FISH FIRST

FEB. 2004 NEWSLETTER

The Fish First ninth annual Banquet will be held May 1, 2004 at the Oak Tree Restaurant in Woodland, WA. Ticket sales start March 1.

Volunteers are needed to make this our best banquet ever and your volunteer time is always appreciated.

The banquet is very important because it provides the capital we need to supply matching funds to grants, so we can do the projects, enhancing spawning and rearing habitat for the fish.

If you would like to help contact Hugh Barrett at 360-263-8588.

Come visit Fish First Membership Booth at the Pacific Northwest Sportsman Show

Feb. 4 - 8, 2004.

We will have a display (booth #509) with large scale photos of

projects, hand out brochures, and talk to people about what we are doing for salmon recovery.

Portland Expo Center, Portland, OR.

Parking $8.00

Regular admission: Adults—$9

Juniors (6-16) - $5

Under 6 – free.

HOURS
Wed.-Fri. ……..11:00 a.m.- 9:00 p.m.

Sat. …………...10:00 a.m.- 8:00 p.m.

Sun. …………..10:00 a.m.- 6:00 p.m.

$2 off coupon available on-line and at sporting goods stores.

The first fish hatcheries in the Pacific Northwest were the Fallert Creek Hatchery on the Kalama River, and the Sea Resources Hatchery on the Chinook River. Both were established in 1895. Driven by political motives and supply and demand for canned salmon worldwide, political leaders embraced the idea of these experimental hatcheries first tested in France, Europe and most recently the Eastern United States.

Hatchery fertilized and raised fish were to replace diminishing stocks of wild salmon and their numbers would support the declining commercial fishing industry.

At the time, agriculture represented both a triumph of the civilized societies and the promise of the future. By extending the familiar values of agriculture to fish culture, the fishermen invested their technology with a powerful image of abundance obtained from human ingenuity and labor. Transferring the success of agriculture to hatcheries did not include the critical intermediate step of actually evaluating and verifying that success. The negative effects on the ecological processes that sustained the salmon were

ignored. Biologists were trained from an ‘agricultural’ perspective, versed in fertilizing, incubating and hatching eggs, raising and releasing ‘sack fry’ into the streams. Eggs were gathered from different streams, fertilized and raised in streams foreign to the fish. Eggs were transported from the Sacramento River by specially adapted train cars bound for East Coast rivers. Eyed eggs from the NE United States were raised and dumped into the West Coast streams. The process of spreading the fish from one stream to another resulted in low returning numbers of fish. The fish were not genetically adapted to the stream they were placed in and had to fight to overcome river conditions they were not adapted to. Streams were overloaded with young fish. Many starved to death for lack of nutrients in the stream.

‘By 1930, seventy-three hatcheries were propagating Pacific salmon in rivers from Alaska to California. Striving primarily for quantity, these early hatcheries released 13.3 billion fry and fingerlings into rivers of the Pacific coast by 1928. Hatcheries not only failed to boost the number of fish but also actually harmed the salmon by mining billions of eggs from wild populations. Fish culture practices such as egg mining and stock transfers were undermining the wild salmon’s ability to reproduce. Yet even with these failures, fish culture was strongly entrenched within state and federal programs.’ (Salmon Without Rivers)

Early scientists believed salmon were genetically uniform and could not travel back to their natal streams, but as adults, spawned in the closest river as they returned from the sea.

In 1891, Charles Gilbert was appointed chairman of the Stanford University Zoology department. With a degree in ichthyology and the systematics of fishes, Gilbert and his students began studies of the Pacific salmon. When these studies began, all that was known about the salmon was rudimentary. The salmon were easily observed at only a few points in their lives – when they entered a river and were netted or trapped, and when the fish spawned in smaller tributary streams. The rest of the salmon life cycle from spawning to adult migration remained a mystery. Gilbert developed an ingenious method to work out basic life histories of the salmon. What the salmon do, where and when they do it and how they do it were discovered by ‘reading’ the scales on the fish. A salmon’s scales are similar to the growth rings on a cross-section of a tree. As a fish and its scales grow, circular ridges are deposited on the scale surface. Narrow spacing of the ‘circuli’ meant slow growth while wide spacing indicated rapid growth. "Thus each fish carries on its scales a capsule history that includes information about its past growth; the age at which it migrated to sea; the relative time it spent rearing in fresh water, estuary, and ocean; and whether its parents spawned naturally or in a hatchery." (Salmon Without Rivers, pg. 164-165) Gilbert unequivocally concluded from studying the fish scales that salmon return to the streams of their birth, are effectively isolated, and interbreed within the limits of their colony. Gilbert also reasoned that if the artificial propagation of salmon more closely mimicked the natural pattern of spending a year in fresh water, there would be a higher survival rate of hatchery fish. Extended rearing would become common practice nearly a quarter century later.

