Something's Fishy

Squarely in the latter group are people making the major decisions. On June 3, 2004, the Bush administration appalled the scientific community—including its own fisheries biologists—by proclaiming that hatchery salmon and steelhead can count as wild fish when determining if a stock needs protection under the Endangered Species Act. To be so counted, said the administration, a domestic hatchery stock must be no more than “moderately divergent” from the wild stock. The domestic chicken is only “moderately divergent” from its progenitor—the endangered jungle fowl. Thanks to Frank Perdue and other factory chicken farmers, there are now millions of chickens on the planet; so by Bush logic, the jungle fowl is fully recovered. The salmon policy is intended to circumvent the Endangered Species Act—the law most loathed by the special interests that brought the Bush administration to power and, to a large extent, comprise it.

The idea to pass off hatchery fish for wild ones was promoted by Mark Rutzick, Bush's former salmon czar at the fish branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA Fisheries). Rutzick had caught the administration's eye when, as a lawyer in Portland, Oregon, he led the timber industry's effort to avoid regulatory inconvenience with the same shell game. The Pacific Legal Foundation, which provides counsel to plaintiffs seeking delisting of salmonids, has also been pushing for this shell game. “Millions of fish from each of the five Pacific salmon species are flourishing from Alaska to California,” the foundation proclaims. “The fact that you can buy salmon for $3.99 a pound in your local supermarket should make that pretty clear.”

Foundation attorney Russell Brooks, who met with Rutzick a month before the plan was announced, represented the timber industry in a 2001 case in which U.S. District Court Judge Michael Hogan ruled that the government's exclusion of hatchery cohos from the threatened Oregon coastal coho stock was arbitrary and capricious. The official line from the administration is that its new salmon policy was forced on it by Judge Hogan. But all Hogan said was that once NOAA decided “that hatchery spawned coho and naturally spawned coho were part of the same [evolutionary significant unit], the listing decision should have been made without further distinctions.” He never said that NOAA had to make the decision to lump hatchery and wild cohos together.

A year earlier the agency had asked six of the nation's top fisheries scientists to review salmonid policy, including the use of hatcheries, and to advise it on how best to recover 27 listed stocks. But their report, released five weeks before the Bush plan was made public, contained facts the administration didn't want to know—basically, that hatcheries were counterproductive in salmonid recovery. The scientists were told their findings were inappropriate for a government publication; so, expressing outrage at the censorship, they published their report in the respected, peer-reviewed journal Science. One of the team members—Ransom Myers, of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia—offers this statement: “Unless [the policy is] changed, it's only a matter of time before salmon stocks that are presently listed will be delisted, and habitat that is critical for their long-term survival is eliminated.

Most of this critical habitat has already been lost to dams. Not only have hatcheries failed to mitigate for this loss, but some function as dams themselves. The idea was to block a river so returning fish could be easily captured and stripped of eggs and milt, and so the hatchery would be insulated from disease. This extinguished wild runs and deprived upstream ecosystems of vital nutrients provided by decaying carcasses of spawned-out salmon. Consider the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Leavenworth Hatchery on Washington State's Icicle Creek. It blocks endangered Upper Columbia River steelhead from 21 miles of prime spawning and nursery habitat, while dewatering habitat of the threatened bull trout. “This is just outrageous,” exclaims Washington Trout's Beardslee. “The agency charged with recovering bull trout is harming them more than any landowner in the entire Wenatchee Basin. Farmers are reprimanded and required to take restorative action if they dewater rivers to raise crops. It's the height of hypocrisy when the agency is doing things every day that the farmers are not allowed to do once.” Washington Trout is preparing a lawsuit.

For years the feds refused to remove a series of three deteriorating, useless dam-weir complexes that blocked Icicle Creek, arguing they were “historically significant.” Under fierce pressure from the public, they finally relented, appraising removal costs at $4.8 million. Then they announced there was no money. So the Icicle Creek Watershed Council, a local citizens group funded largely by philanthropist Harriet Bullitt, decided to take on the job. In August 2003 the council retained a Spokane contractor, who did the work for $249,000. All that remains is for the feds to open one upstream gate. “The Fish and Wildlife Service was okay with our removing the dams,” Bullitt told me. “We followed all their specs and rules; they monitored the job. We finished in five weeks. We revegetated the banks, recycled the rebar and cement. Then we told the hatchery staff to open the gate. We waited and waited, and nothing happened. Now they're telling us that opening the gate is ‘against policy.' ”

Bullitt and her group are up against something more impregnable than any dam—the hatchery bureaucracy. It has its own political base and social structure; in states like Washington—which churns out salmon and steelhead from nearly 100 hatcheries—it dominates fisheries policy and squashes dissension. “If you cross a sacred cow with a military base in Washington State, you get a fish hatchery,” says Bernard Shanks, former director of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, who in 1998 was hounded out of office for merely suggesting that hatchery production be deemphasized.

Collectively, Northwest hatcheries are still a threat to wild salmonids; but they are undergoing major reform—all of it driven by the Endangered Species Act, which holds them accountable for damaging listed stocks. Eggs and milt are increasingly taken from wild fish, and juveniles are often stocked in rivers of origin. Some hatcheries now release smolts at only one location so they won't imprint to other parts of the river where, as returning adults, they'd have more opportunity to spread defective genes. Two years ago Oregon cut the flow of hatchery cohos to its coastal rivers by 90 percent. A few hatcheries, particularly tribal facilities on the Columbia, are experimenting with shade, cover, predator-avoidance conditioning, and curved raceways with sediment on the bottom that produces natural food in the form of macroinvertebrates.

Modern hatcheries, and even most traditional ones, now clip the fleshy, vestigial adipose fin from young salmon and steelhead so adults can be distinguished from wild fish. When commercial or recreational fishermen catch a fish with an adipose fin, they have to let it go. In fact, the adipose fin has become a status symbol, eagerly sought by anglers who didn't want to kill the fish anyway. Rob Masonis, an avid steelheader and northwest regional director for American Rivers, says this: “One of the most encouraging things I've seen in the last five years has been a much greater understanding among anglers of the importance of wild fish and the desire to catch wild fish. They get it; and it's those voices that need to rise up in the policy debate.”

Does the hatchery-reform effort hold promise for restoring self-sustaining salmonid runs? Probably not. For one thing, even after one generation, hatchery stock starts losing its reproductive capacity. “My best expectation would be that hatcheries will be reformed to the point they're no longer harmful,” declares Jim Lichatowich, former assistant chief of fisheries for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, and author of the acclaimed book Salmon Without Rivers.