When is a salmon not a salmon?

greenspun.com : LUSENET : I-695 Thirty Dollar License Tab Initiative : One Thread

I was listening to a program on NPR yesterday (KUOW) and they mentioned that, in an effort to "save" the Red Wolf on the East Coast, the government was tracking down Red Wolfs who had mated with Coyotes and killing their litters, so as not to allow the Red Wolf line to be "polluted" with coyote genes. They were also decrying the existing coyote/wolf hybrids which seemed to be filling the large predator niche too well, to the exclusion of the Red Wolf, and intend to track these down and destroy them to preserve the habitat for the Red Wolf. Now one zoologist/biochemist came up with DNA evidence that indicated that the coyotes and Red Wolf had been interbreeding for thousands of years, certainly before European settlers arrived and likely before ANY settlers arrived. Wolves and Coyotes are, after all, just dogs. And their hybrids (unlike the burro horse hybrid, the mule) are viable, can continue to reproduce, and apparently better fit the current ecological niche than either ancestor. So it looks like we will be going into the eugenics business, destroying Wolv-otes or Coy-ves or whatever. I thought that this went out with Margaret Sanger and the third reich. I thought the whole ISSUE was biodiversity, and survival of the fittest by natural selection was the point. But apparently not. Recently someone (Mikey?) posted a let the salmon go extinct sort of posting. Today I ran across this article in the Columbian. Given the billions that we are paying (remember those "social costs" the transit advocates always talk about) for the environmental protection act and its consequences, maybe we need to relook at the whole issue. Before we tear down dams (and we are at risk for an energy shortage this summer) and accept restrictions on life-style, property rights, and livelihoods that we may ALL come to regret in future decades, just maybe we should have a non-emotional discussion about just what the goals are of the ESA, and where we want to go with it. I like dogs, be they domesticated, wolf, or coyote. I don't think I could look my mongrel (spayed) pound pup who waits for me at the door when I come home at night in the eye if I spent my day going out and killing litters because I didn't like the mother's choice of mate. And killing biodiverse animals in the name of biodiversity doesn't make sense to me.

With regards to fish, I haven't had tropical fish for years. I'm less fond of them, hard to relate to a fish. But I'm not convinced that what's going on in the article below, killing hatchery fish that have been tested by surviving to adulthood and fighting their way back to breed, makes any more sense than killing the coy-lve pups for being too diverse.

Does the ESA really make sense anymore, or is it merely becoming government run amok? What am I missing here?

I know this has little to do with I-695, but it has a lot to do with intrusive government, and rising costs on all public works projects in the Puget Sound Basin. When is someone in government going to wave the bulls**t flag on this issue? Or is the process more important than common sense?

CULLING OF HATCHERY FISH CHALLENGED MANAGERS DEEM NON-WILD FISH INFERIOR TO NATURAL SALMON

Thursday, March 16, 2000 By ERIK ROBINSON, Columbian staff writer It wasn't a pretty sight.

Hundreds of silvery adult salmon lay beaten to death along an Oregon streamside, killed with baseball bats by Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife employees. An elk hunter who came across the scene in late 1998 picked up a video camera and began filming.

The images have outraged sport fishing groups and landowners across the Northwest.

Already, 26 runs of West Coast salmon and steelhead have dwindled nearly to extinction. With all the efforts under way to improve fish passage around hydroelectric dams, land-use changes to protect stream habitat and new restrictions on fishing, the image of state workers bashing to death hundreds of seemingly healthy salmon hit a nerve.

But these fish were raised in a hatchery, so they don't get the same protection as fish that spawn naturally in the wild.

Slaughtering excess hatchery fish is nothing new. Each year, hatcheries in Washington and Oregon club thousands of fish that might otherwise intermingle with and state officials say overwhelm naturally spawning salmon.

The video simply reignited a decades-old debate: When is a fish worthy of passing its genes to the next generation?

Fisheries managers in Washington and Oregon deem most hatchery fish fine for maintaining sport and commercial fishing but that's about all.

In a few cases, eggs and sperm may be taken from naturally spawning adults known as broodstock cultivated in a hatchery and released as smolts into the native stream. With the backing of the federal government, fish managers have turned to such broodstock programs as a temporary method of boosting imperiled wild runs.

For the most part, though, hatcheries are meant to produce fish for people to catch.

Those fish are produced by harvesting eggs and sperm from fin-clipped adult salmon that have been raised in the protected concrete and glass of hatcheries and whose parents have been raised there, too.

By raising fish in hatcheries, the thinking goes, salmon gradually lose the genetic characteristics they developed over generations to adapt to specific rivers and streams. In recent years, hatchery managers have acknowledged the difference and adopted new measures to more closely simulate conditions the eggs and juvenile salmon would find in the wild.

