Debate Rages Over Hatchery vs. Wild Salmon
P H I L O M A T H, Ore., April 3, 2001 -- Ron Yechout was elk hunting in the CoastRange a couple years ago when he came upon technicians at the FallCreek hatchery bashing coho salmon in the head with baseball batsand stripping their blood-red eggs into 5-gallon buckets.
Yechout got his video camera — so incensed was he to learn thatthe Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife was killing thousands ofhatchery fish and millions of their eggs so that about 100threatened wild Alsea River coho could spawn without competitionfrom their domesticated cousins.
Just as the Zapruder film fueled doubts over the assassinationof President John F. Kennedy, Yechout’s home video is spawningresistance to government efforts to save salmon as he shows it toservice clubs and chambers of commerce.
The video has found a receptive audience among people stillsmarting over logging cutbacks to protect the northern spotted owl.It has also sparked a legislative effort to stop killing hatcheryfish and a challenge of the Endangered Species Act.
Hatcheries Since 1872
“We can have a California condor raised in a laboratory andturn them loose and they are wild,” said Yechout, the manager of abank in this small farming and logging town. “Yet we have a higherstandard for fish. There is something wrong with that.”
Hatcheries have been part of the Pacific salmon equation since1872, when the U.S. Fish Commission built the first one on theMcCloud River in Northern California. Since then more than 400 havebeen established from Alaska to California, turning out more than325 million juvenile fish a year.
The biggest problem with hatcheries is they make people thinkthey can have salmon without worrying about wiping out theirspawning habitat with dams, clearcut logging and overgrazing,biologist Jim Lichatowich argues in his book, Salmon WithoutRivers.
Bad Training for Real World
From the very beginning, hatcheries ignored the lifecycle thathad made wild salmon thrive for 10,000 years since the last IceAge. Eggs were routinely shipped as far away as New Zealand, withno regard for the local adaptations the fish had evolved for theirhome rivers. Gene pools were truncated by spawning a wholegeneration from the first few fish to come in.
While hatcheries are good at producing fish for people to catch,they are not as good at producing fish to survive in the wild, saidReg Reisenbichler, a biologist for the U.S. Geological Survey.
To thrive in a hatchery, fish feed aggressively on the top ofthe water, where their food pellets are scattered. In the wild,that sort of behavior will get a smolt eaten by a kingfisher.
As a result, hatcheries genetically change the behavior of thefish, and are vulnerable to booms and busts, said Robin Waples,director of conservation biology at the National Marine FisheriesService’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle.
Hatcheries generally release smolts all at once, so a wholegeneration can be wiped out hitting the ocean when food is scarceor predators are plentiful. Spawners come back in a bunch, too,making them vulnerable to the weather.
Wild fish are spread out as they migrate to the ocean and returnto spawn, so if smolts run into a school of hungry mackerel or theeggs laid by spawners are washed away by flood, there are othersbehind them.
“The only sure way we know of maintaining salmon into thefuture is maintaining the natural diversity we know has carried thespecies through long periods in the past,” Waples said.
Tribes Let Fish Choose
Though still considered experimental by government agencies,tribal fisheries programs think combining higher survival rates ofyoung fish in hatcheries with habitat restoration will bring backmore fish for spiritual and economic use.
On the Hood River, which runs off towering Mount Hood into theColumbia, the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs have joinedwith the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. They are raisingthe fish under more natural conditions, and allowing the fish todecide when to go into the river, rather than dumping them out of atruck.
“We feel we’ve got to imitate Mother Nature the best we can,”said Mick Jennings, a former state fisheries biologist now workingfor the Warm Springs Tribes. “These fish have adapted overthousands of years on their own. The problems in this basin areman-caused activities.”
They haven’t been doing it long enough to see any increase inreturning adults, but they have doubled the proportion of youngfish reaching the mouth of Hood River, Jennings said.
At Fall Creek hatchery in Oregon’s Coast Range, the coho werebred since the 1950s for fishermen to catch in the ocean. Afterocean coho seasons were essentially eliminated in 1993 to protectdwindling wild stocks, the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commissiondecided to shut down Fall Creek’s coho program, said Doug DeHart,fisheries chief for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Video of Killing Angers Politicians
Smolt survival was seriously declining, from 5 percent in the1970s to 0.5 percent in recent years, he said. As a mix of stockstaken from up and down the coast and the lower Columbia River, theylacked the local adaptations evolved by wild fish.
DeHart’s explanations didn’t dissuade two state representativesincensed by Yechout’s video from crafting a bill that would bar thestate from killing off hatchery fish and create an expert panel toreview the science.
“It just doesn’t make sense to kill an endangered species whenwe’re trying to keep them alive,” said state Rep. Jeff Kropf,R-Halsey, who with state Rep. Betsy Close, R-Albany, plans tointroduce the bill next year.
The Pacific Legal Foundation, a property rights organization,lost attempts to stop killing the Fall Creek hatchery coho, but hasa lawsuit arguing that the Endangered Species Act protects hatcherycoho as well as wild.
“Now because of the Ron Yechout video, we know why salmon aredying,” said foundation attorney Russell Brooks. “The governmentis killing them.
“That allows them to continue to list coho salmon as athreatened species, which in turn allows them to continue toregulate. In that regulation they control land use and resources.That’s what it is, is a land grab.”
An adviser to the foundation, retired Oregon State Universityfisheries professor Jim Lannan finds the science favoring wild fishto be weak. He notes that the two strongest wild runs of coho inOregon are on rivers where salmon ranching operations went bust,leaving their domesticated stock to breed with wild fish.
“All I want to see is some intellectual honesty brought intothe argument and see what the public wants,” Lannan said. “Ifthey want culture-based fisheries so they can have the kind ofrobust offshore fisheries they had several years ago, that’s fine.Or if they want to treat salmon like a museum piece, that’s fine,too.”