The Washington State governor press release regarding salmon recovery funds of $27.5 million and more funding for commercial selective gear testing.
http://www.governor.wa.gov/news/news-view.asp?pressRelease=1584&newsType=1 Part of the funding:
“Specifically, this funding targets reducing the negative effects of hatchery operations on federally listed wild fish and explores alternative commercial fishing gear, in a large scale study, to improve the harvest efficiencies on hatchery fish while reducing the total impacts to wild fish”.
To improve the harvest efficiencies on hatchery fish while reducing the total impacts to wild fish is a key statement.
I explained on the $27.5 funding thread how that could be done.
The short version is that WDFW is in the process to find out if the new gear will work in the LCR and establish a mortality rate which last year tests came in at around 1% for seines Vs a known gillnet 40%.Using this simplistic example , selective gear could catch 40 x more hatchery fish while killing the same amount of ESA listed as a gill net.
This would then be under the jurisdiction of US VS Oregon to decide on how this will affect the tribes up river and to figure out a reasonable solution for all parties involved in this continuous case of many years. Nothing is set in stone that commercials would have access to all these fish VS sports or tribes. Anything less than the 40X allocated would be a conservation savings of ESA listed fish that then would prove the Governors press release correct. To improve the harvest efficiencies on hatchery fish while reducing the total impacts to wild fish.
US VS Oregon will figure this and all the other variables out. Close to the beginning of this thread it was said that this wasn’t going to be decided on this or any other forum and ---that would be correct.
I've worked around NMFS enough to know that when they want to cut something they will.
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