That's not good enough, some salmon recovery advocates say, insisting that a naturally spawning run of fish is more than just a romantic notion.

"Wild fish survive better in the wild," said Rob Jones, salmon recovery coordinator for the National Marine Fisheries Service in Portland.

Killing continues

That contention has made killing excess hatchery fish a common practice for years.

In Washington, the state kills as many as 400,000 adult salmon and steelhead that return to 95 fish-rearing facilities statewide each year. Though many are harvested for their eggs and sperm, the rest are simply "excessed" in a manner similar to what occurred along the Oregon streambank. Robin Nicolay, manager of the three state hatcheries on the Lewis River, said workers there killed 25,000 adult fish last year alone.

After commercial and sport fishermen take their portion of the returning adult salmon, the hatcheries only need enough to supply the eggs and sperm to propagate the species. The rest are killed.

"It sounds horrible, but that's the situation you get into when you're trying to recover these stocks," Nicolay said.

A questioned sacrifice

Landowners who are being asked to sacrifice to help stream habitat don't buy that.

"Any fish that makes it all the way back here is as strong as it's going to get," said Amboy tree farmer Dan DuPuis, "so let it go."

Chuck Voss, a Woodland-area resident and president of the Salmonid Foundation, a private group dedicated to preserving both wild and hatchery fish, said it makes no sense to him to kill hatchery-raised fish that are, after all, the progeny of fish that once spawned naturally. He said he considers the hatchery fish to be just as endangered as their naturally spawning brethren.

"They're nothing but brothers and sisters," he said. "It really doesn't make any difference."

It does make a difference in the long run, others say.

In his new book, "Salmon Without Rivers," fisheries scientist Jim Lichatowich describes hatcheries as a "house of cards ... built on the shaky foundation of blind optimism, ideology, and shifting weather patterns." Lichatowich criticizes over-reliance on hatcheries as a failed attempt to simplify genetic characteristics that have evolved over the course of 10,000 years.

For more than a century, Lichatowich wrote, fisheries managers have relied upon technical fixes such as hatcheries to offset the habitat problems caused by dams, logging, mining and grazing.

He said managers continue to make the same mistakes.

"The changes made to date are mere tinkering around the edges of a program in need of a serious overhaul," he wrote.

Hatchery fish strong

Jim Lannon, a retired fisheries professor from Oregon State University, counters that naturally spawning populations of fish in the Alsea River basin have continued to dwindle while hatchery-raised salmon have returned recently in numbers five to 10 times as great as wild fish. The irony, he says, is that both kinds of fish are descended from a common ancestral population.

In a position paper posted on the Salmonid Foundation's Web site, Lannon criticizes the National Marine Fisheries Service for protecting "wild" fish at the expense of hatchery fish.

"Would NMFS claim that among the few surviving rhinos left in the world, those that are bred in captivity are not rhinos at all, but some similar-looking animal?" he wrote.

Jones, the NMFS regional salmon recovery coordinator in Portland, said it's a numbers game. Because a much higher proportion of eggs can survive to become smolts in the protected environment of a hatchery, it stands to reason that at least a few of the juvenile salmon released from hatcheries into the wild will return from the ocean two or three years later as adults ready to spawn, he said.

The few naturally spawning adults that return must overcome much greater obstacles in the wild.

First, they must emerge as fry from their gravel spawning ground, then find their own food, and finally elude predators circling in the water and dive-bombing from the air. The few that survive pass on those genetic characteristics to their offspring.

By sheer numbers, Jones said, a few of the juvenile hatchery fish will return as adults.

"You get a whole bunch of fish that come back, but they only carry a fraction of the genes that have proven necessary for long-term survival," he said.

Subtle differences such as ocean distribution, homing instinct, disease resistance, behavior and coloration are among the genetic tools fish need to survive in the wild, Jones said.

Even so, NMFS has proposed guidelines, due to be finalized later this year, that would continue the region's reliance on hatcheries to help rebuild native salmon runs in the wild. In a proposed fish-protection rule governing 14 species of salmon and steelhead, NMFS acknowledges that hatcheries will continue to use eggs and sperm taken from wild fish.

"The primary purpose of broodstock collection programs must be to reestablish local indigenous populations," according to the rule.

Mimicking nature

Meanwhile, hatcheries are adapting their practices to more closely mimic nature.

Mark Fritsch, fish production coordinator for the Northwest Power Planning Council, formed by an act of Congress to channel money toward projects offsetting the effect of hydroelectric dams in the Columbia River basin, said the council is looking for hatcheries willing to adapt.

"If there is a 'lemon' facility out there, should we be spending the money to sustain that or should we spend that money elsewhere?" he said in an interview last year.

Hatcheries that want the federal funding are beginning to incorporate "nature's concepts," Fritsch said.

