Pacific Northwest Federal Salmon Hatcheries Declining Returns
https://www.opb.org/article/2022/05/24/pacific-northwest-federal-salmon-hatcheries-declining-returns/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Science+news%3A&utm_campaign=Science+Saturday+Email
Federal officials have propped up aging hatcheries despite their known failures, pouring more than $2.2 billion over the past 20 years into keeping them going instead of investing in new hatcheries and habitat restorations that could sustain salmon for the long term. At the largest cluster of federally subsidized hatcheries on the Columbia, the government spends between $250 and $650 for every salmon that returns to the river. So few fish survive that the network of hatcheries responsible for 80% of all the salmon in the Columbia River is at risk of collapse, unable to keep producing fish at meaningful levels, an investigation by Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica has found.
Allyson Purcell is the director of West Coast hatcheries for NOAA, which oversees endangered salmon recovery, sets regulations for hatcheries and funds roughly a third of all Columbia River hatchery production. In an interview, she conceded that federal hatchery reform efforts have historically focused on saving wild salmon, but said that her agency is now researching ways to create more resilient hatchery fish.
Some aim to get less than half a percent of their fish back. But lately, they aren’t even getting that.
“It’s not self-sustaining. We don’t have the numbers,” said Aaron Penney, a member of the Nez Perce who spent more than 20 years managing his tribe’s hatchery on the Clearwater River in Idaho. Penney, now a biologist for the Coeur d’Alene Tribe in northern Idaho, says raising hatchery fish in worsening river and ocean habitat is like “putting a finger in a dike to stop a leak.”
Biologists for the Fish and Wildlife Service knew at the time there was no evidence to suggest hatcheries could make up for the impact. But four of those scientists, including the author of the 1920s research casting doubt on hatcheries, suggested hatcheries anyway; after seeing the government’s plans for dam construction, biologists knew that preserving existing salmon runs would be essentially impossible.
By the end of the 1990s, a panel of scientists for the Northwest Power and Conservation Council concluded that hatcheries had failed in their objective to mitigate habitat damage and were harming wild populations by competing for food and spreading weaker genes. And, they noted, other scientific reviews had reached the same conclusion.
A 2021 study led by NOAA ecologist Lisa Crozier found that warming ocean temperatures could cause salmon survival to decline by roughly 90% within the next 40 years.
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