I have seen lately, in a number of threads, folks commenting on "closing the hatcheries".

The term seems to be used in the context that this action would somehow be good for the fish, and sportfishing.

I'm confused, I guess, as I can't see even the slightest benefit that the fish, or fisherpeople, would derive from closing down the source for the majority of the sport caught steelhead and Chinook Salmon.

If we close the hatcheries, it seems to me that rivers like the Cowlitz would "die".That river has a very robust return of hatchery fish that provide thousands of hours of sportfishng each year, not to mention a healthy source of local income from fisherpeople that persue these fish. Same goes for a number of rivers in the western Washington area. What would be the fate of these fisheries?

In my thinking, the biggest threat that wild steelhead face, aside from natural predators, is the use of gillnets by Commercial and Tribal fishers. Closing the hatcheries won't effect this in the least, will it? At least the Tribes will still be netting the wild fish, and soon, IMO, there won't be any left at all. You will not get the Tribes to stop netting these fish...not without an act of Congress...and that clearly isn't going to happen so long as there is a single wild steelhead left alive.

End result...no fishing seasons likely, at all, for Spring Chinook, Coho seasons won't last long (if at all), and there won't be any steelhead season at all due to what will be very quickly dwindling numbers of wild fish.

Those of you that hold this position are intelligent people, so therefore I must be missing something in the equation.

Could someone please tell me, in English, how closing the hatcheries will do a thing to help fish?

Mike

p.s. Not be cantankerous here, but I have become seriously concerned that I am not "purist" enough to be hangin with y'all.

I'll try a few comments...

Without hatcheries, there are many, many fisheries that flat out wouldn't exist...and so there wouldn't be any fishing or fisheries.

Steelhead harvest fisheries pretty much wouldn't exist on all PS rivers, at least not in the winter, or any steelhead fishing in eastern Washington...they would only exist on the few streams that are open for wild steelhead harvest, and my opinion is that those aren't going to last for long, anyway, regardless of any moratoriums or statewide WSR...they'll all be managed by closure unless something drastic changes, because the very few streams that have "harvestable" numbers of wild fish are not going to maintain their recently higher levels unless there are significant, and unforseen, changes in the environment, their habitats, water quality, and harvest regimes.

Unless the reintroduction programs actually work on the Cowlitz, there wouldn't be much of a fishery there except for coho, which it apparently is working for pretty well already.

Almost everywhere that there are chum fisheries, they are naturally producing, or the natural production constitutes the great majority of the fish, so they wouldn't really be affected at all by hatchery closures.

The biggest hatchery production for chums takes place on Hood Canal, and in my opinion, causes many, many more problems than benefits. They produce artificially gigantic runs of chums, of which only a small amount are actually harvested, and their commercial harvest continues to push wild coho and steelhead in Hood Canal closer and closer to extinction every fall and winter.

Those hatchery programs do much more damage to fish and fisheries than they do good, in my opinion, and as long as they exist, there won't be steelhead fishing in Hood Canal, and it will be very hard to get any significant returns of the historically gigantic coho runs back there, either.

The Wallace River hatchery produces some summer Chinook for harvest, not a ton, but some...enough to fish for. There would be no Chinook fishery on the Sky without it, that's for sure, since the rest of the Chinook are ESA listed.

The coho produced there, however, don't do much for the fisheries. The natural production in the Skykomish for coho is massive...it dwarfs the hatchery production, and the hatchery fish (except in the Wallace itself, at times) don't really bite, anyway. Hatchery coho production on the Wallace likely costs a lot more than it is worth.

Hatchery production on the Skagit for steelhead is an absolute joke...it's never worked well, and it really hasn't worked at all for many years. The amount of money and effort to plant 500k smolts, plus the documented damage all those smolts do to wild steelhead runs there, makes that a waste of money and time, in my book...spend the same amount of money on habitat and stream flow protection at the dams, and you'd probably see an increase in wild production that far exceeds what any hatchery production can do there, with no hatchery/wild interaction problems.

I don't know what the naturally producing coho numbers are for the Skagit, but the Marblemount Hatchery produces quite a few fish...a lot are caught in the terminal area, but I don't know how much they contribute to saltwater or mainstem fisheries...I suspect not much, since they pretty much shoot right up to the hatchery, but there are so many that quite a few are probably caught in salt water fisheries.

Humpies are the same as the chums...they don't need hatcheries, and seem to be providing fish and fisheries wherever they are, in some record breaking run sizes lately, both on the Skagit and on the Snohomish systems.

Those are just a few general comments...there are lots of different hatchery programs that would fit into similar categories as the ones above, but others that have their own set of cirucumstances, too.

