[1] Sockeye Run Breaks 1947 Record
Columbia Basin harvest managers have bumped up their estimate of this year's sockeye run to 375,000 fish after Bonneville Dam counts stayed above 10,000 per day far longer than most anyone had expected.
With about 364,000 counted so far, this year's return will set a new record since the dam was completed in 1938, surpassing the 1947 sockeye run of 335,000. The run has passed the 300,000-fish mark in only two other years, 1952 and 1958, both years when there was considerable harvest, with catches of 166,000 and 197,000 fish, respectively.
On June 23, the 30,000-plus sockeye counted at the dam set a daily record, beating the 27,000 sockeye count on July 7, 1955. That same day, tribal and federal fish managers upgraded the sockeye run to 250,000 after it was clear this year's run was going to be really big. Then it set another daily record the following day. About 14,000 were originally estimated to be heading for Lake Wenatchee, 110,000 to the Okanogan, and 600 ESA-listed socks to the Snake River.
Washington and Oregon harvest managers met a day later and recommended opening the Columbia River to recreational fishing for sockeye all the way to Priest Rapids Dam. WDFW's Cindy LeFleur indicated at the time that managers felt that the run size was likely to go even higher than 250,000.
Tribal fishers were already allowed to keep sockeye as part of their summer season, and said they would likely harvest about 14,000 sockeye and 24,000 summer chinook by July 8. Now they expect to harvest around 25,000 sockeye and 17,000 chinook by July 15.
Non-Indian gillnetters complained that they were being kept from fishing on the third big sockeye run in three years because of a 1-percent impact limit on ESA Snake River sockeye that doesn't give them a fair share of the recent abundance. They had caught about 5,000 summer chinook in two openings.
Most of the sockeye are wild and aiming for B.C.'s Lake Osoyoos, after swimming up the Columbia, and turning off into the Okanogan River between Wells and Chief Joseph dams. Managers were concerned about the Lake Wenatchee component, and were waiting to see if it reached preseason expectations before opening any recreational fishing for them.
An even tinier number are headed for Idaho's Redfish Lake, where the ESA-listed fish have been kept on life support for years. But the expensive captive broodstock program for the Idaho sockeye finally seems to be paying off.
More than nine hundred of them have already been counted passing Lower Granite Dam, almost twice as many as last year at this time.
About 1,200 sockeye--a record since the fish were listed in 1991--were counted at Granite last year, and more than 900 of them made it to the hatchery weir below Redfish Lake. So, it looks like the 2010 run will continue a trend begun in 2008, when nearly 900 made it past Granite.
In 2007, only 54 were counted.
The Lake Osoyoos run is surprising nearly everyone but Canadian federal biologist Kim Hyatt, who told NW Fishletter in 2008 that the 2010 return might be "huge" because migrating juveniles were entering one of the most productive ocean regimes on record. He said last week that the smolt-to-adult return rate for the B.C. sockeye would be around 8 percent. That's an amazing return considering only about half the returning adults usually survive the final leg of the journey from Wells Dam on the Columbia River to their spawning grounds in southern B.C.
Washington and Oregon managers had been more circumspect, and predicted less than half of what returned in 2008. But their prediction for the 2009 sockeye run was only a few thousand fish high of the 179,000-fish return.
Fish prediction is an iffy business at best. The 2008 Columbia sockeye return was a big eye-opener for harvest managers, when the actual run tripled preseason predictions and provided spill advocates with some propaganda to tout the benefits of the court-ordered spill program at federal dams.
NOAA Fisheries scientists said they had observed a weak correlation between spill and improved smolt-to adult returns in the Snake, but the feds' analysis found a negative correlation between spill levels and adult survival in the Columbia, where more than 99 percent of the sockeye came from.
The big return to Lake Osoyoos in 2008 was not the product of particularly good ocean conditions, but it was helped by better water management and a supplementation effort that added hatchery fry to the wild population.
According to WDFW records, the largest sockeye run that has been seen since 1938, when Bonneville Dam was completed, occurred in 1947, with a combined harvest and dam count of 335,000 fish.
