+1 Salmo!

Will just note that the NW Science Opinion article from the early 2000s "Washington Salmon; Extinction is not and option but may be the Preferred Alternative".

The Tribes have worked very hard to get the recs out of the rivers and PS, with WDFW's full support. I tend agree with Salmo that recovery is not really the goal. Recovery would mean de-listing and with that all of the direct controls over activities go away. As long as fish are rare and listed, the Tribes carry a huge hammer over development.

+2 Salmo. One thing you did not mention was whether the current stock assessment and resulting agreements are based upon Stilly Chinook which the tribe reportedly continues to fin clip?

If so, how would ceasing that fin clipping affect the harvest impact?

I will take a shot at this although Salmo will correct me when I go off course or remind me that everybody knows that.

Stilly Chinook have been a long time coded wire tag indicator group for PSC ER assessment. They have been ad clipped and CWT'd since mid 1980's as I recall. Because they are used for fishery assessment, the ad clip coupled with the CWT has been the standard across many stocks and is part of the coastwise CWT sampling programs by a wide range of entities. Originally, samplers just looked for the ad clip and this would indicate that the snout would contain a CWT. With the advent of mass marking and the ease of fin clipping to designate hatchery fish (but not necessarily containing a CWT), sampling became more sophisticated to find those fish containing a CWT. This is where the electronic magnetic wands came into use to identify those fish with a CWT in the snout. The use of the wands have been phased in over time by the coastwide agencies. Washington was the first to use them in all fisheries for sampling both ad clipped and unmarked fish. Alaska used them for marked fish only. BC used them in the troll fisheries. In the Haida GWaii and Vancouver Island lodge sport fisheries ad clipped snouts were place in sampling buckets at the lodges and later picked up by CDFO to separate out the CWT'd snouts from the blanks. So coastwise sampling has kinda been a mixed bag (sorry) but an important part is that ad clipping was still important to distinguish fish that may contain a CWT.

The other key piece about mass marking was the fishery regulation benefits of having mark selective fisheries that allowed for harvesting hatchery fish while letting go the unmarked ("wild"). MSF regulations got the best bang for the buck because of the requirement to release unmarked fish while retaining hatchery fish. Therefore simply by switching from a standard "keep anything" fishery to MSF, the fishery could go longer and have higher harvest for the same number of dead unmarked. This is the standard MSF sales pitch.

Now come to Stilly, because the intent of the program is to get fishery information from as many fisheries as possible, ad clipping is necessary. Unmarked fish and any CWTs aren't kept in MSFs so you don't get any information from these even though you know that they are encountered. So for Stilly, ad clipping the fish allows you to get CWT information in keep-anything and MSF fisheries..which is what is intended. Of course the down side is that the ad clipped fish are harvested at a "hatchery fish" rate and the MSF regulation is no help and in fact aggravates the exploitation situation.

When the comanagers came up with the Stilly ER limits for unmarked and marked in So US. fisheries along with the total ER limit established by NMFS, they seemed to have selected a marked fish ER limit that is more restrictive than even the ESA NMFS limit. The other big downside is that with a more constraining marked fish ER limit, MSFs now become the bad guy and not a regulation that provides more access to harvestable hatchery fish. Hence, winter BM gone.

So going forward, not ad clipping the Stilly fish will diminish the fishery exploitation information from CWTS. But in so doing, Stilly fish would would be released in MSF because they were unmarked.

Let me just add, that there is a lot reluctance in management arenas to depart from long standing operations and data analysis systems. This especially holds true in PSC land. Compromising the CWT fishery information from the Stilly indicator group by not ad clipping would not go down easy.

Hope this helps. Salmo can fill in the missing pieces.


Final comment: This isn't really a PSC problem. Its the comanagers that have imposed a conservation constraint at a low run size that happens to be more restrictive than the ESA limit. And it happens to be on marked fish so MSF regulations make it worse. I can't think of any other instance where a comanagers conservation/recovery objective is more constraining than the ESA limit.

No surprise at all!
Take a look at the posters who get angry about Baywolf posting information!! I think we know who's side they are on..
Lake washington sockeye! Is thier model......
Never let them make escapement...
Put in a hatchery and we will get a fishery....right ... OH NO no fishing by anyone except tribes until we make escapement.... let them fish before the locks so we have to take thier word on how many fish they catch...
And then NEVER let them make ESCAPEMENT! so if they get close to escapement take more fish.....
That way they fish every year and we never fish again.... works for the tribes, works for WDFW, works for state Democrats.... win win win and now the rest of the state to follow the succesful sockeye model that works so great!

