[5] Colvilles Call For More Selective Fishing To Save Summer Run
The Colville Tribes say their wild summer chinook runs will disappear without a more coordinated effort between states and other tribes to manage harvest in the Columbia River.
That was the message to Washington and Oregon fish managers from Joe Peone, head of the tribes' fish and wildlife department, at a Jan. 29 meeting of the Columbia River Compact, the management entity for non-tribal harvest management on the river.
"With the planned escalating levels of non-selective summer chinook fishing, and the Colville Tribes' plans to enhance everyone's harvest with new production from Chief Joseph Hatchery, plus the Yakama Tribes' plans for summer chinook enhancement, and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife's enhancement plans in the Chelan River, our uncoordinated management will, in the absence of selective fishing, only spell the demise of the wild runs," Peone said. "We need more selective fishing to avoid a serious conservation problem."
Peone also called for increased monitoring on the steelhead and spring chinook fisheries to better understand the impacts of the lower river mixed-stock fisheries on the ESA-listed upper Columbia steelhead and spring chinook.
Lower Columbia gillnetters are already under attack from sportfishing groups who want them to fish only in select areas outside the mainstem where salmon are raised in net pens specifically for their harvest. A proposed bill in the Oregon Legislature would mandate just that.
However, Peone called on Washington and Oregon to initiate research on selective fishing methods for the non-treaty commercial fishery on summer chinook. Selective methods like purse seines or fish wheels allow for the live release of wild fish while marked hatchery fish are harvested.
Since the Colvilles are not signatories to the lower Columbia tribal fishing agreement maintained under the ongoing U.S. v. Oregon process, their share of the summer chinook catch comes out of the non-tribal portion. A 2007 agreement with WDFW spelled out how much they would get each year of that 50-percent share.
Peone said the agreement promotes cooperative management of the summer chinook, whose numbers have climbed the past several years, despite "the high exploitation these fish encounter in ocean and river fisheries and the mortalities these chinook encounter traversing seven to nine dams as juveniles and again as adults."
Most of the returning summer chinook are hatchery fish--and most are clipped, so selective fishing can allow for returning the wild component of the run back to the river.
Though the wild summers in the upper Columbia are not listed for protection, the Colvilles are worried that increasing harvest will keep from restoring the wild run, which is also expected to produce broodstock for its new Chief Joseph Hatchery.
Peone said modeling assessments have shown that selective fishing by the Colvilles alone will not ensure sufficient escapement in the future.
With BPA funding, the tribe tested beach seines and purse seines in 2008, and used tangle nets like lower Columbia gillnetters sometimes do in the spring.
When released, the survival of wild fish was over 99 percent from the seines, Peone said. Out of 802 summer chinook caught, 479 hatchery fish were kept, and 297 wild ones were released. He said only 26 wild chinook died, but 25 had been caught in tangle nets.
Peone recommended that managers begin research in the use of these selective methods for the lower river commercial fisheries, since it could eventually mean many more wild fish getting to spawning grounds in the upper Columbia and Okanogan rivers.
With marking rates of hatchery fish nearly 70 percent in both the tribal and non-tribal fisheries downriver last year, Peone said that was good enough to justify selective fishing.
With a preseason prediction of about 71,000 summer chinook, this year's plan calls for a harvestable surplus of more than 36,000 fish, to be split evenly between the tribal and non-tribal parties.
The Colvilles' agreement with WDFW calls for about two-thirds of the non-tribal harvest to be taken above Priest Rapids Dam, with the tribe getting half. That works out to 6,602 summer chinook in 2009.
In recent years, the tribe has allocated some of their share back to the state, which had increased the non-tribal share. In the past two years, 1,000 chinook were re-allocated this way. Peone expected that it would happen again this year.
"These pre-season adjustments allowed for much greater non-tribal sport and commercial fisheries," said Peone. "That said, what is clear now is that granting harvest allocation from the Colville Tribal selective fishery to non-tribal non-selective fisheries only increases the mortality to wild fish, which is unacceptable to the Colville Tribes."
With current ocean and inriver fisheries taking about 70 percent of the wild summers and an added 15-percent loss from dam passage, Peone said the Colvilles don't want to monitor the eventual destruction of the run, but to keep track of its increase in viability.
He called on the managers to better monitor all lower-river fisheries to make more accurate estimates of impacts to each population, since it is a requirement of their headwater fisheries and part of the federal salmon-recovery initiative now under way.
The Colvilles have already planned more monitoring to be funded by BPA as part of the Accords process. They want to assess current assumptions about upper Columbia spring chinook and steelhead survival between Bonneville and McNary dams where lower Columbia tribes gillnet and sport fishers ply.
The Colvilles say the assumptions are used to assess extinction risk and recovery potential and more study has the potential to increase steelhead survival through the lower river by 22 percent and spring chinook by 6 percent.
"In particular," Peone told the managers, "the inter-dam passage conversion appears substantially greater than the sum of dam-passage losses and reported harvest. Lower-river fisheries taking endangered upper Columbia River spring chinook also need greater monitoring to assess harvest impacts at the population level.
"The assumption that all populations are similarly harvested at an average harvest rate in mixed-stock fisheries has potential impacts that can be disastrous to weak populations." -B. R.
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