Ah rainy days. Lets try this. A bio used to give his unscientific probability of returns based on a group of five. He did this as a rough guide to what events shaped a run. Heavy fall floods, ( and size matters ) low summer flows, wet spring with late mild flooding and water color & temp, ocean conditions AT TIME OF SALT ENTRY, and ocean conditions until return.

Took me a bit to get it but if you had say good spawning conditions and a wet spring, two out of five. Add good ocean three and so on. As you seldom get all five he didn't worry about it. The ocean survival thing he said was the wild card as was the out migrant numbers as the agencies do not have those numbers only how many adults spawned. Add to it AK & BC then depending on where you are it gets a little more strange.

So do this, just watch and don't color your view with anything but fish. On a average year he said we had about a 2 1/2. Wet springs really help as does if we do not have a 100 year flood. Ocean survival is the one that nobody seems to truly know, some very educated guesses, and drives everything. You can have the first 3 in the toilet and the ocean up across the board and you will have a lot of survival, depending on species and AK & BC. ( By the way BC sport seldom report Chinook or Coho caught unless around urban areas )

It is truly a crap shoot but the old boy was usually right close.

Sounds like we need more water, of course thats the samething the BPA and the irrigators are saying too.

Sg was right. The Russian steelhead are endangered because of over harvest Mostly by poachers for their eggs for cavier if I remember right.

I equate

MSY = overharvest

in most of the circumstances.

It's not that difficult to figure out. The entire OP is over harvested with tribal nets, etc.... Oregon coast is now over fished.

Keith

L. Louie,

Although MSY/MSH is the lauded management goal in WA, due to wild fish policies and ESA listings, I don't think any run in the state is being managed any longer for MSY. You can stop worrying about that one for now. Meanwhile, habitat is limiting the preponderance of populations.

Sg

Over fishing is global.

MSY=Overharvest

The commercials catch the fish and fishing is the principal livelihood for over 200 million people around the world and then the population eats them.

Out of sight out of mind.
There doesn’t seem to be a problem until stocks aren’t sustainable anymore.

Then it’s going to be another user group that gets the left-overs problem and /or fault.

Sportspeople comes to mind.

http://www.worldwildlife.org/what/globalmarkets/fishing/whyitmatters.html

Overfishing
Overfishing, the catching and killing of more fish that can naturally be replaced, is devastating fish populations. Over 75 percent of fisheries are already fully exploited or overfished. Scientists predict that at the current rates of fishing, all the world’s commercial fisheries will be exhausted by 2048.

Fishing policy
Over exploitation of commercial fisheries is fuelled by government subsidies valued at more than U.S. $10 billion annually, keeping the worldwide fishing capacity at more than twice the level that is biologically sustainable


Fishing gear
The incidental catch of endangered marine mammals, cetaceans, sea turtles, seabirds and certain fish species is the leading threat to their existence --

but 27 million metric tons of incidental catch are carelessly swept away and discarded by commercial fishing operations every year.
That is 59,400,000,000 pounds of waste alone. 59.4 billion pounds

Or SG in most cases the habitat is what it is and natural production is the optimum level for the watershed. It is limited by habitat only if the starting point is in the past pre settlers and development. As people are not going any place and human impacts at best will remain the same, then the starting point needs to be where the habitat became what it is. Habitat can only be the limiting factor if the number of fish spawning are at the optimum natural level and survival is low. Then you can say habitat or that your allowing more fish to spawn then the stream can support so harvest can be increased as less spawning will still produce the same amount of adults. Sound familiar?

Simple fact except for the OP streams, which time will slowly help, in WA the habitat limits only the natural production if your base is in the past before human impacts. Those impacts are not going away, will only continue to increase, and the goals for natural production and harvest or associated impacts will require the reduction of harvest ( over harvest ) until the proper balance in TODAYS watersheds ( not past what ever many thousands it used to support ) is achieved.

It is the penalty that fish pay for sharing the planet with humans, like it or not. Frankly I don't like it but I am not going to save the world and I doubt anyone else on this BB will either.

Personally I can't think of any fisherys in the NW that are being harvested at MSY except maybe crab..

Ironically, MSY did what was intended and that was to trim fish stocks down to bare bones. You are protected from MSY if you are a listed fish which means that thanks to MSY years ago that usually means that they aren’t making escapement.

