Hatchery Fish = Wild Fish

[cj001f]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A51480-2004Apr28?language=printer

 

Hatchery Salmon To Count as Wildlife

 

 

By Blaine Harden

Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, April 29, 2004; Page A01

 

 

SEATTLE, April 28 -- The Bush administration has decided to count hatchery-bred fish, which are pumped into West Coast rivers by the hundreds of millions yearly, when it decides whether stream-bred wild salmon are entitled to protection under the Endangered Species Act.

 

This represents a major change in the federal government's approach to protecting Pacific salmon -- a $700 million-a-year effort that it has described as the most expensive and complicated of all attempts to enforce the Endangered Species Act.

 

The decision, contained in a draft document and confirmed Wednesday by federal officials, means that the health of spawning wild salmon will no longer be the sole gauge of whether a salmon species is judged by the federal government to be on the brink of extinction. Four of five salmon found in major West Coast rivers, including the Columbia, are already bred in hatcheries, and some will now be counted as the federal government tries to determine what salmon species are endangered.

 

"We need to look at both wild and hatchery fish before deciding whether to list a species for protection," said Bob Lohn, Northwest regional administrator for the National Marine Fisheries Service.

 

Lohn added that the new policy will probably help guide decisions this summer by the Bush administration about whether to remove 15 species of salmon from protection as endangered or threatened.

 

From Washington state to Southern California, the decision to count hatchery-bred fish in assessing the health of wild salmon runs could have profound economic consequences.

 

In the past 15 years, the federal government's effort to protect stream-bred wild salmon has forced costly changes in how forests are cut, housing developments are built, farms are cultivated and rivers are operated for hydroelectricity production. Farm, timber and power interests have complained for years about these costs and have sued to remove protections for some fish.

 

They are enthusiastic advocates of counting hatchery fish when assessing the survival chances of wild salmon. Unlike their wild cousins, hatchery fish can be bred without ecosystem-wide modifications to highways, farms and dams.

 

"Upon hearing this news, I am cautiously optimistic that the government may be complying with the law and ending its slippery salmon science," said Russell C. Brooks, a lawyer for the Pacific Legal Foundation, an industry-funded group that has challenged federal salmon-protection efforts in court.

 

Word of the new policy was greeted by outrage from several environmental groups.

 

"Rather than address the problems of habitat degraded by logging, dams and urban sprawl, this policy will purposefully mask the precarious condition of wild salmon behind fish raised by humans in concrete pools," said Jan Hasselman, counsel for the National Wildlife Federation.

 

"This is the same sort of mechanistic, blind reliance on technology that got us into this problem in the first place," said Chris Wood, vice president for conservation at Trout Unlimited. "We built dams that block the fish, and we are trucking many of these fish around the dams. Now the administration thinks we can just produce a bazillion of these hatchery fish and get out from underneath the yoke of the Endangered Species Act."

 

Six of the world's leading experts on salmon ecology complained last month in the journal Science that fish produced in hatcheries cannot be counted on to save wild salmon. The scientists had been asked by the federal government to comment on its salmon-recovery program but said they were later told that some of their conclusions about hatchery fish were inappropriate for official government reports.

 

"The current political and legal wrangling is a sideshow to the real issues. We know biologically that hatchery supplements are no substitute for wild fish," Robert Paine, one of the scientists and an ecologist at the University of Washington, said when the Science article was published in late March.

 

Federal officials said Wednesday that the new policy on hatchery salmon -- to be published in June in the Federal Register and then be opened to public comment -- was in response to a 2001 federal court ruling in Oregon. In that ruling, U.S. District Judge Michael R. Hogan found that the federal government made a mistake by counting only wild fish -- and not genetically similar hatchery fish -- when it listed coastal coho salmon for protection.

 

To the dismay of many environmental groups, the federal government chose not to appeal that ruling, though it seemed counter to the reasoning behind the spending of more than $2 billion in the past 15 years to protect stream-bred wild salmon.

 

"There was an inescapable reasoning to Judge Hogan's ruling," said Lohn, chief of federal salmon recovery in the Northwest. "We thought his reasoning was accurate."

 

He said the Bush administration will continue to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on habitat improvement for salmon.

 

"We have major problems to overcome, both with habitat and with improving the way hatcheries are operated," Lohn said. "Run right, hatcheries can be of considerable value to rebuilding wild fish runs."

[kurthicks]

[bDubyaH]

Next the shrub administration will start counting the animals in zoos as wild, that way we can get rid of any excess green space set aside for animals, say like ANWR, and pave that shit. Oh yippie more places for the soccer moms to drive their hummers. So does this mean that the Atlantic salmon now caught on the Pacific coast (damn Canadians!) will be included in the number of fish on the Atlantic side under the ESA? Bunch of morons!

