When a couple of seals washed up on Seattle area beaches the TV news people were all over it and the resulting incriminations about those **XX!! killers from the Greenies.....but no mention of the possibility that it might have been tribal folks protecting their fisheries.

Without going into great detail the comments about studying pinniped numbers and impacts to death is on target. Lots of different studies have been accomplished to include the fairly recent peer reviewed Chasco study and report. Those folks adjusted Puget Sound Chinook smolt/juvenile losses to adult equivalents and concluded that seals predate twice the Chinook that SRKW Orcas consume and six times what all humans harvest. As I recall the smolt losses were between 25-30% of all Puget Sound outbound Chinook; both hatchery and wild.

That takes us to the WDFW rep's observations about the relatively small number of seals in the Stilly. I suspect he was under observing but the real issue seems to be the hundreds of hungry pinnipeds outside the river mouth. Keep in mind that it was just a fish (or was it half a fish) in the modeling which resulted in a reduced marked selective fishery.