon blew off recommendations from a bi-state advisory panel that would have bumped up the base rate (when runs were medium to high) of the recreational sector's share of spring chinook to 65 percent, and dropped the gillnetters' share to 35 percent. The panel had developed a sliding scale for harvest allocations based on the preseason estimates of the relative strength of spring chinook runs in the Willamette and upriver Columbia.
But Oregon commissioners endorsed a 55-45 split between the sport and commercial sectors and a 50-50 split when the Willy run was very low and the Columbia's very high. The panel had called for a 60-40 split.
Last year, after the two states differed on how to split things up, they compromised by giving the sport side 61 percent and the gillnetters 39 percent. Before that, it had been 57/43.
The Willamette runs have tanked of late, which has complicated the harvest regimes, since the gillnetters were usually able to fish in the lower Columbia on strong Willamette runs before they reached their impact limits on ESA-listed upriver chinook. But last year, harvest managers let the gillnetters fish above the confluence of the Willamette and the Columbia to reduce their impacts on the poor Willamette run.
The 2008 harvest agreement in the US v. Oregon process raised the non-Indian impacts of the spring run from 2 percent to 2.7 percent when runs are healthy, but left to the states how to allocate those impacts between the recreational fishers and the gillnetters. Since the netters have a higher rate of incidental mortality when releasing wild fish from their nets than sporties do when unhooking them, the recreational fishers say they should get more fish to catch because they have less impact on the ESA-listed wild springers. Both groups are allowed to keep only fin-clipped chinook, which means they are of hatchery origin.
Releasing and resuscitating a wild chinook from a large-mesh net only seems to keep the fish alive about 60 percent of the time, so gillnetters have started using small-mesh tangle nets to reduce their impacts on ESA fish. Managers estimate the tangle nets cut mortality in half, but it's still estimated much higher than hooking mortality in the sport fishery, which is pegged at 10 percent.
The panel's recommendations were based on goals of keeping a sport fishery open for at least 45 days in March and April, and commercial harvest opportunities in March and April, with continued catches in the select-area fishery outside the mainstem Columbia, along with implementation of a 35-percent conservation buffer built into harvest rates.
However, sportfishing blogs lit up after the ODFW Commission's vote. Some groups are actively working to move the gillnetters out of mainstem fisheries or get rid of them altogether (see NW Fishletter 253).
Both sides claim the high moral ground--sporties for their cleaner fishery, netters for providing food and saving the fishery years ago.
In many forums where these issues have been debated, there is always one gillnetter who makes the point that, but for their concern, Bonneville Dam would have been built without any fish passage facilities.
The issue came up again last month on The Oregonian's website, where one blogger wrote that "the Astoria fishers went to Salem to burn the capital if Bonneville Dam was built without fish ladders, as was planned. It is only for their militancy that there is the last fish to argue over."
But the netters' high moral ground may actually be more like the sandy dredge spoils they fish around. Stanford University historian Richard White reported in The Organic Machine, his 1995 book on the remaking of the Columbia River, that except for artists' sketches, the Corps of Engineers always had "provisions" for fish passage at the dam.
The netters say the sports side has provided no science to warrant their position, only complaints about the possibility of lost jobs. One blogger on The Oregonian website pointed out that it was actually the recreational sector that went over its allowable impact limit last spring. -B. R.
[6] Most New F&W Proposals Flunk First Science Review
Ten of the first 11 new projects that have been developed from the Fish Accord process need more work before their scientific merit can be judged, according to a Dec. 12 memo from the Independent Scientific Review Panel, the group that reviews projects for the BPA-funded fish and wildlife program.
The panel said, "A few project sponsors will likely be able to respond to our comments quickly in a response memo, but most projects need significant revision."
The proposals from two tribes and the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission are the first to be offered to the panel for review out of nearly 200 projects that BPA has agreed to fund, in return for most tribes' and states' support of the latest hydro BiOp, which has been challenged by environmental and fishing groups, the state of Oregon and the Nez Perce Tribe.