"If we close the hatcheries, it seems to me that rivers like the Cowlitz would "die".That river has a very robust return of hatchery fish"

I'm not sure what you mean by robust, but if you mean a high number of fish, then you're right...but if you mean a very successful productivity/return rate, then you're not. Cowlitz hatchery steelhead return at a dismal rate...but they put in lots and lots and lots of smolts, so even a dismal return rate correlates to a good amount of adults.

"In my thinking, the biggest threat that wild steelhead face, aside from natural predators, is the use of gillnets by Commercial and Tribal fishers. Closing the hatcheries won't effect this in the least, will it?"

Habitat destruction has contributed more to the destruction of steelhead runs, probably by a factor of ten, than all harvest combined...and continues to be the most limiting factor for most wild steelhead runs. Not only that, but habitat destruction is actually used as the justification for many wild steelhead harvest fisheries (tribal and non-tribal) because the managers show that the habitat is so degraded that it somehow can't handle all the fish coming back.

Closing hatcheries would have a very significant effect on commercial fisheries, especially non-tribal. Most non-tribal commercial fisheries are justified by large hatchery runs...the wild runs wouldn't be able to handle the harvest levels...they can't even handle the incidental harvest levels that those commercial fisheries entail. If there were no artificially high hatchery returns, non-tribal commercial fisheries would decrease dramatically.

Tribal commercial fisheries are still limited to half of the harvestable portion of the runs, and half is just half, whether it's half of 300k hatchery fish returning, or half of 1200 wild fish returning. While those fishers and fisheries aren't going anywhere soon, their harvest levels would plummet without hatchery fish, too.

I look at the whole issue as a series of questions, not as just one black and white question of "should we have hatcheries or not?"

What are you seeking to protect? Fish or fisheries?

Except in a very few circumstances, caused by extreme risk of extinction in the Columbia River watershed due to the Federal Hydropower System, no hatchery has ever helped a wild run of fish, and very, very few have had benign effects...

They mess up the gene pool, they create artificial abundance that is over fished, and the small component of the run that is the true wild fish is fished into extinction while chasing after the hatchery fish.

They give fishermen, and especially fish managers, false assurances that all is well, when it is not.

Got a habitat problem? No problem...just toss in another 100k smolts.

Need a dam? No problem...build a hatchery at the base of it.

Need to divert an entire stream into an irrigation ditch to water your apples? No problem, we'll toss in a few thousand smolts from this other river...it'll all average out in the end.

This doesn't solve the problem...it just masks it, until it's too late.

The hatchery fish are horribly unfit, and they need habitat, too, as well as clean water, flowing rivers, and healthy upland habitat.

Why does the federal government try so hard to get everyone to agree that hatchery fish are just as good as wild, even when every single credible scientific report ever written comes to the exact opposite conclusion?

Because as long as there are hatcheries full of fish on the lower Columbia, then there is no problem with the Federal Hydropower System, or the Corps of Engineer dredging activities, or water withdrawals, or development, or any number of other habitat destructions.

The hatchery fish mask those problems until, as usual, it is too late...and when it gets close to "too late"...we'll just toss in a few more smolts and call it good.

If protecting fisheries is your goal, then hatcheries are part of the answer, but only part. They have to be operated so that their bad effects are minimized, and their productivity maximized (not the amount of smolts they release, but the quality and percentage of adults they return...performance standards).

Habitat, water quality, dam operations, and harvest regimes all have to be considered for hatchery fish, too.

The easy, and frequently incorrect, solution is that whatever the problem is, throw more smolts at it. This rarely returns more fish, and is also used as a justification to destroy more habitat, use more water, mess up the dam operations, and conduct more intense sport and commercial fisheries.

There's no trade off, because there is no return for the investment.

Hatcheries are an integral part of fisheries in the PNW, but where they are not needed, they are not needed, and they can't be used as mitigation for habitat and hydropower projects, because they don't replace what was lost, and soon you're back to no fish, only now there is no habitat, either.

Run them responsibly where necessary, work just as hard, or harder, to fund habitat protection and restoration projects, and to put greater buffers in harvest regimes, and for better dam operations, or they won't work very well to provide fisheries.

Looking back, that's a pretty long and rambling response...but there might be a few nuggets of useful information in there.

Fish on...

Todd

Coho back to Marblemount Hatchery this year, just under 8400

Nice post Todd

I'm not all for closing hatcheries. I do, however, feel that most of our hatcheries aren't giving us a good return for our dollar. I also accept that there are negative impacts from our hatcheries. Impacts such as...
1. Hatchery fish do poorly when spawning in the wild. Hatchery x native crosses result in fewer natives returning.
2. Hatchery fish fuel many fisheries, commercial and sport, that result in the death of many wild fish (by-catch).
3. Young hatchery fish compete with young wild fish. I don't know to what degree, but it happens.
4. High populations of hatchery fish (say outmigrating smolt) can create high populations of predators, which then also prey on the wild fish that are mingled in. For example, Skagit merganser populations may be inflated because of all the hatchery raised steelhead, coho, and chinook smolt in the river at certain times of year.