Darth -

That is probably as good an explanation of a lousy situation as I have read. Thank you.

While I understand the desire to not mess with data collection procedures (and potentially alter the results) one must also question whether preventing a small ripple in the continuum is worth the overall annual cost with no end in sight (that being recovery of the Stilly Chinook). After all, they could just put a footnote recognizing such a minor procedural alteration.

Frankly, there needs to be a change in the paradigm.

If only I were King for a day.....

"Oh, what a tangled web we weave...."

Thanks Darth,

I'll also point out (as Smalma would likely) that these results are also the price of prioritizing pre-terminal marine sport above all else in the process. If we would let the fish sort themselves out a bit more, impacts to weak stocks would go much further, as far as season length and numbers harvested.

Recreational fisheries should have at least two tiers of structure - one for when the weak stocks are slightly more abundant and fisheries could expand more into the pre-terminal; and a second that focuses on compressing those fisheries to extend terminal and/or "cleaner" pre-terminal areas.

I'd also add that many of these pre-terminal PS fisheries must chew up the lion's share of available total ESA impacts, on these weakest stocks, to even stay open for the limited time they are. This year you see the results of an increased %, relative to the recent past, of Stilly impacts being shifted into the terminal area. Mind you, this likely only amounts to the Stilaguamish fishery getting about 30 Chinook salmon....they got 15ish last year.

There is another reason that I haven't seen mentioned yet for clipping some of the Stilly fish. There is really no other way (that I am aware) to evaluate the impacts of mark selective fisheries (MSF) on specific populations without doing this double index tagging (DIT). In short, some fish are tagged and marked (susceptible to MSF fisheries) and others are tagged and not marked (not susceptible to MSF fisheries). Comparing the harvest (exploitation) rates on the two groups lets you estimate the impact of the fishery. Pretty important to know if you want to keep having these types of fisheries. As discussed above, there can also be a downside, particularly when REALLY important fish are used for DIT rather than using just a hatchery population (thought to represent some real natural population) for the DIT as is done for some PSC indicator stocks (if that is what they are still called).

I am pretty sure that some other stocks are already being evaluated through a surrogate.

To use such an at risk stock with its arguably disproportionate impact on other fisheries in this manner is irresponsible at best.

The stillaguamish hatchery program is small and limited by the number of natural-origin fish they can collect for broodstock. PSC exploitation rate indicator tag groups need to be 200K tags for statistical robustness. That means just about the whole program is tagged and because of the prior mentioned sampling in northern fisheries being clip only sampling, the releases are ad clip and cwt. If the program was larger - at least 400k, the could release the double index tag group that OncyT was referring to.

A key part of DIT analysis for identifying differential harvest rates by fishery is to have the catches in each fishery to be electronically sampled. That is both marked and unmarked need to be examined to see if they contain a CWT (in those "keep anything" fisheries). This hasn't been the case but I don't know what the situation is now. Alaska was a holdout for a long time in that they didn't look at unclipped fish for CWTs. The lodge fisheries in BC were another problem for unmarked. But in essence if only some of the fisheries are sampled then doing DIT analysis is much more complicated and requires some major assumptions.

So using DIT groups for evaluating individual fisheries is problematic because of these sampling issues. However, the differences in escapement numbers for the unmarked and marked tag groups can quickly be used to get an all-fishery difference in exploitaiion rates between the two. What has been found that the higher the proportion of the stock that is exposed to MSFs, the greater the difference in escapement rates between the unmarked and marked groups. EG PS stocks generally show a greater gap between the two than Col R tules for example. But the data is messy and sometimes down track with expectations very well.

Just Because is correct that doing DIT groups requires essentially double the number of released fish and CWTs. That luxury isn't there for Stilly.

First, I really did not enjoy that statistics class in college.

That said, so far this has provided some interesting details but to what end for Stily Chinook? Short term? Long term? And how will this data facilitate achievement of those goals? Or have I just not been paying enough attention???

The wild Stilly chinook will not come back. Habitat degradation and a
growing human population. Fishing can be closed completely and the fish will not rebound. How many Stilly fish are intercepted by SEAK and BC? But the tribe can always use it as a tool to get the WA recs off the water which is what they want.

The application of the information that the return of the CWT information helps answer some of the questions being asked about Stillaguamish Chinook. The CWT information is the foundation of the managers FRAM model used both pre and post season.