The 2008 return of 213,000 sockeye was the largest since 1959's 271,000-fish return. But back then, 185,000 sockeye were landed in commercial fisheries. In 1958, when 313,000 sockeye returned, 197,000 were harvested. There have been no targeted commercial harvest on them by non-Indians since 1988. -Bill Rudolph
[2] Summer Run Downgraded; Big Fall Return Expected
The sockeye run may be the big stunner this year, but some other salmon stocks are not surprising managers in a good way. On June 30, they downgraded the summer chinook run from 89,000 to 82,000 fish. Yesterday, they did it again. Now they estimate only 75,000 summers will make it to the river mouth. Most of the summer chinook are headed for hatcheries in the upper Columbia region.
Managers originally said 56,000 chinook would be split evenly between tribal and non-tribal fisheries, with 13,400 allocated to non-treaty fisheries above Priest Rapids Dam, 5,450 fish for lower Columbia gillnetters, and another 5,450 fish going to the recreational side.
Meanwhile, a steady trickle of summer chinook is still rolling into Idaho. Almost 500 a day are passing Lower Granite Dam, with the spring/summer run adding up to 119,000 fish so far. That's less than half of the managers' preseason estimate of 272,000 spring/summers, but it's been good enough to pass the 2002 return (97,000) to become the second largest spring chinook run in recent decades.
However, this year's return is still way below 2001's return of 186,000 hatchery and wild fish. The official counting of the Snake spring/summer run continues at Granite until Aug. 17.
Nearly half a million steelhead are expected to migrate past Bonneville Dam this summer and fall, about 139 percent of the recent 10-year average.
The fall chinook run should top more than 664,000 fish, with nearly 320,000 upriver brights expected to be heading for the Hanford Reach area, more than 100,000 higher than last year's return.
Tule numbers should be way up this year, too. Nearly 163,000 are expected back to Bonneville Pool, more than three times last year's return, and another 75,000 destined for the mid-Columbia.
About 85,000 hatchery falls are expected in the lower river, with about 10,000 wilds (ESA-listed) predicted to show. Managers also estimate that more than 5,000 ESA-listed wild fall chinook will return to the Snake River this year. -B. R.
[3] June Rains Push Basin Water Supply To 76 Percent Of Normal: La Niña On The Way
The Northwest River Forecast Center bumped up the January-July water supply (Columbia at The Dalles) to 76 percent of normal on July 8--a healthy boost from the previous month's 69 percent.
There was nothing normal about the early June rains. Basinwide precip above The Dalles was 179 percent of normal from June 1-28. Last month saw above-normal precip in every region of the Northwest, 156 percent of normal for the Columbia above Coulee, 241 percent in Oregon's Umatilla watershed, and 216 percent above normal for the Upper Snake.
The feds say the next 90-day period portends an equal chance of below-average, average, or above-average temperature and precipitation. The April-September forecast calls for an 80-percent of normal water supply.
They also noted that a full-blown La Niña may be in place by the end of summer, which could lead to a wetter, colder winter.
Already, conditions in the equatorial Pacific have changed rapidly from El Niño-neutral just a month or two ago. In some places, below-surface water temperatures are now 4 degrees Celsius below average. Further cooling is expected, said a July 6 update from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.
"Historically, about 35 to 40 percent of El Niño events (such as occurred in 2009/10) are followed by a La Niña within the same year," said the Aussie update. "The combination of current trends and model outlooks suggest the chance of a La Niña in 2010 is now clearly more likely than not."
NOAA agrees. In its own July 6 update, said conditions were favorable for the onset of a La Nina event between July and August and last through early 2011.
"The central equatorial Pacific Ocean could stay colder than normal into summer and beyond," said oceanographer and climatologist Bill Patzert, in a June 13 press release from the Jet Propulsion Lab. "That's because sea level is already about 10 centimeters [4 inches] below normal, creating a significant deficit of the heat stored in the upper ocean." He said the next few months will reveal if the current cooling trend will eventually evolve into a long-lasting La Niña situation.
