 A hatchery worker in the early 1980s. Many biologists say salmon produced in hatcheries have contributed to the loss of wild salmon. Others argue that hateries, managed differently, can play a role in the recovery of wild salmon. |
By Teresa Novak Young salmon are deceptively easy to produce artificially. Cannery operators built the first hatcheries in Oregon in the late 1870s, on the Clackamas and Rogue rivers. Their goal was to increase salmon runs by artificially combining salmon genetic material to create baby salmon fry, and then releasing the juvenile smolts to join wild young salmon swimming seaward from their upstream spawning grounds. Today, more than 70 percent of Oregon's salmon start life not in streams but in a fish hatchery. The role of salmon hatcheries has shifted several times over the years between a remedy for lost fish habitat to a method of helping boost wild salmon stock restoration. |
But the evidence is mounting that the economic value from using hatchery salmon to supplement wild runs has come at a high cost to the health of the wild salmon.
Large-scale construction of salmon hatcheries didn't begin until after massive dams rose in the Columbia River Basin.
In 1938, Congress passed the Mitchell Act to provide federal money for aggressive construction of hatcheries as a way of replacing the thousands of acres of salmon spawning grounds that were blocked or flooded behind dams. Subsequently, more than 80 were built in the Columbia River Basin.
Along the Oregon coast, hatcheries were used to increase the numbers of salmon for sport fishing. The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife operates 34 salmon hatcheries. There are 10 additional ones through ODFW's volunteer-operated Salmon Trout Enhancement Program, known as STEP.
Fish from these hatchery programs sometimes are used to stock so-called artificially created water systems that are not connected to wild streams.
Such hatchery enhancements were favored by people who thought that if it looks like a salmon, catches like a salmon and tastes like a salmon, who cares where its parents were, or where and how it was hatched?
But between the mid-50s and early 1970s, scientists increasingly found there was plenty to be concerned about. They were saying that the mass production of hatchery salmon was harming the remaining wild salmon runs and endangering the future welfare of salmon populations.
"They were like a large, unregulated experiment," said Jim Lichatowich, a fisheries biologist and salmon consultant in the Seattle area.
Early hatchery management often involved little more than transporting the biggest, most desirable species of salmon from one river to another. Little was understood then about the unique genetic makeup of each salmon run, and the "homing" device built into these fish to allow them to find their way back to their native streams.
This was clearly evident on the lower Columbia River. By 1991, the National Marine Fisheries Service could find no significant remnants of native coho salmon in the river.
Hatchery fish were less able to survive in the ocean than wild fish, although as smolts the larger, artificially reared hatchery fish sometimes out-competed the smaller native fish.
If some salmon streams contain 70 percent or more of hatchery fish, how do you tell a hatchery salmon from a wild salmon?
Other than DNA testing, many hatchery salmon can be identified because they are missing a tiny, unused fin near the tail, called an adipose fin, that is clipped before the smolts leave the hatchery.
Onno Husing, executive director of the Oregon Coastal Zone Management Association, said some people are convinced that 50 years of aggressive hatchery propagation has destroyed all of the wild fish.
"It's a viewpoint at one end of the spectrum, but it's out there," he said.
But other groups, including Oregon Trout, a native fish conservation group, and the National Marine Fisheries Service, the federal agency in charge of protecting wild salmon, believe wild fish runs and genetically wild fish still exist.
They believe that wild salmon runs can be built back up if salmon streams are returned to their natural conditions and enough wild fish come back to reproduce there.
Underlying all of this is Oregon's Wild Fish Management Policy, which was formally adopted by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife in 1992. It declares that it is the goal "of the people of the state of Oregon to restore native stocks of salmon and trout to their historic levels of abundance."
The goal of the wild fish policy is to reduce the negative effect that the hatcheries have had on the wild fish, while still maintaining the economic value of the fisheries and the communities that rely on them.
Many involved in salmon restoration groups and projects say it is easy to see now where the major mistakes were made in early hatchery management programs.
Diseases and parasites spread easily in hatchery fish, and the long-term effects of early cures sometimes were worse than the disease.
Little study was given to the long-term effects that mass releases of hatchery salmon would have on the health of streams and the other life forms in them.
Because hatchery salmon do not return to spawning grounds, fewer salmon are laying eggs and dying in woodland streams.
This means the loss of an important source of food for bears, foxes, eagles and raccoons, as well as in-stream animals.
"We're just beginning to understand how important those carcasses are to the whole ecosystem of that habitat," said Jim Martin, a chief developer of the Oregon Plan for Salmon and Watersheds.
Salmon also are important to the culture and economy of Pacific Northwest native American tribes.
For centuries, salmon served both as an important food source and cultural icon for the native people of the Northwest. But without consulting them, federal and state governments blocked salmon streams with dams and then built hatcheries downstream rather than in the upstream fishing grounds of the tribes.
Yet some see modern hatcheries that manage for genetic diversity as an important component in salmon recovery.
Henry Yuen, a fisheries biologist for the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission in Portland, said hatcheries may become intensive care centers in the salmon recovery process, incubating dwindling stocks of wild salmon for re-release into restored habitats.
"Not every scientist has a negative view of hatcheries, and some offer solutions on how to use them properly," Yuen said.
For example, hatchery fish have been used to repopulate and re-establish extinct wild runs, such as the ones in the Umatilla River. Considered a conspicuous success, the massive project cost more than $50 million to bring hatchery-reared salmon back to a river where runs of coho and chinook had been extinct for more than 70 years.
Those hatchery fish appear to be surviving and behaving as if they were born to be wild, Yuen said.