Serially?

This?

Action Alert-Next Step we need your support by no later than March 22nd
A huge thank you!!!!! To all of you for supporting us on the 2.5 year WDFW Commission process on changing the old WDFW Commission Hatchery Policy called Hatchery Reform and removing HSRG language. I am not sure how many of you understand how game changing this is! This is the biggest positive salmon news in decades! WE WON!
We have one more issue that we need your help with one more time to jump this last hurdle in the HSRG process. It is removed, but need to make sure that the SEPA process moves forward allowing the plan to advance to the next step. If you agree you need to respond that you are satisfied that the Determination of Nonsignificance (DNS) is correct for DNS 21-008: ANADROMOUS SALMON AND STEELHEAD HATCHERY POLICY C-3624 which SUPERSEDES POLICY C-3619.
This is critical in order for the WDFW and Northwest Treaty Tribes to start work on the Co-manager Hatchery Policy where each river system will be evaluated to see where hatchery production can be increased. You can take the easy road, read the document we have pre-written for you, and hit the send button, or you can write your own comments and email it to: SEPAdesk2@dfw.wa.gov
WDFW sent out a document called Determination of Nonsignificance DNS 20-045. Please click on the link below and read it. The document also has other ways to contact them to send your letter. We need all the emails and comments we can get, as this is a numbers game. There are going to be other organizations trying to stop this next step from moving forward and sending out their comments against it. Its important that you send this out ASAP!
Click Here to read the document
HSRG was an automatic perpetual funding machine for the salmon recovery “industry” as it provided a constant influx of funding by using the name of salmon recovery. It also provided language to sue to shut down hatchery production from all the while, adding additional cuts to our hatchery production output. Lawsuits take needed money away from our hatcheries when paid out to the ones suing. The problem being is that the many organizations put funding first and fish second. This is used as a crisis management tool. No crisis-no funding. There is no money in recovered fisheries.
Ilwaco’s Butch Smith and I have been working non-stop on removing this for 5-6 years. Many, many sleepless nights to get here. WDFW Commissioner Don McIsaac was the key driver to getting us to this point. He was former Pacific Fisheries Management Council’s Executive Director for 16 years which is the highest fisheries seat in our West Coast. He understands salmon better than just about anyone. He took the job as a WDFW Commissioner to bring back our salmon runs and rebuild our hatcheries and production where it makes sense. Larry Carpenter and the rest of the commissioners deserve our thanks too. We really appreciate what they did. They voted for change, that in the following years will make North of Falcon easier by having more fish to split up. So next time you see them please thank them.
We cannot end this without thanking our tribal brothers and sisters that were key in getting us to this point. I personally want to thank Lorraine Loomis, Justin Parker, Lisa Wilson, GI James, Jason Gobin, Scott Schuyler, Mike Crewson, Tom Chance, Ray Fryberg, Randy Kindley, and many other tribal members, for reaching across the line to build a coalition with PSA and Coastal fishers that led us to this huge victory! Without getting this done we would have continued down the same death spiral of massively decreased hatchery production. We agree that increased hatchery production is needed to get us all back fishing. Please respond today and forward this to your family members and friends. We need massive responses to get to the next level so that the anti-hatchery groups do not kill this as they are working against us. Thank you!
Sincerely,
Ron Garner
President
Puget Sound Anglers State Board


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Can somebody frame this one for me? Trying to understand the significance of this,

fb

I believe that the somewhat simple answer is that it will allow significant increases in artificial production. As an example, the lower Columbia Chinook are/were in such bad shape that hatchery releases had to be almost eliminated to allow for "recovery" of naturally spawning fish. As has been noted in PS, the decades since listing have not resulted in improvements in the wild fish. The argument can thus be made that actual recovery is , in many cases, impossible to achieve. We can debate the reasons (habitat, climate change, overfishing, your choice) but the rusult is that we, as a society, don't want to accept the cost of meaningful wild recovery and the constraints on development that leads to. So, if we are going to have fisheries where we kill fish, then we gotta grow them in hatcheries.

