Washington Trout is Not “The Wedge”

Hugh Lewis is counsel for Washington Trout and can be reached at (360) 392-2880 or hugh@salmonheart.net.

Who is driving a “wedge” into the local salmon recovery process? It isn’t Washington Trout. Your cover story in January 2003, authored by Jeremy Brown and entitled “Fish Soup? Wild Salmon Recovery, Hatcheries and Fish Farms,” is riddled with half-truths and outright fabrications.

I am on the board of directors of Washington Trout, the conservation organization so thoroughly and unjustifiably vilified in Mr. Brown’s article, and I serve as its in-house counsel. Readers interested in learning about our organization are invited to visit our Web site, http://www.washingtontrout. org. Had Mr. Brown bothered to visit that Web site, perhaps the thrust of his article might have taken a more productive turn.

Mr. Brown’s article makes sense when it discusses the “Whatcom County Resolution” which imposed a county-wide moratorium on commercial marine salmon net pens; the article also makes sense when it discusses the deleterious impacts of farmed salmon on human communities in the section entitled “Industrial Salmon: a Poor Substitute.”

Where the article starts to break down is in its third section, the so-called “Wedge Issue,” which addresses the suit filed by Washington Trout and the Native Fish Society. That suit seeks to force changes to the manner in which our state’s hatchery system is operated, or to cease their operations until the hatchery system can be made compliant with requirements of the Endangered Species Act. This is the actual objective of that lawsuit, in spite of what Mr. Brown asserts.

Mr. Brown asserts that Washington Trout has been “duped into doing the bidding of development interests,” and states that Washington Trout is “a group that espouses catch and release fly fishing.” These are utterly ridiculous statements. Washington Trout is a conservation organization and not a fishing club; it does not “espouse catch and release fly fishing,” and it does the bidding of no third parties.

In fact, it is the “development interests” which are, along with the commercial fishing industry that employs Mr. Brown, the principal private supporters of hatchery programs. An article generated by the property rights group Oregonians In Action demonstrates this clearly. It is found at http://www.propertyrightsresearch.org/role_o.htm.

If you are a developer, hatcheries have historically been your friend, because those hatcheries, designed to produce “salmon without rivers,” have continuously permitted the development of land which once served as habitat for wild salmon. The winners under hatchery management have been developers, not fish.

The commercial fishing industry has also continuously supported the use of hatcheries (see, for example http://www.alaska.net/~usag/resolutions/resolution2.htm) which have been touted as being able to produce more salmon than Mother Nature could. A century of reliance on hatchery production, however, has produced only Endangered Species Act listings rather than an increase in harvest numbers. Readers of the Whatcom Watch should consider these issues very carefully.

Mr. Brown states that Washington Trout’s intention is to close all the hatcheries so that our members will somehow become the only people allowed to fish for salmon or, to use his florid prose, “gain the spoils for (our) own use!” I don’t know where he gets this stuff, but it’s nothing more than malicious drivel.

Washington Trout does not actually espouse any sort of fishing activities. We are advocates for fish, and not for fishermen. The literature discussing “catch and release” mortality cited by Mr. Brown is accurate. We recognize its accuracy and attempt to promote an understanding of this issue among members of the angling community.

We further maintain, however, that when fish populations drop to “threatened” or “endangered” levels, no fishing activity of any sort, commercial or sport, should be directed against them. That’s our real position. If anybody is driving a “wedge” here, it is Jeremy Brown.

Readers interested in learning the real story behind our lawsuit directed at Washington’s chinook hatchery system are invited to read the article appearing at our website: http://www.washingtontrout.org/hatchnoticepr.shtml.

I can also advise that Washington Trout has filed an additional 60-day notice of an intent to sue over the operation of the state’s coho and steelhead hatcheries, which produce literally millions of highly predatory coho and steelhead smolts each year which prey heavily upon threatened chinook fry and smolts attempting to make their way into the ocean.

Our actions are not ill-founded. People who questioned the efficacy of hatchery management used to be viewed as “kooks.” Now, leading scientists from all over, including independent researchers and the National Marine Fisheries Service’s own scientific review panel, agree that hatchery production harms wild fish. A huge body of scientific research conducted over the past dozen years explicitly supports our position.