The CR smelt is an example of a fish that should have been listed long ago. It wasn’t so a season was set last year for sports and commercials. Dumber than rocks.

Commercials in this state will negotiate for every fish available under MSY

MSY means that any stock of fish is one step away from disaster unlike the returns of Russian salmon in greater numbers that can weather what the ocean conditions can dish out and stay healthy.

That is the main difference between a Russian salmon and a PNW salmon run.

If habitat is the big problem then the odd-even smolt number differential for Skagit coho and Keogh steelhead would not be occurring. The increasing harvest of coho coming from pristine creeks in Alaska as pink escapement icreases would not be occurring.

Carrying capacity, at least as defined by Chapman and others back in the 60s and 70s, was determined by the non-living habitat (water, gravel, LWD, etc.) AND food. Since the food, in most northern Pacific watersheds, is derived from the ocean and transported to the watersheds by anadromous fish one of the major controllers of smolt numbers today is the lack of food. Want more coho smolts? Leave the pinks and chums alone. Steelhead are a little trickier as those in the upper watersheds need coho.

By all means, I don't want to suggest that the habitat is good or doesn't need fixing. But, as Alaska studies are showing, pristine habitat with little escapment gives about 15% of the harvest possible if more fish are allowed to spawn.

Sg, I understand what you are saying but I don't think it is entirely accurate. Several fall Chinook populations in Puget Sound are still being harvested at MSY rates or greater. In the lower Columbia, it's still uncertain if the current harvest rates for Chinook can be sustained. If you play around a little with some Beverton-Holt models for many Puget Sound steelhead populations, you will find that under current conditions, incidental harvest rates of 5% -10% could very easily be MSY.

Example of MSY tool at work.

If the Russians used MSY as their tool of choice to manage their salmon like the PNW and most of the world then instead of 15% going to Japan by agreement this could effectively happen.

Japan sees the salmon runs so thick in the rivers that they inform the Russians that look at all those fish going to waste just heading up the river. The USA doesn’t waste all those fish and neither should you. How about if you let us take 80 % of the estimated run size That would leave enough escapement to spawn and those fish heading up river wouldn’t go to waste. Of course after several years of missed estimates and now 95% of the run size has disappeared from just 15 years earlier.

Now you have the most pristine place on earth with habitat galore with their salmon endangered to any bump in the road that the environment has to offer just like in the PNW.

I know simplistic without many factors factored in including the political pressure that is exerted by the commercials in the PNW to-get every fish that should be available in their mind.

Those of you that don’t think political pressure exists where commercials are concerned in the PNW.....

The commercials will seek to introduce legislation designed to end the annual march to the courthouse by the gillnet fleet challenging the Puget Sound fall chum schedule

If they can’t win in court they are going to take it to Olympia legislatively.

I have to agree with carcassman - Food availability rarely receives enough attnetion in these discussions. For stream rearing species, food availability is often limiting production during the summer months, particularly in small streams. Density dependent growth is clearly evident - lower density results in larger fish. Higher density results in smaller fish. Food availability is limiting the total biomass in the stream. See Quinn's book for a good discussion of this. So when people say that the capacity of our streams is a fraction of what might have been the case historically, that isn't necessarily due only to poor spawning success or lack of quality rearing space. Without sufficient food resources, production will suffer.

I participated in an experiment 20 years ago where food was artificially increased in a small coho stream. Growth and density both increased dramatically where food was supplimented, resulting in as much as an 8-fold increase in coho biomass. Carcass/nutrient supplementation studies have shown a similar response with no change in the physical habitat. Both food production and rearing space are critical components of freshwater rearing habitat.

Thank you thank you

Salmon, as do Hipos & Elephants in the natural state, altered the environment by their life cycles. Salmon, by the act of spawning and death, ( carcass ) created a web of life that involved many things from insects to other fish. From the time commercial harvest began in the PNW the productivity of the habitat began to decline.

Many streams that once had rather large numbers of fish simply have some now and with harvest such as it is, that is about what it will be in the future.

Precisely,

Harvest =MSY

and if you see several fish available over and beyond MSY commercials go to court to get those available fish if not given to them through negotiations and then use legislative measures also.

With MSY ruling the day, we would be delusional to think that we will see anything different in run sizes than we see right now.

One thing worse than a gill net is MSY.

Hey the sun is out……………..