You forgot to thank the starving PS Killer Whales.

The general public cares for Willy.

Not so much for fish or salmon in general.

03/17/2021

Is this a salmon issue or will/does this also affect Wild/nature steelhead????

I still have not seen a "real plan" placed by WDFW, after the 12/14/2020 change on "no fishing from boats", is there a plan?????? Someone in WDFW Fish management needs to put a management plan in writing and make the general public aware, probably before 2021/22 license sales start, could affect how people spent their "fishing bucks"

Just saying............

Plan? We don't need no stinkin' Plan. As long as we stay out of court, all's fine.

Have to agree, Doc. General public likely wants lots of fish out there to feed Willy, the seals, and all the birds.

Hatchery Science Review Group (HSRG) ? I'm not a biologist so I don't understand the language and had to Google it.

I'm curious how groups like WSC, etc. will react? More lawsuits slowing or stopping any increase in hatchery production?

How do you quite the federal government?
HSRG was put into effect by the US Congress in 2000.

Got the email about this yesterday.

Looks as though they've decided having more fish for markets is more important than having wild fish. I'm frankly surprised it took so long.

I'm frankly surprised you make this an either/or situation and attribute the motivation as commercial.

Because it is. You can't restore the Columbia above Bonneville until the dams are gone. Same with watersheds like the Sacramento and San Joaquin. There are many others. Further, we have demonstrated that the wild stocks can't support the harvest we (rec/commercial) want to direct at them. We do't want to leave water in rivers, let rivers have floodplains, leave trees on hillsides. WA, NOAA, and the Co-Managers have had since the 90s to begin the actual recovery process for Chinook and steelhead. That success should be enough to convince folks how important the actual recover and restoration of these fish is.

For the "Make Hatchery Fish Great Again" folks, you might want look at the facts.
No wild fish means no hatchery fish.
They are forever connected, break that connection and poof, it all disappears.

Could this potentially be something that gets hatchery steelhead back into Puget Sound rivers again?

This may not have as much of an effect on things as the proponents may like...because hatchery programs and fisheries still have to comply with the ESA. The HSRG did comply with the ESA, and getting rid of it doesn't get rid of the ESA, it just gets rid of an ESA-compliant tool.

Ignoring the ESA will just result in very easy low-hanging-fruit lawsuits from the NGOs.

Fish on...

Todd

Again how do you quite the federal government?
HSRG came from Congress and now Washington is telling the feds to stick it?
I agree this kind of stupid needs to be made to pay.

The old saying was you need a healthy wild stock to have a healthy hatchery stock ( same river ) and always manage for the wild stock or two non integrated stocks. The problem here is in down years for wild you will have users, commercials and rec, screaming they should be harvesting those " surplus " fish. You will have better luck dealing with a rabid dog than a harvester in full kill mode screeching all hatchery fish must die. The simplest answer is the hatchery fish in these years are the inriver rec fishers best years as the commercial side is restrained.

I participated in HSRG and was once told my team's methodology was HSRG before there was an HSRG. The thing is HSRG came at things from a science point of view that was rather idealistic and simply failed to factor in the human side of things with the lofty goals it contained. It did not factor in the demands that mixed stock fisheries, marine and fresh water, place on the creature. Ended up propelling the development of the " habitat restoration industry " rather than drive the needed habitat preservation.

So simple fact is streams the have healthy wild runs need strong protection not just fresh water but most importantly in the marine environment. Streams that are toast just accept it and max out hatchery production. Streams that have some resemblance of the natural order work to stabilize the habitat and the fish. If human intervention is needed to do this be habitat restoration or hatchery supplementation then do that to restore and maintain the run.

So for myself after 40 years working with fish this simple fact. You cannot save every stream or every stock of fish. As a friend once said your 200 years and 4 million people late.

One needs to remember that a hatchery needs higher quality water than the wild fish in the river. Rearing fish in close quarters raises the risk of disease. Water quality and quantity are paramount.

