#764633 - 06/07/12 10:40 AM
Re: Black mouth?
[Re: Tug3]
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River Nutrients
Registered: 11/21/07
Posts: 7519
Loc: Olema,California,Planet Earth
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Tug
Start with the food base. The fish won't stay somewhere there is no food. Try water quality; it keeps getting worse. Predators, such as seals and sea lions have increased; they gotta eat something.
Even the increases in such things as lincod, searuns, and native char may play some role, as they need to eat too and small chinook fills the tummy nicely.
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#764778 - 06/07/12 07:35 PM
Re: Black mouth?
[Re: Carcassman]
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Parr
Registered: 01/12/12
Posts: 65
Loc: Tumwater
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Carcassman,
See my previous post those are all my assertions.
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#765387 - 06/10/12 10:12 PM
Re: Black mouth?
[Re: Tug3]
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River Nutrients
Registered: 10/22/09
Posts: 3031
Loc: University Place and Whidbey I...
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Sorry to have come in so late but am compelled to ask some questions and reinforce some information.
First, Carcassman asserts that water quality is worse than at the high point of the winter blackmouth program. Is that really true given the development of better sanitary sewer treatment systems as well as efforts to reduce the amount of surface water runoff? And even if true exactly how might this account for the decrease? We are talking about salt water here.
Obviously these fish need food or they will not hang around. If the assertion is that a lack of feed caused them to move out of the intended (and historical) areas is there any data that supports these fish being caught elsewhere? If not, where did they go?
Which leads me to Tug having raised the specter of predation by marine mammals. I am not going to research the absolutes again but in general terms information presented during the rockfish recovery plan review process revealed that in the early 70s there were somewhere around 200 seals in all of Puget Sound - in large part because they had had a bounty on them for years and they were generally shot on sight by commercial fishermen and others.
That minimal seal population grew from several hundred to 14,000 in 2007 and 15,000 at the time the initial rockfish plan was put out for review and comment. In the plan the writers opined that the seal population growth rate appeared to be slowing - that is, still growing but at a decreasing rate. Based upon consumption data in the plan those 14,000 seals would have been consuming 28 million pounds of food a year; 15,000 over 30 million. And we do know for sure that seals love salmon and also have herring as a major food source (as well as rockfish; something the writers of the rockfish plan tried to minimize during the hearings).
I suggest it doesn't take a rocket scientist to plot the curves over time and recognize a correlation - and not much of a leap of faith to see the cause and effect. (I am NOT a rocket scientist but I do know one....) And by increasing the legal minimum size the chances of these fish surviving the predators and reaching that minimum became smaller which surely caused a decrease in the contribution rate.
While I don't believe the State Auditor's Office has sufficient technical capability to satisfactorily accomplish performance audits on WDFW programs (they admitted as much by trying to outsource them) they did generate an audit of the blackmouth program. That audit addresses the contribution rates and escalating costs per fish caught over time of the program. If interested the title is Department of Fish and Wildlife Delayed-Release Chinook Salmon dated April 9, 2010 and is assigned report number 1003365.
_________________________
Remember to immediately record your catch or you may become the catch!
It's the person who has done nothing who is sure nothing can be done. (Ewing)
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#765396 - 06/10/12 11:16 PM
Re: Black mouth?
[Re: Larry B]
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Spawner
Registered: 01/22/06
Posts: 917
Loc: tacoma
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Lots of experts on this board who offer their opinions as if they have a sound basis in science. Would be very helpful if we separate the opinion and speculation from the science. So far, we have foodbase, seals, water quality, logging, population growth, hatchery/wild interactions, hatchery practices, fish management techniques, predator fish abundance, size limits, ocean productivity, and tribal harvest mentioned. I probably missed a few, dozens of others on other threads though. Not much science offered to support the vast majority of those opinions. Yet they are usually presented with conviction as if there is some technical basis for the strong contentions.
Is it any wonder our experts have failed to identify and (if possible) address what the real problems are?
Edited by milt roe (06/10/12 11:17 PM)
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#765402 - 06/10/12 11:58 PM
Re: Black mouth?
[Re: Larry B]
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River Nutrients
Registered: 11/21/07
Posts: 7519
Loc: Olema,California,Planet Earth
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The question of water quality relates to freshwater. Chinook reared to yearling in FW have a greater tendency to residualize in the Sound than those that go to saltwater as fingerlings. Even if they are held in net pens in saltwater.
WDFW hatcheries have lost freshwater at a many facilities, the water id=s warming, etc.
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#765467 - 06/11/12 01:47 PM
Re: Black mouth?
[Re: Carcassman]
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River Nutrients
Registered: 10/22/09
Posts: 3031
Loc: University Place and Whidbey I...
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Carcassman - thank you for that clarification and additional information pertaining to fresh versus saltwater rearing residualization rates.
Milt - You are correct that there are lots of probable causative factors and little research having been done. That is certainly a part of the problem. Note that I did not attribute all of the decrease to only seal predation. But I do believe that if seals eat salmon (as well as what salmon feed upon) and if seals in P.S. consume some 30 million pounds of food per year it is reasonable to assume there is a much greater adverse impact than when there were 200 seals eating roughly 400,000 pounds. Even if only 1% (pure speculation and for math purposes) is from the delayed release blackmouth program that would be 300,000 pounds per year which equates to a lot of sub-22 inch fish. We can't simply ignore the 800# gorilla at the table when looking at the future of this program.
_________________________
Remember to immediately record your catch or you may become the catch!
It's the person who has done nothing who is sure nothing can be done. (Ewing)
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