Here's the deal people. Eat WILD salmon...it tastes better, and contributes far less to environmental degredation, particularly now that they want to use the hatchery population numbers to keep from having to do any sort of meaningful changing of our ways. Hey shrub

[Greg_W]

"Rather than address the problems of habitat degraded by logging, dams and urban sprawl, this policy will purposefully mask the precarious condition of wild salmon behind fish raised by humans in concrete pools," said Jan Hasselman, counsel for the National Wildlife Federation.

 

HOW ABOUT ADDRESSING THE PROBLEM OF INDIANS WITH GILL NETS SITTING AT THE MOUTH OF THE FUCKING FISH LADDERS!!!! GEE, DON'T YOU THINK THAT AFFECTS THE NUMBERS OF BOTH WILD AND HATCHERY FISH RETURNING? FUCKING PISSES ME OFF THAT EVERYONE TALKS ABOUT DAMS AND LOGGING, BUT NO ONE WILL TOUCH THE BULLSHIT FISHING TACTICS THAT THE INDIANS ARE ALLOWED TO UTILIZE.

[arlen]

Get your own treaty, dumbass.

[fenderfour]

Yep, I imagine that there were plenty of fish ladders around when the treaty was signed...

[Greg_W]

Get your own treaty, dumbass.

 

Fuck you, Arlen, I'm sick of all this treaty bullshit. If everyone cared so much about the environment and salmon, they'd take a hard look at indian fishing practices. It's the sportsmen who will lose, despite the tourism and recreation dollars they bring to the state. As I recall, the indian catch numbers are related to the commercial catch numbers, so no one is going to call for a redux in the commercial numbers. What about an all out moratorium similar to what they did on the East Coast for Atlantic Salmon? I think it was a 10-year moratorium and the species came back. Everyone talks about the ESA and salmon/steelhead being scarce, but since I've lived out West (since '97) there have been record returns on the Columbia, Snake, Grande Ronde, Clearwater, and other rivers.

[bDubyaH]

In the greater scheme the natives chillling at the fish ladder don't matter that much. yes they do catch fish, and yes it can be irritating as hell to see them doing that, but if it is on native land they can do whatever they like (it's a bit of a deal worked out with the feds). also the native catch is generally minor in relation to any commercial and sport catch and is included in the population analyses. So it comes back to a. there is a resource that many people want to use b. that resource has very specific habitat needs c. we can either adjust our ways or farm them? Adjusting our ways is harder, but I would be willing to bet leads to an overall better quality of life (that's for everyone, not just the shareholders in a logging operation) so do we adjust our ways a bit and not build the next suburban mini-mall housing development on the banks of a stream, do we not clear cut down to the edge of the riparian coridor. Or do we say screw it all this is America I have a right to fuck shit up and then let "science" fix it (in a lame-ass short-cut kinda way). Oh yeah and all this is besides the fucked up impacts that the retarded genetics of farmed salmon inflict on wild salmon.

Friends don't let friends eat Farmed Fish!

[arlen]

You can beat your head against it all you want, but it's a legal reality, Greg. Besides, fishing tribes have multiple levels of regulation on their fishing practices, and they were here doing it for a living before "sportsmen" had a sport.

[Greg_W]

In with "changing our ways", why do you not consider adjusting catch limits for both commercial and indians? Those are the two largest harvesters in the fishery.

[bDubyaH]

That is part of it, in western AK there has been a few times when no subsistance (or commercial or sport) harvest has been allowed due to extremely poor runs. But in reality stocks are "managed" for the primary user groups. while the greatest value added product is derived from sport fisherman in most areas, at least in AK, they are not the greatest harvesters. commercial fisherman are and their livelihood depends on the catch size. but when it comes right down to it you could have no catch at all and the populations would continue to decline if sediment loads and temperatures are increased in streams due to logging/construction above salmon critical threshholds. in short if we want wild fish, they need the habitat, then we can manage based on oceanographic conditions (very important for year-class determination) and population sizes, taking into account the impacts of all user groups. But I do understand what you are saying it often seems like the difficult part of holding back is switched from one group to another ie. we keep catching fish, you stop logging and vice-versa. But it's not only science it's politics if it were just science it would be easy.

[arlen]

Tribal catch limits are adjusted, sometimes more frequently than commercial or sport fishing. It's just that they're done by the appropriate agencies--federal, supra-tribal (like NWIFC) and tribal--rather than typically state agencies, although they cooperate with them. And they're separate from a lot of the rule-making process that commercial and sport fishing industries can influence.

 

In any case, tribal fisheries are responsible for a lot of habitat improvements that benefit all fishing on the rivers, and they directly benefit sport fishermen by letting them fish on the rez at all.