We should admit that since the first listing we have generally done a poor job. As Rivrguy noted, we keep adding people and that subtracts salmon.

I can see, and there are examples of, successful hatchery operations and successful wild runs. They just ain't in the same place. And, so long as we worship marine mixed stock fisheries, ignore the salmonid food needs in the ocean, starve the streams for nutrients, and maximize predator numbers, be it people, seals, or birds, wild fish are but a hazy memory. And if we don't deal with marine water productivity, so are the hatchery fish.

I think this is where the blinders need to come off the contingent that sees hatcheries as the panacea. Bottom line, if we ain't got the conditions to produce wild fish in robust numbers, the hatchery clones ain't far behind.

Wait... we'll just make a genetically superior hatchery fish by infusing with wild broodstock. And we'll make hatcheries better by making hatchery conditions more like the wild.

J F C.... someday everybody's gonna realize the best "hatchery" ever created was a healthy wild river.

Doh

One of the purposes of the HSRG was to recommend improvements in hatchery performance so that wild fish aren’t adversely effected. Their recommendations often resulted in fewer hatchery fish being raised and released.

But hatchery reform will not succeed unless there is harvest reform too. Wild fish and hatchery fish may or may not be genetically compatible. There is lots of debate on that issue. However, there is NO debate on the difference in exploitation rate.

We can harvest around 90% of the hatchery fish, and still have enough for broodstock for the hatchery. However, harvest on wild fish ain’t anywhere close to 90%. It’s probably closer to 10%, depending on the river system.

So if we plan on harvesting the hatchery fish at a rate compatible with productivity of the hatchery (e.g., 90%), the wild fish go extinct. Conversely, if we harvest at the rate of wild fish productivity (e.g., 10%), the hatchery will be overrun with hatchery adults that weren’t caught. In that case, the purpose of the hatchery can be questioned if we can’t catch 90% of the fish they produce.

Historically, the end result is that we catch the hatchery fish, and the wild fish go extinct. This has happened repeatedly in the PNW and elsewhere. Adding more hatchery fish won’t help. Neither will casting the HSRG recommendations out the window.

I agree with FishDoc that a river in its natural state is the best ‘hatchery’ we have. The problem is the productivity of that river may only allow catch-and-release (particularly on steelhead), given the number of anglers who are targeting these fish, the normal low productivity of wild fish, and the precarious state of the river habitat and the ocean conditions.

If at some point in the future the rivers in the PNW resemble those in Alaska, we might be able to have a high exploitation rate on wild fish. Like they do in Alaska.
But until then, wild fish and hatchery fish will continue to be incompatible.

I get it! I think their is little doubt hatcheries have affected most if not all Salmon and Steelhead runs on the West Coast. The question is, where do we go from here? Shut everything down 100% to protect what's left? Close all hatcheries? Stop progress? That ship has sailed. I'm thinking of nothing but opportunity! Call it selfish. Yes I am! Catch and release? That's OK by me. I just want to be on the water with rod and reel. With Steelhead I know some problems exist on certain rivers, but I know some rivers could be open for catch and release. Numbers support it. The Skagit/Sauk catch and release opportunity are prime examples. It's like pulling teeth to get the research done to allow such. I could be wrong but I thought with this HSRG gone, doors could open for an increase in individual river evals. to determine whether such opportunities could open up? Are the tribes the only barrier to this? Sounds like the tribes are all on board with this HSRG gone. Maybe I am totally off base and dazed and confused? HELP!

I think the down fall of HSRG was when they said their plan would be successful in 500 years..

Actually it went south when people refused to do what they said needed to be done to recover wild stocks.
Fish need cold clean water, the general population doesn't think so.
So surprise surprise fishin about done, well played.
Welcome to the days we have made.

It would be VERY interesting to see how many wild salmon returned to our rivers this fall if the open ocean slaughter was canceled for the year. That's the only honest, accurate measure of how many adults our rivers can produce. If we allowed them all to spawn and it didn't result in better smolt production numbers, we'd know our rivers were indeed at capacity with the insanely low escapement goals established today. My jaded sense is that those goals are driven much more by economics than biology.