From the draft 2017 co-manager plan the post season FRAM Stillaguamish exploitation rates (ER) estimates for the years 2005 to 2014 yield the following information

Alaska had a 1.7% ER on unmarked fish and 2.3% on marked fish.
BC had a 15.7% ER on unmarked fish and 19,6% on marked fish.
SUS troll had a 1.7% ER on unmarked fish and 2.6% on marked fish.
SUS net had a 1.2% ER on unmarked fish and 1.2% on marked fish.
SUS sport had a 4.2% ER on unmarked fish and 9.4% on marked fish.

The NF Stillaguamish hatchery program has been a conservation program designed to supplement spawning escapements. A run reconstruction for the same document for the 20 year period (1990s to 2009) should on the average the natural spawning escapement was approximately 1,500 (marked and unmarked combined) which on the average produced and naturally produced runs (fish produced by those spawners) of 933 adults (2.5% of the estimated of 40,000 historic population). Over those 20 years there were 4 years where the number of naturally produced adults (recruits) exceeded the number of spawners. Those R/S (recruits/spawners) that were greater than 1.0 had values of 1.02, 1.02, 1.06, and 1.23. During the first 10 years the average R/S was 0.7 and during the second it was 0.6. 6 individual years had R/S of less than 0.5 with the lowest being 0.24. Pretty clear that conservation problem is essential to supporting Stillaguamish Chinook.

The lower North Fork Stillaguamish USGS stream guage (NF Stillaguamish near Arlington) has a reasonably long period of recorded of annual peak flows that might help illustrate the sorts of habitat issues that Lifter is referring to. Those records go back 1929.

From 1929 to 1979 there was not a single year with an annual flood larger than 32,000 cfs.

During the 1980s there were 3 years with floods over 32,000 cfs (32,100 to 36,300).

During the 1990s there were 4 years with floods over 32,000 cfs (34,400 to 36,700).

During the 2000s there were 8 years with floods over 32,000 cfs: those events were 33,500, 39,000, 39,200, 39,800, 44,000, 49,400, 50,600, and 55,100.

I'll leave it to the reader whether the increase in larger floods is significant or not

BTW -there now a second Stillaguamish hatchery program in the basin. This a captive program for the SF fall Chinook population.

Curt

Smalma,

I did not know that there is a captive broodstock program for any part of Stilly Chinook. I wonder if those fish are significantly different from NF Chinook. I'm leaning toward using NF Chinook for captive broodstock would be a more valuable use (higher and better under the "wise use" concept) than ad clipping and CWT for indicator stock release to the ocean. The data we already have suggests that ER, while significant, is not the factor driving these fish toward extinction. I will talk with Ed about it. I can't believe he's really satisfied with keeping gamefish seasons on the Stilly closed for the next 100 years, which is exactly where we are headed by maintaining the status quo.

Sg

Apparently there is at least 10 years worth of data available to provide comparative exploitation rates.

If (an important qualifier) the number of returning adults is a limiting factor in ability to increase brood stock production how would not clipping those fish impact returns?

Reading the numbers the SUS sport fishery has an impact of 9.4% on clipped fish but 4.2% on unclipped fish. Just playing with those numbers and with all other factors the same it appears as though NOT clipping them would reduce impact by 5.2% so how many additional adult returns would that produce in river?

You can also throw in another 1% potential savings tied to the SUS commercial troll fishery and roughly 4% in the Canadian fishery and .6% AK.

Total potential close to 11%.

Do I have those numbers right and, if so, how many additional returning fish would that represent?

Let the tribes have the fish.
All of them.

Then we will go fish on their fish.

Time for a revolution.

Salmo,

They have actually found that, since the listing in 1999, the two populations are likely more associated with migration timing than fork-specific distributions, in general. These are a summer and a more fall-timed component. The summers are more prevalent spawning in the NF and the "falls" more in the SF, but they both overlap in space a bit. The captive brood program is on the fall or "SF" population and yes, they can tell the pops apart genetically.

Larry, a simple answer to your question would be that since there is a forecasted terminal run for just shy of 1,000, and since the total exploitation rate is roughly 20% and the hatchery component rate slightly higher in the SUS, you could expect roughly 200+ additional fish (H and W) to return absent all fisheries for this year. Just shutting down specific fisheries would be some subtotal of that added amount.

Mind you, this is my back o' the napkin estimate....mileage may vary.