Something's Fishy

So, with hard work and luck, hatcheries may one day cease providing substitutes for the wild salmonids they eliminate and only provide partial mitigation for people prevented by habitat loss from taking wild fish. In other words, they'll become efficient producers of meat and sport. Environmentalists need to understand there's nothing wrong with that. One of the most eloquent advocates of native-fish restoration is Jim Martin, Oregon's former fisheries chief and now director of the Berkley Conservation Institute. “Hatchery management has changed tremendously over the last 10 or 15 years,” he told me. “But there's just as much hatchery bashing by environmental groups as ever. A lot of fisheries managers in this country are disgusted with the environmental community because no matter how much they do to improve hatcheries, it's not enough. We're not wiping out any cities or reclaiming any farms for wetlands, so we're stuck with a hell of a lot of habitat loss. Hatcheries currently support 70 percent of the anadromous salmonid fisheries in the West. Without them, there'd be very little fishing.”

The problem with hatchery bashing is not that there's too much of it but that it's too unfocused, and one reason hatcheries provide so much fishing is that they impede natural reproduction. However, the fact that some hatcheries are grossly abused doesn't mean that others aren't desperately needed. Without hatcheries to hold rare stock all but lost in the wild, there would be no self-sustaining lake trout in Lake Superior. Greenback cutthroat trout—once believed extinct—would not be almost fully recovered. Utah would not have its Bonneville cutthroats back. There'd be scant hope of saving Snake River sockeye salmon, coaster brook trout, westslope cutthroats, Rio Grande cutthroats, Apache trout, Atlantic salmon, Gila trout, Gila topminnows, and pallid sturgeon. In tailwaters and reservoirs all across the continent, hatcheries provide fishing where none would otherwise exist. In these waters, at least, game fish like trout, landlocked salmon, walleye, and striped bass are stocked as juveniles, growing fast, regaining muscle tone and color. It may not be natural fishing, but at least nature is involved. It gets the public outdoors, invested in clean air and water. Martin is right in everything he says.

But there's more to be said. I object to the hatchery bureaucracy not just for what it does to wild fish but for what it does to people. It creates the illusion—perpetuated by the Bush administration—that habitat is expendable. (Why protect clean, free-flowing rivers and watersheds from dams, pollution, and watershed abuses when you can mass-produce salmonids in concrete fish factories?) And it impedes development of what George Bird Grinnell, 19th-century sportsman and outdoor writer, and founder of the first Audubon Society, called “a refined taste in natural objects.” Anglers conditioned by hatcheries chase stocking trucks like herring gulls, then fish with pellet imitations. It would be cheaper and more efficient to replace the fish tanks in trucks with seats and haul the anglers to the hatcheries.

One bright June morning, amid a blizzard of mayflies called pale morning duns, I worked my way up Utah's Logan River, catching and releasing brown trout. I'd been hoping to add to my life list a Lahontan cutthroat—a descendant of the massive predators, bigger than most salmon, that prowled ancient Lake Lahontan and had been considered extinct until the late 1950s, when they were rediscovered in a tiny creek above a waterfall by Colorado State University fisheries professor Robert Behnke. But no Lahontan showed, and I was happy enough exercising the browns—strong, stream-bred fish with perfect fins, ocher spots, and buttercup-yellow bellies. I was reaching down to shake another brown from my barbless fly when I saw what looked like a large goldfish, but which, on closer examination, turned out to be an albino rainbow trout. Despite their extreme vulnerability to predators, the state breeds them and tosses them in with normal, less visible rainbows so the public spots them easily and doesn't complain that the stocking truck hasn't been around.

More recently I found myself in the mountains of West Virginia, inspecting acid-mine damage to brook trout habitat. I came away encouraged, not only by the remarkable progress being made in bringing dead water back to life with innovative lime treatments, but by the many pristine streams that still teem with these gaudy little natives. West Virginia's brook trout are a national treasure that should be promoted like California's redwoods or Minnesota's timber wolves. But the official patch of the state's Department of Natural Resources features a white-tailed deer, a cardinal, and a rainbow trout—native to the Pacific Northwest. This fish—called a West Virginia Centennial Golden Trout—is a pigment-impoverished mutant that turned up in a hatchery in 1954 and has been cultured ever since. It's so popular that Pennsylvania borrowed the warped genes to concoct what it calls its “palomino trout.”

All sorts of other Frankenstein fish are patched together in hatcheries; and because they're hybrids of species unlikely to meet in the wild and because they're frequently sterile, they help perpetuate the hatchery bureaucracy. These include “tiger muskie” (a cross between a muskellunge and a northern pike), “tiger trout” (brown trout X brook trout), “wiper” (white bass X striper), “saugeye” (sauger X walleye), “splake” (speckled trout X lake trout), and “cuttbow” (cutthroat X rainbow). The more Frankenstein fish that hatcheries pump out, the more demand they create. Conditioned by such values and policy, anglers rebel when enlightened managers attempt to restore imperiled native fish by poisoning out introduced aliens and mongrels.

Just before I left the Bonneville Hatchery, I hiked along its water source, Tanner Creek, starting in the mist beside 350-foot-high Wahclella Falls and moving downstream. I'd almost reached Interstate 84 when I saw a flash of red. A pair of wild coho salmon were spawning. Having never witnessed this, I watched transfixed as the two fish shivered and turned on their sides over the depression the hen had cut in the gravel with her tail. The scene reminded me of what we'd lost but also of the tenacity of the life force, the ability of wild creatures to rebound when given half a chance.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

To support efforts to reform hatcheries and restore wild salmonid populations, go to Save Our Wild Salmon (www.wildsalmon.org).