I'm sure commercial fishing isn't the only thing holding them back, but I've lived in this country long enough to know that people's ability to make short term profit from scarce resources always wins out versus making the sacrifices necessary to stabilize the resource before it's gone. There's a reason people are seldom wrong when they tell you to "follow the money."

Yes and no. There would be a real jump in coho but the Chinook returning this year are 3, 4, and 5 and (ideally) older. Stopping the slaughter one year still leaves th immature Chinook open to fishing next year and the year after and the year after.

I always thought that too. The closest we've come in many many recent years is last summer, when a good deal of the intercept mixed stock fisheries were trimmed due to covid, travel and fishing restrictions, and some degree of lessened commercial impact due to low market demand/price. I'm not saying the slaughter was cancelled, but it was muted to some degree. The preseason run forecast wasn't stellar but it wasn't abysmal either, and I thought my local returns in the south Sound would really shine. They didn't, the run fizzled, and the fishing was on the whole still pretty lousy.

Granted that's a pretty anecdotal little data point, but still I'd hoped for a little more in the strike zone,

fb

Here we go down the same rabbit hole - if we just tweak the harvest and hatchery pieces of the 4 "Hs" salmonid recovery will occur and we can continue to fish.

For the vast majority of the ESA listed salmonid population this continued focus on harvest and hatchery issues serve largely to divert the discussions and needed actions from the real drivers in limiting those populations.

Bottom line we have too many people using our river's productivity to produce salmonids for other uses. This compounded by our collectively unwillingness to pay the true price to prioritize the fish needs.

The fate of Puget Sound steelhead illustrates the failure of the strategy of focusing on those hatchery and harvest issues. The majority of the Puget Sound steelhead populations (70%+) have not had any significant fishing or planting of hatchery fish for 3 to 8 generations of wild steelhead. The result fewer steelhead today than at the time of the ESA listing. Could it be hatchery and harvest are not what is driving the status of those steelhead?


fleaflickr02 asks an interesting question. In the mid-1990s the PS comanager made the decision to reduce harvest rates on a number of region's Chinook stocks. As one would expected there was an increase in the numbers of fish reaching the spawning grounds. However in spite of the continuation of those lower harvest rates the populations have continued to decline at the same or potential fast rates; within a few years there were fewer fish than before the harvest reduction. Take home point eliminate harvest will extend the time we will have fish but not the ultimate end point -extinction!

Maybe the most interesting aspect of this discussion is that it seems that many anglers (PSA and others) and many of he tribal leadership are basically say that ESA recovery efforts will not be successful enough to support fishing and hatchery fish are essential. While I can see where they are coming from not sure that in the ESA arena the feds can hop on that train.

Curt

That was exactly my point above...removing the HSRG doesn't remove the ESA, and the ESA doesn't give twoshits about fishing or fisheries, and won't allow for extirpation of local stocks and increased stocking of hatchery fish.

Without either the God Squad coming in and saying it's ok to cause the extinction of local stocks in order to have a fishery, or the Feds changing the definition of what an ESU is in order to let fish go extinct in the Cowlitz while the LCR fish are still listed, all this does is remove a tool to comply with the ESA.

Fish on...

Todd

So you do or do not support king of the reach program?

Even if we work hard on the FW issues there are big marine problems that are human-solvable like hatchery programs, harvest of forage fish, and bycatch. We simply don't, as a society, want to deal with it.

Agree that past, current and likely continuation of habitat degradation will prevent recovery of wild stock (whatever its definition). And especially to numbers sufficient to meet harvest demands.

This whole complex issue of ESA listings and related recovery efforts is muddled with seemingly mixed understandings (or misunderstandings) of terms and goals.

Is the goal to protect and recover existing pure genetic stocks? Or is it to protect naturally spawning stocks (no matter their relationship to the original genetics of individual river systems)?

My initial understanding was that it was to recover those remnant pure genetic stocks. Then came information that in reality the goal is to allow current stocks (with genetics likely altered by years of out of basin plantings) to evolve over time. That is particularly true with Puget Sound Chinook.