Willis Horton Rich, a former student of Gilbert’s, stands out his contribution to understanding salmon biology and the role he played during the era of large scale hydro-power development in the Northwest.

He discovered through studying salmon life histories that juvenile Chinook salmon migrate through the main-stem Columbia River all during the year. This continuous migration is a well orchestrated event composed of many independent populations. Each population began its migration according to unique environmental cues. He discovered the salmon were richly diverse in their life histories and how they responded to the complex mix of habitats in the Northwest. He concluded that Pacific salmon return to their natal waters to spawn and that each species of Pacific salmon were composed of many local, self-perpetuating populations and thus constructed a new and revolutionary vision of salmon management.

At the same time Canadian biologists were tracking ocean

migration of the salmon. They found Chinook salmon from the Columbia River off the west coast of Vancouver Island and confirmed that salmon do indeed make

extensive ocean migrations. This discovery proved the remarkable homing ability of Pacific salmon.

In 1995, following a study of the effects of hatcheries on native Coho salmon in the lower Columbia River, biologists from the National Marine Fisheries

Service concluded that one of the factors contributing to the loss of native Coho, was the transfer of hatchery fish between tributaries in the lower river. They advised that these transfers be stopped. Their recommendation came 69 years after salmon managers first recognized that the practice was detrimental. (Salmon Without

Today local state hatcheries along the North Fork Lewis river, managed by Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW), work with Fish First to replenish wild and native stocks in the Lewis River and tributaries. 860,000 eyed late Coho eggs will be placed in Remote Site Incubators (RSI or egg boxes) on area streams this winter. The eggs were harvested from wild and native fish in the system. An egg box with uninterrupted flow and no silt cover, provides 90 to 97% live hatch compared to a redd in the wild at 10 to 20% live hatch. Unlike wild and native spawning fish who deal with degraded shallow and non-existent spawning areas, fewer fish to fertilize eggs, stream disturbances like cattle walking in the creek or flood events that wash eggs out of the redds, the salmon eggs in the egg box are protected from predation while in the egg or sack fish stage. The juveniles emerge from the RSI as small fry and enter the stream ecosystem. Upstream from each remote site incubator, Fish First’s nutrient enhancement team place salmon carcasses that are harvested by hatchery personnel. 3/4 are placed fresh and 1/4 are placed as frozen fish into the stream.

We are finding that fresh fish sink where we place them, while frozen fish float like a log downstream before sinking. By combining both frozen and fresh deposits of fish, we canvas a larger area of the waterway. It is scientifically proven that emerging fry consume decaying spawned out adult salmon and in this cycle, build healthy stocks for proliferation of the species.

Hatcheries walk a fine line. Personnel know the importance of replenishing declining ESA listed species of wild and native fish. They know what the loss of the genetic diversity of wild salmon means to the ecosystem and to the hatchery and why it is important to sustain individual populations.

The team of Fish First and WDFW supported hatcheries on the North Fork Lewis river can prove this partnership is working. Success can be measured in a count in over 30,000 returning Coho salmon to Cedar Creek (a North Fork Lewis river tributary), in 2003.

Fish First works closely with local hatcheries to help satisfy the commercial and sport fishermen. Our net pen projects at Echo Bay in Woodland, WA., and at Spealeyi Bay, Ariel, WA., allow us to extend the growth and development of fry to smolts that imprint with the area, making them healthy and vigorous for their journey to the sea.

The first part of January we picked loss and weighed fish for size. The first batch of smolts were released from the Echo net pens Jan. 31. After releasing the fish, we washed down the nets and replaced them in the pens for the next 75,000 spring Chinook due Feb. 3.

On Feb. 3 volunteers will start putting the pipe together about 8:00 a.m. The first truck of fish is expected to arrive by 9:30. All fish should be in the pens by about 1:30 p.m.

I’ve been busy with egg boxes and nutrient enhancement, putting steelhead carcasses in lower Lewis River side creeks where we have egg boxes.

Just in case there is a change in the schedule, volunteers are asked to call Dan Balch 360-225-7388.