Other issues like water quality downstream of hatcheries, and possibility of disease transmission are out there, but I don't know much about them.

Don't shortchange yourself Ripley... that post was full of pearls.... eloquently laid out in a logical nuts and bolts fashion. Did they teach you that in law school?

Bottom line, hatcheries are not here to conserve fish, they're here to conserve harvest!

Wow, very nice job Todd. Excellent hatchery summary. Its not rambling. There is really no way to summarize the hatchery debate anymore then you've already done.

vince

Hatcheries are a crutch to support our crippled wild systems.

That crutch does a good job of supporting harvest but is a poor prothesis for those wild systems.

Tight lines
S malma

Great post, Todd. Why don't people like you go into politics?
SS

Do not leave out closing all west coast herring fisheries when we close the hatcheries. It does no good to dump millions into spawning habitat only to destroy the food supply for the ocean bound fish.

Todd isn't even giving us the extreme version.

Great post Todd.

One minor advantage of the Wallace hatchery coho production is that they do add fish to various marine recreational selective, wild fish release, fisheries.

Beezer

Nice post, Todd, but I have to question those last two paragraphs.

I gave Bob a current read about this whole argument that hatchery fish are unfit, a problem, etc, etc.

Bob - if you read this and still have the article, would you please post the Journal title and reference info. I highly recommend it to everyone. Very enlightening.

As it turns out, it's not the fish itself that is unfit. It's the MANAGEMENT practices that are unfit.

The fish don't have a say in where they are reared, what temperature they are cooked in, where and when they are released, and for what purposes, etc, etc. The list of hatchery abuses, bad management practices, questionable decisions, goes on and on.....

It's the managers that make all those decisions, not the fish itself. Those decisions tend to not be wise, not thought out, and usually comes with bad results to the fish and the fisheries.

Not defending hatcheries, but it really makes you wonder how things might be (in the future), if current hatchery management policies and decision change for the better. Or, maybe I should say when hatcheries change for the fish, and not the fisherman.

Todd,

Thank you for the well thought out, and information filled response. That is what I had hoped for.

Couple questions come to mind (and then I'm off to a meeting til tonight). I'll post a few more question tonight, if that's OK.

You said: (italics)

"Steelhead harvest fisheries pretty much wouldn't exist on all PS rivers, at least not in the winter, or any steelhead fishing in eastern Washington...they would only exist on the few streams that are open for wild steelhead harvest, and my opinion is that those aren't going to last for long, anyway, regardless of any moratoriums or statewide WSR...they'll all be managed by closure unless something drastic changes, because the very few streams that have "harvestable" numbers of wild fish are not going to maintain their recently higher levels unless there are significant, and unforseen, changes in the environment, their habitats, water quality, and harvest regimes.

So, in essence, ALL steelhead fishing would cease for a number of years, with no guarantee of the return of any steelhead fishery?

My thoughts are that, assuming all of the data you provide is accurate, then what are going to be the "downstream" effects of these changes?

Has anyone looked at the impact the closures would have on the local economies where the sportsmen currently spend millions of dollars annually in search of these fish?

One of the things you repeat several times in your post is the issue of HABITAT. In what way will the closure of the hatcheries help habitat restoration?

Off to work...still gotta make a living.


Thanks, in advance, for the replies.

Mike

Mike,

It’s hard to add to Todd’s thoughtful and lengthy post, or Smalma’s succinct and perfectly accurate post, but I’ll try.

I think it’s very much worth noting how you, and numerous other anglers see commercial and treaty gillnet fishing as the greatest threat to wild steelhead. I know and work with quite a few fisheries biologists with very extensive experience, and while many, if not most, would agree that commercial and recreational fishing probably does not benefit wild steelhead, not a one believes that non-treaty commercial, recreational, and or treaty net fishing is the greatest threat to wild steelhead. To the last one, we believe it’s habitat degradation. Now, either all fish biologists are wrong, or maybe, just maybe, habitat degradation is a greater threat to wild steelhead than fishing mortality at the levels allowed presently.

Smalma called the hatchery system a crutch. That crutch has become the foundation of our continued fishing. Without the crutch, the Pacific ocean would be closed to salmon fishing, commercial and recreational, year round. The lower Columbia River would never open to fishing (except for URBs), nor would most, and possibly not any, of its tributaries. All Puget Sound rivers would be closed to steelhead fishing, or at least harvest. Puget Sound would offer continued fishing for pink and chum salmon, and coho approximately half the years. The coastal tributaries would offer the most consistent fishing for modest to good runs of steelhead, coho, and chinook, but probably not for long if that was all that was left in our state.

