How can you sit there and say that....

The Lewis River Brights have held a solid population exceeding escapement of 6600 for 12 out of the last 14 years... Expected return for this year is around 12,000 and yet we still don't have an in river opportunity to harvest them...

Odd really...

Keith

LCR wild steelhead have not been harvested for over two decades, yet populations hover in the threatened category.
Willamette wild spring chinook haven't been harvested for over two decades, yet they remain ESA listed.
Same can be said about Clackamas wild coho, decades of no harvest, yet populations haven't rebounded.

OK, so they haven't been harvested by sport anglers... But Clackamas Coho sure have been pounded by the gillnets... LCR Wild steelhead have been hammered by gillnets and tanglenets as well as the Willamette spring chinook...

Over and above their challenging journey home through the net gauntlets then they're C n R'd by sport anglers.... If these fish weren't handled, would they recover?

Keith

Clakamas River wild coho are a late returning stock, they enter the river in late Nov. through the end of Jan.
So run timing would put them well out of the gillnet harvest periods.
The point of this thread is simple, if recovery efforts are not directed at issues concerning carrying capacity, then recovery will not happen, ever.
Wild steelhead are a good example, in spite of two decades of no harvest, little if any recovery has taken place.
The same can be said about sea run cutthroat, chums and spring chinook, simply curtailing harvest hasn't significantly recovered any threatened of ESA listed stocks.

It depends on what factors are limiting, like that isn't a statement of the obvious. However, context means a lot. Wild PS steelhead populations were down beginning in the late 1960s through mid-70s. Harvest restrictions went into effect, and coupled with good ocean conditions, the wild steelhead rebound of the 80s has now become our "good ole' days" benchmark of what good wild steelhead populations look like. Same harvest restrictions, or tighter even, and poor early marine survival condtions, roughly the same freshwater habitat conditions, and these same wild steelhead populations cannot even make their escapment goals, let alone provide any fishing opportunity.

LCR wild steelhead are a different story. Gillnets are no friend to steelhead, but the amount of net soaking time in the spring isn't enough to be the limiting factor preventing recovery, but it's a contributing factor. Most of the LCR steelhead tribs have trashed habitat (logging and other development), and who knows what their marine survival conditions are like, but it sure doesn't seem to be the same feeding grounds as the above Bonneville summer runs visit. What the harvest restrictions tell us is that over-harvest isn't the limiting factor for LCR wild steelhead. It's habitat, either freshwater or ocean, or both.

Sg

Thanks Salmo, I would agree with your interpretation of why these stocks don't recover after harvest restrictions.
This also mirrors what most west slope stock assessments are saying, which is the top 5 limiting factors for recovery are in fact habitat related.

I've never met an anadromous stock that wasn't over fished.

The CR was noted in history that you could walk on the backs of fish to get to the other side of the river. And of course over fishing reduced the fish stocks tremendously before the dams and forests and urban sprawl occurred, that they then built hatcheries before 1900.

So you're saying that if we take all the dams out, replant and regrow the forest, make the rivers pristine, rebuild estuaries, no mining, reverse urban sprawl, etc. then we would have

1) If that could ever be done?
2)and what would be the cost?
3) More steelhead? if just did the remodeling of the environment?
4)or if man quite over harvesting fish all together in the ocean? and/or the river?

I don't buy over harvest isn't a big portion of the problem.

I was told this story...
At a salmon celebration recently, a nine year old girl asked, "If salmon are endangered, why are we eating them?"

Good question, no?

It is the root of the habitat thing........ the productivity of it. In our time the capacity of the habitat is greatly reduced ( dams, people, everything human ) so it will not sustain the harvest it once did. That said when one is defining over harvest it must be in present circumstance not historical. To put it simply if 100 yrs ago you could harvest 1,000 from a stream with out impact but today you can only take 50 but take 100 and the run is depressed then which is it over harvest or habitat? Over harvest, as you must manage what you have not want or was present in the past.

The concept that your going to do away with and/or ignore 250 years of human impacts or fix them is almost laughable. Take PS, ( please ) they say the population will double again in this century. You really think that puny little clean up effort going on will stop the human impacts? For every one thing you fix growth will tear up two new ones. It has been the argument inside the world of fish for years, habitat restoration or preservation. Write off blasted watersheds and restore those that would have a reasonable chance of survivability and preserve those with the natural eco systems intact. I am old enough and seen enough to realize it is preservation and write off time.

Limit growth impacts and preserve those streams that are and can continue to function as ecosystems. Quite PCing the Sound and doing as the Gov is now and go after septic tanks, storm run off, and mandatory growth management. Then reduce harvest to what the watersheds individually can support and manage from the spawning beds out not the ocean in. We won't and will continue to OVER HARVEST because the habitat productivity continues to decline.

Like the old saying .................. Which came first, chicken or the egg? Or in this case habitat productivity or over harvest.

