Expect declines in hatchery production

To The Eagle:

I was interested to see the pictures of beach seining in last week’s Eagle. I was troubled, however, by the third caption which read, “Fishery managers hope the seines will be less lethal to endangered wild salmon than gillnets.” The implication here seems to be that there exists a conservation issue with gillnets. If that were the case, then the projected savings in wild salmon would be credited to spawning escapements.

In reality, those “savings” are being transferred to the recreational fishery for hook and release mortalities. There are no conservation benefits to this transfer. The recreational fishery simply wants to handle and kill more wild fish.

The seine fishery experiments were originally justified as a live capture method to sort harvest and increase catches of surplus hatchery and abundant wild populations without increasing incidental kills to stocks listed under the Endangered Species Act. This goal has faded as recreational fishing groups began to realize there would be fewer hatchery fish for them to catch.

The recreational harvest rate for fall chinook is about 10 percent. That means you have to remove 10 fish from the commercial fishery to put into the recreational fishery. The differential is even more dramatic for coho.

So we have large surpluses of hatchery returns due to increasing restrictions on the commercial fishery. Meanwhile, the power companies are increasingly wondering why they are rearing large numbers of fish as mitigation for dams, that no one is able or allowed to catch.

The upshot here is that failing an increase in commercial harvest, we can expect some substantial declines in hatchery production, especially below Bonneville Dam. This situation could be ameliorated considerably if the treaty tribes elected to fish below Bonneville Dam. Obviously the last chapter is far from being written on Columbia River fisheries.

Kent Martin, Skamokawa