It used to be that one needed to drive to the University of Washington’s School of Fisheries Science to gain access to such literature and verify rival claims regarding hatcheries. Now, it is possible to conduct a fair amount of such research on-line. In the Appendix below this article, some Web sites are listed for those of your readers who are interested in furthering their knowledge with respect to these issues.

Mr. Brown’s glowing description of the local Kendall Hatchery chinook program glosses over disturbing realities. He states that this facility “has scrupulously ensured its genetic integrity.” He cites no authority for this proposition, and there probably is no such authority.

It is now well understood by competent scientists that genetic changes to hatchery populations occur even in the first generation of hatchery rearing; see in this regard noted fishery scientist Reg Reisenbichler’s work cited at http://www.coastrange.org/salmon&survivalpg4.html. These and other problems are exacerbated when the numbers of hatchery-reared returning adults vastly outnumber those of returning wild fish, as is the case in the Nooksack River system.

We and other members of the local “coalition” have concerns that the adult chinook return statistics cited by Mr. Brown actually misrepresent the health of the North/Middle Fork stock, as well as the extent to which we are approaching our recovery goals. Under the Endangered Species Act, only wild chinook (those that were naturally spawned) are considered in evaluating progress towards recovery, and 94 percent of the 3,687 returning adults in 2002 originated from the hatchery.

The number of returning wild North/Middle Fork chinook was closer to 200. This gross disparity is a strong indicator of the overall poor health of this wild stock. The Kendall Hatchery program releases may actually be reduced by the co-managers in future years because over 50 percent of the early chinook spawners in the South Fork Nooksack were strays from the Kendall Hatchery. The South Fork has its own small, reproductively isolated population of wild chinook.

Straying by hatchery fish into spawning grounds of remnant wild fish populations is a predictable risk factor for the survival of wild fish, which compromises the genetic integrity of the wild population. See http://www.epa.gov/fedrgstr/EPA-SPECIES/1994/December/Day-28/pr-95.html.

When the wild fish are listed for protection under the Endangered Species Act, such risks are deemed acceptable only where the impacts are predictably low. Here, where more than 50 percent of the spawners in the South Fork are of hatchery origin, the magnitude of attendant risk is simply unacceptable.

Mr. Brown’s article mysteriously refers to the Kendall Hatchery as a “supplementation” hatchery, which is a facility designed to produce a “harvestable surplus” of fish in a river system in which a weakened wild run cannot sustain harvest. This is not, however, the stated purpose for the Kendall Hatchery.

In the official “Future Brood Document” generated by the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife and Tribal co-managers, this facility is described as a “Recovery Facility,” the purpose of which is not to support a harvest, but rather to rebuild a damaged wild population (see http://www.nwifc.wa.gov/03fbd/fnook-sam.txt.)

It would appear, however, from the actual 2002 Chinook return statistics discussed above, that an unstated goal of the Kendall Hatchery’s chinook program has been to produce more fish than are necessary to “rebuild” the population, and that it has quietly morphed into a “supplementation” facility without public notice.

The scientific literature associated with “supplementation” facilities concludes that it is inappropriate to operate a supplementation program when the local wild population is so depleted that it cannot withstand the harm predictably resulting from interactions with overwhelming numbers of hatchery fish.

For what it is worth, another objective of our lawsuit is to ferret out such inconsistencies between the publicly stated objectives for these facilities and their actual performance qualities.

The public, which is being asked to make its own sacrifices in so many areas toward the broad goal of “salmon recovery,” has a right to be concerned about the actions of any entity which is allowed to operate as though it were immune from compliance with the Endangered Species Act, even if that entity is the state of Washington. Some members of the local “coalition” apparently do not share this concern. We can only surmise at their motivations.

Somebody needs to ask hard questions and take others to task when they fail to implement basic scientific precautions in the conduct of activities which are known to damage wild fish populations and the ecosystems which support them. That is our mission. That is what we do.

It’s ironic that a publication like the Whatcom Watch should become the vehicle for this uninformed and unprincipled attack on my organization. §