Off the Northwest coast, the ocean is slowly cooling, but temperatures are still average in many areas close to shore. Further offshore, some waters are already 2 degrees F below average. -B. R.
[4] State Of The Ocean--2009
In their review of last year's ocean conditions, Canadian biologists called 2009, "the year of the Humboldt Squid." That's because the warming waters off the Pacific Northwest hosted the jet-propelled predators in numbers never before seen.
According to the report, one three-minute tow by researchers studying hake abundance nabbed 120 of them. Commercial fishing boats targeting other species, sometimes caught the large squid as bycatch by the tens of tons.
There were ten major incidents last year where they washed ashore. They also showed up on beaches in Campbell River, and Puget Sound in December. No one is sure why that happens.
Luckily, they seem to have gone back to California, leaving some evidence that they have decimated hake populations off the Northwest coast. They could have eaten plenty of young salmon as well, though there is not much evidence from a study of stomach contents.
NOAA Fisheries researcher Bill Petersen, based in Newport, Oregon, told NW Fishletter earlier this week that hake fishermen are tied up in his seaport town for the time being because there are no hake around to catch. He said last year's squid visitors may very well have something to do with it.
But 2009 wasn't all bad news.
Since nearby ocean waters remained cool through the spring and early summer, migrating juvenile salmon likely survived in good numbers until later in the season. NOAA trawl surveys last June found juvenile chinook numbers off Washington and Oregon to be the fourth highest in 12 years of sampling.
But the Canadian report says warming waters likely affected some juvenile coho stocks, after researchers off Vancouver Island last spring found them in the highest numbers they've ever seen. "However, their growth rate, between May and October 2009 was one of the lowest since observations began in 1998, coinciding with the onset of warmer local waters," said the report.
The scientists said they weren't exactly sure why the decline in the coho growth rate was so severe, but it coincided in time with the shift in zooplankton populations from cool-water species to warm-water species. They also cautioned that even if juvenile coho survival was high, adult returns were likely to be modest since the brood year of 2007 was relatively small--due to another period of warm ocean conditions in 2006 when the young cohos migrated to sea.
"In 2009, there was an almost complete shift in zooplankton species on the outer continental shelf of the west coast of Vancouver island between late May and early September," said the report. Two warm-water plankton species dominated the big switch--species that had usually made up a large part of the biomass off southern California over the past 30-50 years. Both have become extremely abundant in Northwest waters in some years since 2000.
The Canadian report pointed to NOAA researcher Peterson's own surveys of plankton growth in 2009 that seem to indicate warming waters were more of a localized event and not a result of an El Niño, which usually causes a northerly flow of subtropical waters during summer and autumn.
By early 2010, however, Oregon coastal waters were showing above average temperatures, said the report, "likely due to wind patterns associated with El Niño."
As El Niño events go, the latest one hasn't been much, said Peterson. He expects an average to below-average year for salmon returns from juveniles that migrated out this year.
Peterson also said there hasn't been a real definitive spring transition this year, when currents and wind switch from southerly to a northerly direction and trigger the upwelling conditions that bring up nutrients from the deep to spark plankton growth. "It's been off and on all spring," he said.
Last year, the spring transition began early in March.
Just back from a June survey off Washington and Oregon, Peterson said ocean productivity looks about average, with "lots" of subyearling fall chinook out there. The young fall chinook may have got to the ocean faster than normal because of the early June rains that bumped flows in the Snake and Columbia Basin to levels far higher than from any expected freshet fed by last winter's meager snowpack.
Another intriguing bit of research included in the new report is David Welch's results from acoustic-tagging a group of Fraser River sockeye migrating to sea from Cultus Lake in 2007 and tracking them up Georgia Strait and the east side of Vancouver Island to a point where they entered Queen Charlotte Sound. Of the original 200 tagged sockeye, about 27 percent made it up to the Sound where they enter the outside ocean environment.