Lucky Louie -
I don't think anyone is saying that over harvest has not been a problem or that it continues to be a problem for many stocks. However the fact remains in the majority of the cases habitat problems over shadow the harvest impacts.

There are far to many examples of where harvest rates have been greatly reduced without seeing much in a positive response in population numbers.

There are a number of anadromous populations which currently fit most folks definition of not being over fished. Just one example that many here would be familar with would be Puget Sound wild summer steelhead. Virtually no commercial impacts and recreational fishery has been wild steehead release for 25 years.

Regarding what might happen if habitat issues were addressed. Most estimates that I have seen is that the productiivity and capacity of most of our rivers and the fish stocks they support are only 10 to 20% (range from near 0 to maybe 50%) of what they historically were. Clearly there is ample room for improvement. For the Skykomish summer Chinook it was estimated that under current conditions MSY escapement levels would be in the area of 6,000 adults with a potential associated harvest of 3,000 to 4,000 fish. If the habitat was restored to what has been callled properly functioning conditions (rouoghly 80% of the historic conditions) MSY escapement levels would go up to apporx. 20,000 spawners and a harvest in the 60,000 range. BTW - if all fishing impacts on that stock were end it would be expected that the population would stablize at something less than 20,000 with no current or future harvest.

I think the above example illustrates Rivrguy's point and shows what has been lost due to habitat losses.

Slab Happy -
Out of the mouth of babes!

Actually a great question which shows why we have such problems in the salmon world. To the public in general the issue seems to be that a salmon continues to be salmon. For most the salmon on our grills come from stocks that are not ESA listed (hatchery fish or from stocks not listed). A lot more education is needed about that salmon (wild versus hatchrey, ESA listed versus non-listed, etc) is more than a generic term; a Chinook is not a pink. Heck even hard core anglers sometimes wrestle with these issues. Without that education it will be tough to get folks to buy into the need to protect wild salmon or to put folks in a position to make informed decisions regarding the future fate of the resource that we all care so much about.

Tight lines
Curt

I think we can do both at the same time.

Since it is a rainy day, lets all of us take a virtual trip to Russian Kamchatka Peninsula. After departing our plane, we embark and finish our trip by helicopter when we hit a time warp of 250 years plus like Alaska and the PNW use to be.

Here is an account of what we will see.


The Kamchatka Peninsula was once a Cold War listening post, used by Russia to spy on Alaska.
Geographically remote and sealed off for 65 years, the landscape is without dams, logging or agriculture. Its 800-mile coastline has seen little economic development. Instead of industrial complexes, farms or blocks of housing, a helicopter fly-over reveals snow-rimmed volcanoes that give way to slopes of birch and tamarack and broad valleys partitioned by rivers that twist like ribbons.
The mountains were bisected by broad valleys where clear rivers wandered through marshes, grasslands, and thickets of willows and cottonwoods. This was a landscape as rich as my home, Oregon, must have been when Lewis and Clark arrived in the fall of 1805

I could see why these rivers were so productive, and what had been lost from the rivers of my home in the Pacific Northwest. From their headwaters in glaciers, lava fields, perched meadows and forested canyons, the rivers cascaded through a mountainous terrain untouched by human hands. Where the rivers found the smooth contours of the lower elevation valleys, the differences between these Kamchatkan rivers and our own rivers were even more pronounced. The rivers I saw from the helicopter divided into braids that wandered across the valley floors, connecting a glittering miasma of pools, riffles, old water-filled channels, oxbows and marshes. These floodplain habitats-long since lost in the United States to agricultural and urban development- provided not only the biological productivity of wetlands, but a wide gradient of micro-habitats for all of the varieties and life stages of juvenile salmon, trout and char. Indeed, when the helicopter landed, we saw thousands of fingerling salmon and char in these swampy off-channel meanders.
The peninsula produces nearly 25 percent of the world's wild Pacific salmon, and is home to Russia's only population of steelhead, an endangered species.


Anybody want to guess what made the russian steelhead endangered in one of the post pristine places on earth?

Where we can still see salmon like the accounts from Lewis and Clark exposition, so thick that you cross the river walking on their backs.

So Louie why is it that stocks that suffer huge spawner depletion during poor ocean conditions, rebound almost immediately after ocean conditions improve, yet when harvest is curtailed nothing happens?

LOL!

Kids are brilliant. Just goes to show how confused we "grownups" are.

Thank you all for your expertise, insight, and time taken to put this all out front - again.

Freespool,

You could be seeing a mirage. Something is there but it has been distorted by other factors. Your answers could lie in Russia.

This might interest you because of the similarities of Kamchatka steelhead and Oregon steelhead.