The Accord proposals are on a fast track review, but it may take some time before their projects are OK'd by the science panel, which plays an important role in the process used by the Northwest Power and Conservation Council to develop proposal recommendations for BPA funding.
However, the Accord agreement states that projects developed in that process will be funded by BPA whether or not the Council recommends them, as long as the parties explain their reasons for bypassing the Council.
The tribes, in comments recently submitted in regard to the draft F&W program now being finalized by the Power Council, said their Accord projects did not need scientific review. However, a guidance document has been developed to help parties wade through the process (see NW Fishletter 255).
Just how that will work out is yet to be seen, but it was reported that BPA and Council staffers and tribal representatives were slated to meet this Friday to sort out the ISRP situation.
BPA spokesman Scott Sims told NW Fishletter that it's not unusual for the ISRP to ask for more information when new projects are introduced. He said his agency and the various sponsors are mapping out a strategy to respond to the ISRP comments.
"We're in a new era with these Accords and we're going to be on a learning curve," Sims said. He called the ISRP response an "initial dialog" that will continue to improve the proposals. He said they will undergo a joint internal review before they are submitted for ISRP review.
The Umatilla, Warm Springs, Shoshone-Bannock, Yakama, and Colville Tribes along with the Columbia Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, and the states of Montana, Idaho and Washington all have millions of dollars in future fish and wildlife proposals riding on this process.
However, the fast track could bog down because it may take extra time to satisfy the panel. They pointed out that some of these initial proposals "need to be completely reworked to meet the criteria for scientific adequacy."
The panel said the absence of the administrative form "hindered" their review. "Without a budget, reviewers lacked valuable information on the sequence and duration of project implementation, which gives an indication of the logical progression of the project and the ability of the sponsor to complete the project. The ISRP recommends that future Accord projects include a budget linked to work elements and time."
The ISRP also found some of the projects submitted "significantly overlap, geographically and topically."
They found only one project that met their scientific review criteria, a proposal to conduct a genetic assessment of Columbia River stocks from the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission. Two other proposals from CRITFC didn't pass muster, along with six projects from the Warm Springs Tribes, and a project to recondition steelhead kelts (fish that spawn more than once) proposed by the Yakama Tribes.
But the ISRP said it was committed to working with BPA, the Council and project sponsors to ensure the projects are "technically sound, thoroughly justified, well-documented from their initiation, and improved through our review."
Council staffers have reviewed the CRITFC genetic assessment project for possible action by NPCC members at next week's meeting. They said the Council could either recommend it for implementation as is, or defer action on it until a regional approach to monitoring, evaluation, research and reporting, now being developed, is completed. Staffers said "changes in scope and intent of this project may be required" when the regional strategy is implemented.
The staff review said the CRITFC study could contribute to the management of salmonid stocks by improving stock composition accuracy and allow for "timely" fish management, but it is also very expensive, costing more than $9 million from 2008 to 2017.
They advised the Council to proceed "cautiously" with a recommendation regarding full implementation of this project until "a more complete understanding" regarding the new monitoring and evaluation approach is defined and how the CRITFC proposal "would fit within this framework." -B. R.
[7] Feds Say Black Rock Project Too Expensive
The Bureau of Reclamation has decided that an ambitious proposal to pump water from the Columbia River into a massive new storage project in the Yakima watershed called Black Rock Reservoir would be a black hole for federal dollars.
The Bureau's five-year, $18 million study said none of the alternatives reviewed made economic sense, especially the proposal to spend nearly $8 billion to construct a 1.6 MAF storage project that would ease drought conditions for agricultural users. The study said even the Black Rock project wouldn't provide enough fishery benefits to be picked as the preferred alternative in the Bureau's final EIS.
Other less draconian options are still under review by the state of Washington, with a report expected next spring.
The Black Rock project called for construction of a 600-foot-high dam to hold back water pumped uphill from the Priest Rapids Pool on the mainstem Columbia in a 10-mile-long reservoir. The dam would have been larger than Grand Coulee, according to the Yakima Herald Republic. Environmental groups said the project would return only 13 cents for every dollar spent. -B. R.
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