With my current understanding (right or wrong) I am leaning toward accepting a reality that the "wild fish" goal is vague at best and that hatchery production is the only way to generate anywhere near the number of fish (particularly P.S. Chinook) required to satisfy all of the requirements for those fish; human and other.

Pragmatic or caving in??

Let's actually look at successful recovery programs. They (the managers) worked at retaining as much of the original genetic material as possible but in the end the goal was to get animals out there.

European Peregrine Falcons were part of NA recovery. In Whooping Cranes we know that whole lines have been lost, but we are putting out what we have to work with. And, new populations are being returned to areas where they were extirpated. Same with Condors. The whole absolute genetic purity argument is preventing recovery, in my mind. The habitat is changing, even when "intact". What we need is large naturally spawning populations that are able to evolve in the system. But, at the end of the day, wild fish will never meet the consumptive demands of humans, especially if we have to share the fish with pinnipeds and SRKWs. And Grizzlies and wolves.

I worked with some geneticists (fish) who believed that the other recovery programs in other taxa (that actually worked) were wrong because they were not genetically pure. So, they went for purity but apparently not recovery.

I’m always curious if out of basin hatchery fish are as bad at reproducing as some people clam, how quickly will their negative genetics get weeded out if you quit planting them. One or two generations?

And then overall how quickly will natural selection completely take over and you end up with a run that is completely adapted to the watershed?

It seems that places like the Great Lakes and South American have taken NW hatchery fish and been able to colonize naturally reproducing runs.

So even if all the original genetics of a stream has been extirpated I would think if recolonized and left to their own devices you’d end up with what was essentially a native population after a couple generations. Of course that assumes all our man made issues aren’t wiping them out.

Great example!

I believe one of the first rules of change is that if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. Natural selection will weed out the maladapted fish fast. Not that few Chambers Creek steelhead even made it to smolt. To have to stop not only planting hatchery fish in specific streams but ensuring that any strays will be overwhelmed by wild spawners.

Great example of exotic invasive species proliferation.
That's the same as say look how good the zebra mussels are doing in the Great Lakes.

Completely pragmatic,

fb

Poor analogy. Accidental with 0 benefit. Salmon would be a great invasive species to have to feed and play with in ones backyard. 100's of examples exist that man has introduced on purpose. Like Ring neck Pheasants, Turkey's, Elk, Mountain Goats, Triploid Trout, Tiger Muskey, and Walleye just to name a few. Sometimes the benefits out weigh the costs.

The problem, as I see it, isn't whether we have "pure" stocks or not...but if they are producing naturally...if our rivers were capable of producing them naturally, they already would be. We don't need to plant fish where they don't exist, we already have fish in those rivers, and they are wild and naturally adapted stocks, and they can't manage it.

Not sure how planting more would all of a sudden make them capable of supporting more...they need the exact same habitat that the ones that are already there need...and if we made the changes required to allow the planted fish to "create" a run, well, the fish are there to do that already, without planting any.

The problem is, of course, that we don't want to do any of that...we don't want to fix habitat, we don't want to take out more dams, and we don't want to curtail harvest...we just want more fish to kill with all of those things...

...and if those fish aren't naturally producing, then the ESA won't let it happen.

I'll note for the third time in this thread...the ESA doesn't give twoshits about fishing, or fisheries...it only cares about naturally producing fish stocks, and whatever supporting tools we can use to get to that.

We can protect hatchery fish under the ESA if a rescue program is used to save or re-introduce a naturally producing run, but we can't substitute fish raised in a hatchery for fish naturally spawned and call it good.

The ESA would be satisfied with a 100 fish run that comes back every year, and would come down on a 100,000 fish run that comes back every year to a hatchery, while the natural spawners decline closer and closer to zero.

Change the ESA, or get the God Squad to write off the wild fish...but until then, this is the lowest of low hanging fruit for the NGOs to sue over.

Fish on...

Todd