Comparability of Kamchatka and eastern PacificO. mykiss populations
Although once considered a separate species (Behnke1966), conspecificity of Kamchatka populations with
O. mykiss in North America is now well established (Behnke 1992). Molecular data from nuclear (Okazaki
1984; Pavlov & Kuzishchin 1999) and mitochondrial (McCusker et al. 2000) loci suggest a closer relationship
of Kamchatka populations to coastal groups extending through Oregon and California,

The project now involves fishery management agencies and universities in Russia, Canada and the United States. International cooperation has resulted in a dozen scientific papers, life history data collections from 14 rivers, and a range of efforts to protect steelhead from illegal overharvest and habitat destruction.

Louie, my point is harvest reform doesn't equal recovery, and we can see countless examples of steelhead stocks that have not recovered, in spite of decades of no harvest.
Yet when ocean conditions fluctuates from bad to good, stocks rebound almost immediately.
Doesn't that indicate a river's carry capacity is the deciding factor in determining a stocks population?
I'm all about recovering our steelhead and salmon stocks, but advocating a policy that has clearly shown in the past 25 years, little to no recovery ability, seems like a big step backward to me.

L. Louie,

While Kamchatka steelhead are biologically the same as PNW steelhead, the population similarity stops there. Kamchatka is not a good comparison to OR or WA steelhead rivers. The Kamchatka steelhead are endangered due to over-fishing, but it's important to understand the context of that over-fishing. The Kamchatka steelhead populations are not very productive, so they are very sensitive to fishing pressure. A few poachers at the mouth of a river system can cause a lot of damage to the local steelhead population.

Kamchatka steelhead runs exhibit respawner rates up to 75%, while here and in BC we see about 12 - 15% repeat spawning among wild steelhead. The high respawner rate of Kamchatka steelhead means that recruitment of new and younger adult steelhead to the spawning population is low. It's unlikely that young recruits are selected by the harvest over re-spawners, so either the freshwater or marine habitat has low productivity. The marine waters appear to be rich, considering that other salmonid populations are typically large, but we know now that this is not always a dependable clue. More likely it is the harsh sub-arctic climate that limits productivity for an extensive stream rearing obligate like steelhead.

It appears to me that in the natural order of the ecosystem, individual Kamchatka steelhead populations are relatively small, with low recruitment, and thus extremely sensitive to over-fishing. Heck, any fishing might be over-fishing for such populations. I think an important take-home message is that even contemporary degraded OR streams are more productive for steelhead than their Kamchatka counterparts. The measure of productivity in this case being recruits per spawner and smolts per hectare of freshwater habitat.

Sg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamchatka_Peninsula


Kamchatka also has a total population about 1/15th of the Northwest which leads back to the original problem, humans and rats get along just fine, humans and salmon don't..

My point is that MSY doesn’t equal recovery or sustainability and that is where I would begin to look to the policy of 80 years of MSY being the contributing factor to the decline of stocks of fish in general..




Coupled with the approach that has been widely criticized as ignoring several key factors involved in fisheries management and has led to the devastating collapse of many fisheries. As a simple calculation, it ignores the size and age of the animal being taken, its reproductive status, and it focuses solely on the species in question, ignoring the damage to the ecosystem caused by the designated level of exploitation and the issue of bycatch.
.
“The concept of MSY as a fisheries management strategy developed in the early 1930s.[2][3][4] It increased in popularity in the 1950s with the advent of surplus-production models with explicitly estimate MSY.[1] As an apparently simple and logical management goal, combined with the lack of other simple management goals of the time, MSY was adopted as the primary management goal by several international organizations (e.g., IWC, IATTC,[5] ICCAT, ICNAF), and individual countries.[6]
Between 1949 and 1955, the U.S. maneuvered to have MSY declared the goal of international fisheries management (Johnson 2007). The international MSY treaty that was eventually adopted in 1955 gave foreign fleets the right to fish off any coast. Nations that wanted to exclude foreign boats had to first prove that its fish were overfished.[7]
As experience was gained with the model, it became apparent to some researchers that it lacked the capability to deal with the real world operational complexities and the influence of trophic and other interactions. In 1977, Larkin wrote its epitaph, challenging the goal of maximum sustained yield on several grounds: It put populations at too much risk; it did not account for spatial variability in productivity; it did not account for species other than the focus of the fishery; it considered only the benefits, not the costs, of fishing; and it was sensitive to political pressure.[8] In fact, none of these criticisms was aimed at sustainability as a goal. ]
The first one noted that seeking the absolute MSY with uncertain parameters was risky. The rest point out that the goal of MSY was not holistic; it left out too many relevant features.[7]
Some managers began to use more conservative quota recommendations, but the influence of the MSY model for fisheries management still prevailed. Even while the scientific community was beginning to question the appropriateness and effectiveness of MSY as a management goal,[8][9] it was incorporated into the 1982 United Nations Convention for the Law of the Sea, thus ensuring its integration into national and international fisheries acts and laws.[6] According to Walters and Maguire, an ‘‘institutional juggernaut had been set in motion’’, climaxing in the early 1990s with the collapse of northern cod”.[10

Good link.

Yes about 1/15 the population of WA that could fit about 2 1/2 states of WA in it. No problem with pristine conditions.