New article on salmon recovery out on Tidal Exchange today. Read, Share, discuss!

https://tidalexchange.com/2018/03/15/fisheries-mgmt-for-dummies-2-recovery-you-try-it/

Makes sense, That's probably why Washington state won't even consider this idea.

What idea?

Read the article.

Washington is doing what they suggest which is banking on habitat restoration as the solution.

I suspect the "banking on habitat restoration" will be 100% lip service, as it always is. At best our "habitat" work has been nipping at the edges of slowing down the destruction.

No way in hell anyone will want to spend the time and money required to turn Puget Sound back into a good place to be a wild salmon.

Fish on...

Todd

Exactly, So that's not working, Let's just cut the fishing back some more, Like we have been doing for years now.

If we don't want to fix the habitat then we mitigate with hatcheries. Either/or. If we are unwilling to control population, growth, and sprawl then hatcheries are the ONLY way to get salmon for harvest.

I like the simulation.... A LOT!

It has application far beyond the Stilly.

It gives one great insight on what it would actually take to recover populations ANYWHERE in the state.... even in places where habitat is much better than the Stilly.

Willapa Bay chinook immediately came to mind as WFWC/WDFW has a policy aimed at rebuilding those coastal chinook. Mind you, the habitat is NOT ideal chinook habitat.... but what's there is in hella'better shape than what you I-5er's have in Pugetropolis. For that matter, chinook habitat is hella'better ANYWHERE on the coast than what chinook have in PS.

Because of the much smaller human environmental footprint, it's the only region in WA where chinook haven't been ESA listed.... the last best king populations in the state with the least spoiled habitats available for their ongoing viability/recovery. That's kind of a BIG deal that seems to have escaped the fish managers

We've f'd it up just about everywhere else. If WDFW can't find redemption here, then where?

So even before the simulation went prime-time, I had a chance to play with the first draft. The reset is a nice addition. As is the button for invoking production from the conservation hatchery to keep the "life support" going.

As I concluded over a decade ago in an ancient thread...

http://www.piscatorialpursuits.com/forum...html#Post399440

.... it's as if the Stilly is a patient in the hospital ICU, and pulling the plug on the hatchery would be the equivalent of pulling the plug on the critically/terminally ill patient.

In the end, the only thing that can possibly bring this population back to viability is habitat restoration. Everything else is fruitless full court press that cannot be sustained.

The big problem with this argument (no matter how valid), to Todd's point, is that habitat restoration on the scale it would require to achieve recovery is absolutely never going to be funded. It's WAY too much money, WAY too far down the list of spending priorities. We need to face that reality. For the most part, the habitat we've got is as good as it's going to get.

The other problem with putting all the eggs in the habitat basket is that it supports the absurd notion that current exploitation rates (outside Puget Sound) are appropriate. I will go out on a limb and guarantee that, if by some bizarre miracle the habitat were restored completely, it won't produce a significant number more fish unless we increase escapement goals. In case anyone hasn't noticed, those continue to go the wrong direction, despite the fact that habitat improvements (however small) have been made. Why's that? Because when NMFS sees run forecasts that don't allow for the standard, bought and paid for commercial exploitation rates, they go ahead and schedule fisheries at that rate anyway, leaving the Tribes and the States less to work with in their fisheries. Our co-managers all want their fisheries, too, and the only way to get there is to lower escapement goals for the limiting stocks, blaming the habitat. Just as it's irrefutable that habitat is the ultimate population limiter, it's irrefutable that lowering escapement goals so we can all fish will NEVER lead to more fish.

In a nutshell, I think salmon (and many of the plant and animal species that depend on them) are screwed; ultimately by loss of habitat, but at present, because of intentional, unrelenting overharvest. "Recovery" is a pipe dream. I think we need to be a little more realistic in our goal-setting. For example, I think doing enough habitat work to support 10-20% more spawners (much more realistic than the whole enchilada), then reducing harvest to achieve a similar increase in escapement, is a practical approach that might allow us to achieve enough recovery to uphold reasonable fishing opportunities for all stakeholders for quite a while.

It's a good article, and I understand why talk of reducing harvest is a slippery slope for the sport fishing fleet in Puget Sound. That said, to claim fishing (in general) is not part of the problem is disingenuous, and potentially damaging to the cause of raising awareness of the plight of Puget Sound salmon.

To get anywhere, we need to quit doing the same things wrong, year after year. Clearly, the status quo won't work. It's past time for us to move on from the idyllic image of fishing over historical run sizes and start living in the present. If everyone's willing to sacrifice just a little, we should be able to achieve some small measure of improvement. It just comes down to making the tough decisions that need to be made in the short run. Without that, there is no long run.

Fleaficker -

I agree that the status quo has not been working. The issue is that since the ESA listing of Puget Sound Chinook in the vast majority (all?) of the Puget Sound basins the key habitat supporting the region's Chinook has continued to decline. If Puget Sound wild Chinook and by extension any fishing in the sound is to have future the status quo of declining habitat has to be reverse.

The beauty of the stimulation provided by tidal exchange is that one can test your theory that all that needs to be done is reduce the harvest some and improve the habitat to support 10 to 20% more fish. To test your idea I increased the habitat capacity to 940 spawners (125% increase) and reduced all fishing impacts to zero (as much as harvest can be reduced) and still without the conservation tribal hatchery program the population still goes extinct.

