I cheated and bummed this from
Chi Wulff.
The extraordinary effort to save sockeye salmon
After 20 years and more than $40 million
spent, the new direction for Snake River sockeye focuses on rebuilding
population rather than just preventing extinction. But will it work?
Seattle Times staff reporter
STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES
A Snake River sockeye is captured for its genes after swimming more than 900 miles to reach its spawning grounds.
REDFISH LAKE CREEK, Idaho —
A vermilion slash in clear, cold water, the Snake River sockeye in
this mountain stream is one of nature's long-distance athletes,
traveling at least 900 miles to get here.
That this fish can make such a journey — the longest of any sockeye
in the world — is remarkable. But it's more incredible that this fish is
still around at all.
Down to just one known fish — dubbed Lonesome Larry — in 1992, state,
tribal and federal fish managers have painstakingly preserved the
species in captivity ever since.
Twenty years and $40 million later, they have a new goal. Not just
mere survival for Snake River sockeye, but rebuilding the run to at
least 2,500 wild fish, free of any hatchery influence, making the epic
journey all the way from the Pacific across a time zone to the high
mountain lakes of Idaho.
To appreciate how big a step that is, consider this: It's taken fish
managers in six federal, state and tribal agencies to get this far. They
oversee the lives of these fish, plotting their genetics on
spreadsheets, mixing their gametes in plastic bags, and whisking them in
various life stages around the Pacific Northwest in plastic shipping
tubes, barges, trucks and planes, using five different facilities in
three states to hatch, incubate and rear them, in both fresh water and
salt.
By now, Bonneville Power Administration ratepayers have spent nearly
$9,000 for every sockeye that's made it back to Idaho since this all
started in 1991.
The sockeye rescue is part of a much larger Columbia River Basin Fish
and Wildlife program — believed to be the largest of its kind in the
world — that has cost Bonneville ratepayers more than $12 billion since
1978, depending on how you count it.
While Elwha Dam removal cost U.S. taxpayers $325 million, BPA
ratepayers spend more than $200 million each year — including $311
million budgeted this year alone — on programs intended to restore fish,
wildlife and habitat harmed by the Columbia and Lower Snake River dams.
It adds up: The program's cost accounts for one-third of the wholesale
rate Bonneville charges utilities that use its power, including Seattle
City Light, which buys 41 percent of its power from BPA.
A recent jump in sockeye returns, including more than 1,000 fish in
both 2010 and 2011, encouraged managers to expand the program and break
ground on a new, $14 million hatchery this year. The goal now is way
beyond just saving sockeye from extinction, and on to building a wild,
self-sustaining population.
It's quite a comeback. The captive brood program was nearly canceled
in 2006, because so few sockeye were making it back to Idaho. "We
thought it was a little bit of a moonshot," said Rick Williams, a member
of a scientific panel that recommended against continuing to fund the
program.
The Northwest Power and Conservation Council, appointed by governors
from four Western states, voted to keep it going anyway, after Idaho's
governor asked members to vote with their hearts, not their heads. Then
came a couple of good years of sockeye returns. Last summer, the council
doubled down, voting to expand the program and build the hatchery.
Lorri Bodi, BPA's vice president for environment, fish and wildlife,
said she was glad nobody pulled the plug on Snake River sockeye. She has
a photo in her office of herself releasing one of the fish back to
Redfish Lake to spawn a few years ago, a feel-good moment that still
gives her hope. "We went from zero to four fish coming back every year.
They were functionally extinct. Now, in good years, we have more than
1,000. We are going to take it to the next level. ... This is a
testament to optimism.
"Our goal is to have a few thousand sockeye again, just as we did in
the 1950s, before human impacts were so severe. It's a pretty cool thing
to do."
The issue of dams
But where some see cause for optimism, others see denial. Idaho,
Oregon and Washington are replete with hatcheries, but 16 runs of salmon
and steelhead in the Columbia Basin are still listed for protection
under the Endangered Species Act. And despite a few good years of
returns, Snake River sockeye remain endangered. Just 243 sockeye made it
back to Idaho this year.
With eight dams between their spawning grounds and the Pacific,
hatchery production alone won't be enough to rebuild healthy, naturally
spawning populations of Snake River sockeye and other Columbia Basin
salmon and steelhead, said Joseph Bogaard, outreach director in the
Seattle office of the Save Our Wild Salmon Coalition, a nonprofit that
advocates for dam removal on the Lower Snake River.