Sincerely,

Salmo g.

I agree with Todd too, despite the fatigue I felt by the end of the post.

I'm not against hatchery steelhead, but I'm very against the effects they have on native steelhead populations in terms of artificially altering their genetic makeups through introgression (ie. cross-breeding). Those unique gene pools define what is special about each river's native population. Those need to be nurtured.


Perhaps refocusing hatchery investments into native broodstock programs would help, instead of pouring Chambers Crk clones into the rivers like crazy. My .02,

fb

Mike,

"So, in essence, ALL steelhead fishing would cease for a number of years, with no guarantee of the return of any steelhead fishery?"

If all steelhead hatcheries were to close right away, within a couple of years there would only be fishing on those few streams that support healthier runs of wild fish, and I think that they, too, would close within a short time, not due to the hatchery closures, but due to the fact that until all the other problems are fixed that they face, they, too, will join the rest of the rivers on the "not enough to fish for" list.

"Has anyone looked at the impact the closures would have on the local economies where the sportsmen currently spend millions of dollars annually in search of these fish?"

Every time the idea of closing certain hatcheries comes up, this definitely comes up,too...the hatcheries provide most of the fishing, so most of the money spent is at least related to the operation of the hatcheries.

"One of the things you repeat several times in your post is the issue of HABITAT. In what way will the closure of the hatcheries help habitat restoration?"

This is the key question in your last post...and while I don't think it is necessary to close hatcheries to do it, it will take some serious convincing of fish managers and politicians to really get it done otherwise.

Over the past 100 years, whatever the reason for massive local downturns in wild fish populations, the answer has not been to fix the problem, or avoid the problem...it's been to "mitigate" the problem by building a hatchery that is intended to replace, both in number and quality, the fish that were killed.

This has lead to hundreds, if not thousands, of local extinctions of all species of Pacific Salmon and steelhead.

The fact of the matter, however, is that this DOES NOT work...it does not return fish of a quality and quantity that is comparable to what was there before the "project" that lead to mitigation.

Hatcheries built at the foot of dams are the most obvious complete and utter failures of this "destroy and mitigate" pattern, but it happened all over the ranges, in dozens of different ways, not just with dams.

And still does...with the same low to no chance of actually "mitigating" the loss...

And the government has shown repeatedly that it doesn't care if it actually mitigates, but they do care that it costs much less than modifying or not doing the project, and that it makes the habitat destruction "legal" because it has been legally "mitigated", even though it has not been mitigated in the least by any biological, social, or economic standard.

If there were no "mitigation hatcheries" to put up on a pedestal as the fair trade off for habitat destruction, then what would have to be done to actually mitigate the effects of the project?

One, they might have to actually design the project in such a way that environmental impacts are minimized, rather than build another hatchery to set off the destruction.

Two, they might have to do habitat work to replace "in kind" what they have destroyed, rather than build another hatchery.

Three, when doing cost/benefit analyses for the project, the true costs will actually be in the analysis...costs of habitat mitigation, etc., rather than just dumping those costs on society...rather than just assuming that the social and environmental costs of the project will be "solved and mitigated" by another hatchery.

Instead of the big Gov't announcement that "construction of this project will create 156 jobs and bring 5.4Million into the local economy"....you'll hear that, plus "and will cost us billions of dollars in the future to fix all of the social, economic, and environmental problems it will cause"...(sounds a little like the Columbia River, doesn't it?)

So, in answer to your final question, the removal of hatcheries (or better yet, the removal of their consideration as the "solution", rather than the literal removal of the hatcheries) would expose the habitat problems for what they are, and put actual habitat protections and restoration back on the board as the actual way to "mitigate" for habitat destruction.

In many ways, it's not so much the hatchery that is the problem, but the myth about what it represents, and the actions taken upon that myth.

Abundant hatchery fish mask the fate of the weak hatchery stocks, so EITHER remove the hatchery, OR don't let it mask the problem.

Mark the fish, count the wild ones, study the effects of the hatchery fish and fisheries on the wild ones, and practice true weak stock management.

Harvest managers pay a lot of lip service to this, but don't really do it (look at the complete opposite happening on the Columbia right now, while the Department speaks out of both sides of its mouth in the same sentence).

I think that talk of removing hatcheries is designed to either remove them, so that they can't mask the problems, or to force managers to stop leaning on them as a crutch and make them actually ask the hard questions about fish management, and habitat protection.

I think that if you focus on protecting the fish, then the fisheries will take care of themselves.

Fish on...

Todd