One hatchery, for example, has anchored old Christmas trees to its raceway to mimic the natural environment. Others are beginning to allow smolts to leave the hatchery in their own time, as opposed to dumping them all out at once.

Rather than dropping food pellets onto the surface, where fish in the wild would be easily targeted by birds, some hatcheries are switching to in-water feeding systems.

In the old days, Fritsch said, hatchery managers saw themselves merely as meat producers for commercial, sport and tribal fisheries. Now, they're trying to augment naturally spawning runs.

"The mentalities have changed greatly," he said. "I'd say from the '60s, there's been a huge transition."

Erik Robinson covers the environment and science for The Columbian. He can be reached by telephone at 360-759-8014 or by e-mail at erik.robinson@columbian. com.



-- Craig Carson (craigcar@crosswinds.net), March 16, 2000

Answers

Yawwwn!!! Ever get the feeling that you've wasted your life reading something?

Try this page Craig:

http://www.wa.gov/wdfw/

I hope to God that they have a forum!

-- Merciful Nate (mercifuln8@yahoo.com), March 17, 2000.


"Yawwwn!!! Ever get the feeling that you've wasted your life reading something? "

Yea, Nate. Virtually every comment you make!

zowie

-- (zowie@hotmail.com), March 17, 2000.


Thanks for the well thought-out responses, Zowie!

But please warn us all before-hand if your family tree doesn't fork

-- Merciful Nate (mercifuln8@yahoo.com), March 17, 2000.


"Thanks for the well thought-out responses, Zowie! " If that was meant as sarcasm, it misses the mark. You've proven yourself no judge of quality in thought processes.

-- (zowie@hotmail.com), March 17, 2000.

When is a salmon not a salmon?

When it is food.

Z

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), March 18, 2000.



Indeed!

And if it's so $^&*)(%^ endangered, why do we let people eat them? We don't let people eat other endangered species.

zowi

-- (zowie@hotmail.com), March 18, 2000.


Zowie:

And if it's so $^&*)(%^ endangered, why do we let people eat them? We don't let people eat other endangered species.

Because salmon are not endangered everywhere. Folks in Puget Sound have made a political decision that they don't want their native salmon to disappear. What would be the genetic result of that loss? Hard to say. This is driven by a political agenda; not by science. Not that I don't support many environmental concerns; yet, I do believe in risk benefit analysis based on factual information and the right of citizens to have input into the decision making process.

Best wishe

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), March 21, 2000.


"Folks in Puget Sound have made a political decision that they don't want their native salmon to disappear. " Actually, no they haven't. This is a federal mandate. And please define "native salmon." Do they have special treaty rights compared to non-native salmon? If so, why?

-- (zowie@hotmail.com), March 21, 2000.

Zowie:

"Folks in Puget Sound have made a political decision that they don't want their native salmon to disappear. " Actually, no they haven't. This is a federal mandate. And please define "native salmon." Do they have special treaty rights compared to non-native salmon? If so, why?

Well Zowster; native salmon have been defined by ecosystem. Some even define them by river; Skagit [which really doesn't drain into the sound; although political and geographical definitions of the sound don't match in my experience], etc. This stuff is not clear yet. The landlocked sockeye may get a new definition. The .gov has defined them by large areas. This thing isn't over. You may soon see coming to your town, definition by creek. Then you will be happy. Sure

Best wish

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), March 21, 2000.


"Well Zowster; native salmon have been defined by ecosystem. " Define "ecosystem."

-- (zowie@hotmail.com), March 21, 2000.


Zowie:

First we need to define what a Zowster is. That is your job. I am waiting.

Best wishes,,,,,

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), March 21, 2000.


Or is that Zowster

Best wishes,,,,

Z

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), March 21, 2000.


A zowster probably shares DNA at the 99.99% level with a Z1X4Y7. Very similar species.

Now what's a definition of "ecosystem." Thought the whole damn environment was an ecosystem.

-- (zowie@hotmail.com), March 21, 2000.


Zowster:

That may be true; but first I need evidence. Please provide gel images of the restriction digests. Then I will be convinced. You don't need to go further than that.Remember, within error, chimps fit that description ;<) or so it seems........

Best wishes,,,,,

Z

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), March 21, 2000.


I don't know how to put gel images on the web. Heck, I don't even know how you put on the colored type. Still don't know why a salmon swimming in Hylebos is any more important than one in the Green River, or a hatchery fish coming back after proving its survival skills in 4-5 years in the open ocean. Can you 'splain it to me?

zowie

-- (zowie@hotmail.com), March 22, 2000.



Z-

Even an old dog can learn new tricks.

The Zowster

-- (zowie@hotmail.com), March 22, 2000.


And now that I have, back to the question:

Please define "native salmon." Do they have special treaty rights compared to non-native salmon? If so, why?

zowie

-- (zowie@hotmail.com), March 22, 2000.


Moderation questions? read the FAQ