But that's not all. To extend battery life in the tags, Welch's group had programmed them to turn off once they reached the open ocean, and turn on again two years later, in 2009, as the adult sockeye approached their spawning grounds. Two adult sockeye from the original 200 were actually detected at arrays off Vancouver Island and later in the Fraser River. According to the report, the 1-percent return rate was similar to return rates from hatchery and wild sockeye counted upon leaving and returning to the lake.
The analysis suggested that sockeye mortality beyond the Fraser/Georgia Strait region must have been at least 7 times higher beyond that point in their journey, and may explain why other Fraser sockeye stocks returned at much lower levels than expected last year. The report said it was also possible that a disease contracted during their migration later reduced their survival, "but the available data cannot be used to directly support this theory either."
Other findings in the State of the Ocean report had suggested that unusually low chlorophyll levels in Queen Charlotte Sound in April 2007 may have contributed to low marine survival for Fraser sockeye that returned last year. Welch suggested that since the Cultus Lake and other Fraser stocks had similar survival rates back to the river, "it is plausible that other Fraser River sockeye smolts in 2007 also had greater mortality after migrating through Queen Charlotte Strait."
There is one major caveat to the findings in this in the DFO report--few, if any of the results have yet been peer-reviewed. Welch may still have a hard time convincing his fellow researchers that survival rates of his acoustic-tagged hatchery fish can represent the run at large since they were so much bigger (159-189 mm) than typical wild smolts (average 100 mm). -B. R.
[5] Fraser Sockeye Prediction Gets Complicated
After getting burned big time over last year's Fraser River prediction, Canadian biologists have developed a more complicated way of trying to estimate this year's return. A DFO paper released in June says that three alternative scenarios have been developed to deal with uncertainty over future survival--each representing a different level of productivity.
Last year, only about 1.5 million sockeye showed up from the 10-million sockeye prediction--DFO said the actual return was down in the 10-percent range of probability. Most stocks showed the lowest productivity on record, which has puzzled biologists because it was generally thought that ocean conditions had improved when the fish went to sea in 2007.
When the "recent productivity" scenario is used in the new analysis, the forecasts of the four run timing groups from 25-percent to 75-percent probability levels are:
The forecast says there is a one in four chance that the total run will be at or below 7 million, and a three in four chance that it will be at or below 18.3 million. This year's return is expected to be dominated by Late Shuswap Sockeye--about 63 percent at the 50-percent probability level.
The latest analysis has found about a 50-percent probability that the 2010 Fraser sockeye run will add up to about 11 million fish, but the report cautions that "while recommendations were presented to improve the forecasting performance, significant improvements are unlikely to reduce uncertainty."
On July 9, the Pacific Salmon Commission bumped up their forecast for Early Stuart Run to 110,000 from 41,000 (50-percent probability), after analyzing the migration, so far. -B. R.
[6] Enviros Sue NWPCC Over Newest Power Plan
The Idaho-based Northwest Resource Information Center filed a lawsuit July 6 in the Ninth Circuit Court that claims the latest power plan developed by the Northwest Power and Conservation Council illegally inflates the cost of salmon mitigation and ignores the benefits of increased fish runs.
The petition faults the Council for using a cost allocation methodology that "arbitrarily and artificially inflates the costs of measures for anadromous fish protection, mitigation, and enhancement, most notably bypass spill and reservoir operations. Moreover, the Council's analysis of the Program's cost is not based on methodology that quantifies the environmental costs and benefits of power from the FCRPS and other resources."
The lawsuit goes after BPA's cost estimates of foregone revenues and power purchases associated with dam operations necessary to aid fish. The petition says BPA's use of wholesale market rates, instead of the actual rates it charges customers for power to estimate costs, "exaggerates" the energy-related costs of salmon mitigation, which has "a chilling effect" on current or potential additional proposals to aid fish.
NWPCC spokesman John Harrison said the Council has no comment at this time because it is still studying the petition.
Meanwhile, Earthjustice attorney Steve Mashuda told The Lewiston Tribune July 8 that by using average costs, BPA's estimate of spill and flow augmentation costs would have been $300 million a year instead of $450 million. -B. R.
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