Unfortunately more and more the habitat situation on the Stillaguamish is becoming the norm and without changing the status quo of declining habitat quality the region's ESA listed Chinook are head directly towards extinction. Yes we can and probably should reduce fishing but all that will do is buy a little time before to inevitability of extinction.

Curt

Applying the sim to WB, where the goal is ultimately 4300 wild spawners.

I set habitat sufficient to carry 5500.
I set marine predation at 40% to reflect pre-terminal harvest (BC/AK interception is actually closer to 50% )
I set the inside ER at 14% which is where the WB Policy eventually expects us to land.

This scenario produces a viable steady state population of spawners of about 1600-1700.

If we could somehow get BC and AK to cut their interceptions down by 1/2 (20%), the sim ramps up to a population of 3500-4000 spawners in just a few generations.

If we improve habitat access/quality to 7500 fish, we ramp that population up to a steady state of about 4500-5000.

The actual numbers might differ from reality, but I believe the interaction between the variables is on solid ground.

...

I did one final exercise to see what level of exploitation restraint it would require to reach a steady state of maximum sustainable abundance.... where the population reaches equilibrium at carrying capacity.

That happens at about 15% exploitation (regardless of who is doing the exploiting).

So when is Seattle getting mowed over and replanted with trees

I absolutely agree, and thank you. My point is that, realistically, prolonging it is the best we can do at this point, so why not do that instead of accelerating the process (the status quo)? One thing we never try is letting more wild fish spawn, more often, on purpose. Never have, and I'll bet you a dollar we never will. Just too economically painful, I guess....

The problem with Ricker is that it is an economic analysis rather than biological. What is the minimum investment in spawners to get the maximum catch? Completely ignores any sort of inter species effects.

In AK, wild coho are fished at 60% (at least in the particular SE AK stream I am familiar with). The catch has varied from 1,000 to 8,000, with the appropriate escapement. It is sustainable at any of those levels.

What changed the catch? Pinks. No pink spawners, 1,000 coho catch. Approximately 2 kilos of pinks per square metre and you harvest 8,000. That number of pinks, at the higher levels, certainly exceeds an MSY calculation for the stock.

That is a nice, but simplistic, way to look at it. The downside of the large pink escapements is that they appear to depress Chinook survival and may outcompete coho in the ocean.

Recovery is going to take looking at the whole ecosystem, and this will include the invertebrates that feed to fry and smolts, including the predators like pinnipeds, terns, and cormorants. Doing it within dozens of silos will guarantee non-success.

FleaFlicker -- my kind of a-ha moment with this tool is trying what you're suggesting -- which is "letting more wild fish spawn" and seeing that it doesn't really do anything. That's, to me, the point of all this. The gravel is effectively incapable of doing anything with those spawners. The escapement is (at least apparently) directly linked with habitat carrying capacity. You can increase escapement by cutting fishing, but not in a way that leads to recovery. You just get more fish escaping and not finding good habitat for their redd.

Carcassman, it's certainly true that it's an ecosystem wide "habitat" problem. I think the point of the article is again that cutting FISHING right now isn't going to do jack squat for recovery. It will not produce larger returns in future years--what it arguably will do is decrease the chances that an overly optimistic forecast will in turn lead to overfishing. So if that's what we're doing we shouldn't call it a "rebuilding escapement rate" we should call it a "less likely to go extinct" escapement rate.

Have we tried to put more fish on the grounds that "won't take them"? In the 80s we probably doubled chum escapements above "MSY". Damn, the production increased. In the 90s and 00s we took pinks to probably 50x MSY. Same thing happened. Admittedly, then runs have since declined but decadal shifts in ocean production have been known to drive overall numbers.

Pinks and chums spawn in the same places as Chinook. The pinks spawn at the same time. They have a similar freshwater experiance in that they are short-term rearing fish. Why, other than the fact that Chinook are so damn popular in marine mixed stock fisheries, are they so different in freshwater?

When WDF first set Chinook escapement goals for Puget Sound they explicitly said that the goals were nowhere near utilizing the available habitat.

We know that mass spawning actually cleans the gravel and removes the fine sediments that are currently entrained in the gravel and significantly reduce egg-fry survival. What is the plan for cleaning the gravel if we are not going to use spawners? Also, and getting back to the problems with MSY, mass spawning has been shown to produce fewer fry per female (competition, superimposition, actual digging up of eggs) but sends more total fry to the estuary. And economist wants more fry per female, and ecologist wants more fry.

Also, as to "rebuilding escapement rate". When I was in the game, the RER for a number of PS stocks was actually greater than MSY calculated for those same stocks. It looked good, made ya feel warm and fuzzy, and just kept the stocks on a downward spiral.

You just have to love WDFW's salmon management. This year's return to the Deschutes facility in Tumwater, 29,000 Chinook showed up. Only one hundred were released above the trap (to spawn?). Yep! One hundred! Probably all males. Although not the best Chinook habitat, certainly some successful spawning/hatching could have taken place with a large escapement. I'm sure glad that the watershed got to benefit from those hundred salmon! And I know that the landowners in the watershed appreciate being strictly regulated for the sake of salmon. A bigger escapement of that huge Chinook return would certainly have benefitted the up and down Coho population through nutrient enhancement. Who's running this madhouse, anyway? (Just my continuing disgust with WDFW, so pardon my bitching)