"There was a lot of opposition to this emergency-room life support
and a sense that it would not work, and that if it did, it would become a
replacement for dealing with the deeper, more difficult issues,"
Bogaard said. "We were thankfully wrong on the first issue; it has
provided a new opportunity for sockeye. But it has also been so
politically easier to find the money to do this than deal with the real
issues.
"It's more of the same, kicking the can down the road, and it's
certainly not working for us," Bogaard said of the new sockeye hatchery.
Jim Lichatowich, author of "Salmon Without Rivers," sees agencies
protecting their comfort zone, instead of salmon. "Building a large
hatchery infrastructure to try to compensate for the dams is the status
quo; it is the comfort zone for the management agencies," Lichatowich
said. "Agencies get big budgets to run them, and politicians get credit
for solving the problem. But the fact is ... hatcheries haven't been
measuring up, otherwise we wouldn't have so many salmon in the Columbia
Snake Basin that are listed."
Jeff Heindel, deputy director of hatchery programs for Idaho, says he
knows he faces skepticism, as Northwest ratepayers pour even more money
into Snake River sockeye.
"Even my own mother thinks it's crazy," Heindel said. "If I can't
sell it to her, I'm not sure I can sell it to the average Joe."
Larry's descendants
The extraordinary effort that has gone into preserving Snake River
sockeye is not unusual. There are dozens of publicly funded efforts,
most of them run by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, under way around
the country to bank the genes of devastated populations of animals,
from red wolves to black-footed ferrets. By definition, the programs
require extreme measures to sustain small populations of animals in
totally artificial settings.
In a building outside Boise, sockeye kept in the captive brood
program circle in fiberglass pools. Fed on the hour, they are grown to
adult size, graduating to ever-larger tubs. Exercise is provided by a
jet of water sputtering in the tubs, against which the fish steadily
swim.
They live somewhere between captive rearing and extinction; no longer wild animals, but not gone from the Earth, either.
"Slimy little suckers," says a technician as a fish he lifts to check
for weight and length slides from his hands and hits the deck. Quickly
picking it up and blotting its abundant slime with a paper towel, he
measures the fish and puts it back, unharmed, in its tank. Fish techs
dubbed the food that fattens these fish "beefcake." But while they will
bulk up, captive-reared sockeye are slimier, dimmer in color and less
fecund than the wild fish from which they descend.
Go back to the beginning, and you'll meet Lonesome Larry, so-called
because he was the only sockeye to return to Redfish Lake in 1992. With
no mate with which to spawn, Larry was injected with hormones to pump up
his milt production; stripped of his gametes, killed, stuffed and
mounted in a nearby nature center. His milt was stored in liquid
nitrogen, to dribble out year by year.
Descended from Lonesome Larry and other founders of the captive
brood, some of these fish in the baby pools every year are allowed
conjugal visits to Redfish Lake to reproduce on their own, along with
some fish returned to the lake after capture.
Amazingly, Heindel says, the fish reared in captivity still
understand their primal task, and head to the southeast end of Redfish
Lake, as their wild forebears did, to successfully spawn.
Today, every sockeye returning to the Stanley Basin of Idaho is
trapped by the state's department of fish and game at its Sawtooth
Hatchery and at Redfish Lake Creek. From there, they are driven two and a
half hours to a hatchery complex outside Boise, where the captive brood
program is located.
Driving six sockeye to Eagle one day last August, Dan Baker, manager
of the Eagle hatchery, kept an eye on a dashboard light glowing green to
assure him oxygen was still bubbling in the chilled water in the box in
the back of the pickup.
He stopped at a gas station mid-journey, and popped the top to check
on the fish, as a fluffy dog came tail-wagging over. One fish tipped its
nose out of the water, making for the edge, but Baker was too quick for
it, and thunked down the lid. "Haven't lost one yet," he said, climbing
back into the truck.
A battery of technicians was waiting when he arrived, to work up the
new fish. In less time than it takes to make a sandwich, they cataloged
each fish, then scanned it for tags, measured it, weighed it, yanked off
a scale with forceps to confirm the sockeye's age, clipped off a hunk
of fin for DNA analysis, crunched a hole in its dorsal fin with a hole
punch to snug on a zip-tie tag, and injected the fish with a hypodermic
full of antibiotics plunged in its side.
A technician dropped the last, limp fish in a holding tank full of
water dosed with disinfectant. From here, some of the fish would be
trucked back to Stanley, and returned to spawn in Redfish Lake.
But for the rest, this was the end of the road: new genes for the captive brood.
Lynda V. Mapes: 206-464-2736 or lmapes@seattletimes.com. On Twitter @lyndavmapes.
The extraordinary effort to save sockeye salmon | Local News | The Seattle Times