Rivrguy,

Habitat limits fish populations, now and in 1850. The difference is that it was the pristine condition of habitat that was limiting populations in 1850, but limiting them to a much higher level, estimated at 10 to 20 times larger than today's populations sizes.

Carcassman,

I think food, along with space, are generally considered to be key parameters of fish habitat. Each of those is then sub-divided into their many elements (space: pool, glide, riffle, over-head cover, substrate, channel complexity, etc., etc.; food: aquatic insects, terrestrial insects, species, fish, fish products, etc.)

OncyT,

It's my understanding that the wild PS chinook being harvested at higher than MSY aren't being harvested at that rate for the reason of MSY, but rather to exact reasonable harvest rates on co-mingled hatchery chinook. IMO it's ludicrous to believe that it's feasible to harvest hatchery chinook from the Green, Puyallup, and Skokomish Rivers via gillnet fisheries and attain desired exploitation rates (very low) and escapement levels of the co-mingled wild chinook. And that's without going into the subject that the co-mingled wild chinook are essentially hatchery origin NORs, but that can be for another day.

I think the same thing applies to several of the LCR tributary hatchery chinook populations, excepting the Lewis. The tributary habitat is trashed, endemic wild chinook populations are far more likely than not extirpated, and the NORs that exist are predominately, if not entirely, of hatchery origin. I suspect that any exploitation rate above "slight" will exceed the MSY rate of those populations, particularly if they are sustained only due to the presence of hatchery strays. It's going to be a PITA to prove it, but perhaps the Grays River weir will demonstrate just how poor natural reproduction of fall chinook, unaided by hatchery strays, is in small tributaries that are environmentally trashed.

I agree in regards to the PS steelhead populations. When R:S < 1.0, almost any fishing mortality at all exceeds MSY. Again, that doesn't make over-fishing the limiting factor, just a contributing one when either fresh and or marine habitat is the proximate limiting factor.

Aunty,

Unfortunately, the MDN of hatchery fish seldom ends up where it has the potential to contribute to productivity of natural fish populations. All the tossing of hatchery carcasses that goes on is analogous to applying a bandaid to a sliced carotid artery; not much help.

Milt,

I don't think food is so much over-looked as it's just not specified, just as we don't specify the many aspects of space as it pertains to habitat. We can generally talk about habitat limiting productivity without every time adding the details of channel complexity that creates more individual fish territories per unit area, and we can say that habitat is limiting without every time mentioning that it ain't really habitat if there is no food, or that it's poor habitat if there's very little food. Imagine Costco, only empty save for a single jar of peanuts; everyone understands that there is a lot of space, but it isn't very good habitat under those circumstances.

Sg

Well, we do spend millions every year dumping wood in to creeks that are very likely severely limited by low food availability. So I'll stand by my professional opinion on this one.

Lack of nutrients is a habitat issue...and, as with the rest of the factors, if it's the limiting factor, then it's the one that's most important...if it's not, then it's not.

Fish on...

Todd

Sg, I'm fully aware of the reasoning behind the harvest rates for some of the Puget Sound and LCR populations, but needing to have high harvest rates to remove tons of hatchery fish while "incidentally" harvesting natural populations at levels that cannot be sustained simply doesn't cut it. Particularly when all of these populations are listed and some are essential for recover. That approach is part of what got us where we are.

The only reason that I am making this point is because of what I perceive as your dismissal of harvest being an issue anywhere. That simply is not the case, either for some listed ESU's or for many of the unlisted populations where nobody is concerned (since they're not listed) or nobody is watching (since they're not listed).

I would be interested though Sg, in your suggested approach for watersheds that are essential or important for recovery and have large hatchery programs located in the watershed. Seems to me the only way out is to have a high level or selective harvest or reduce hatchery production significantly. Or, I guess, simply ignore them.

OncyT,

When I say that habitat is the limiting factor for populations, I mean that GENERALLY, across numerous species, numerous stocks within species, and numerouse river systems. I'm not dismissing harvest as a factor, and as you point out, in some specific cases for specific species in specific river systems, yes, harvest is more limiting than habitat. I was trying to get at the point that if harvest rates were zero, quite a number of chinook and steelhead populations would still be in the tank - for a long time. In those cases, habitat should be viewed as more limiting than harvest if the populations produce little or no surplus production in the absense of harvest.

I don't see much disagreement here. I think our differences are the result of comparing and contrasting conditions across species, stocks, and watersheds, which surely lends a lot of confusing to the discussion.

Sg