An ounce of image is worth a pound of performance

Damn cynicism seems to be contagious!

That was one of Murphy's Laws that was on a poster in the office.

Another concern I have about the pinniped predation on salmon is temporal and spatial. Temporally, they (Harbor seals, I think) take a lot of smolts. Removing them saves smolts, for 3,4,5 years down the road; assuming that marine survival and our extremely conservative marine managers allow the additional smolts to survive to return.

Most of the predation by adult pinnipeds that at least makes the news is after the fish have passed the SRKW. Such as Ballard Locks and the Columbia. So, killing these pinnipeds benefits the SRKW if the surviving adults are allowed to spawn and all that additional production is allowed to return to the SRKW. This action has an additional year of waiting for benefits above letting the smolts go.

This is faster than habitat fixes but still lets the SRKW continue to auger in.

During that most recent Prey Working Group session the WDFW's expert on pinnipeds (and harbor seals in particular) Jeffries opined that any effort to reduce harbor seal populations would need to be broadly based spatially rather than focused just around choke points/river mouths. That seemed rather counter intuitive to me but he is the expert. Anyway, if that were to occur it could reduce impacts on returning adult Chinook beginning in the Straits with cumulative "saving" increases the surviving Chinook move further toward natal streams.

Edit: A big bull Orca and six or seven cows/calves made the turn around Possession headed north toward Everett on Friday evening. Pretty cool.

When you consider the size difference between the whales and seals it will take a lot of removals to feed one whale. Just using made-up numbers, if a whale eats 10 salmon a day and a seal 1, then 10 seals need removal (and no additional fishery removals) to feed one whale. That would mean remove 700 pinnipeds for the whales alone. Annually, until the salmon numbers rebound enough to feed the whales and pinnipeds.

Removals of the pinnipeds need some serious analysis, as you noted, of the where, when, and how many. I still think that the whole push in the Columbia is for fishermen and not whales as the salmon have already bypassed the whales before hitting the river. But, whales get more sympathy than fisher people.

Your number of 700 harbor seals would be approximately 5% of the total population within Puget Sound. I have read some numbers for the amount of salmon a SRKW requires on a daily basis and also a "goal" for increased availability but I do not recall a net increase number per SRKW. That is, how many more Chinook does each SRKW require over and above what they are currently able to find and eat in order to meet their needs?

Back to the recent Canadian publication which as I recall indicated that harbor seals consume (adjusted to adult equivalents) what the Orcas require (presumably in total).

All other factors remaining the same how many pinnipeds would need to be removed to provide for the Orcas? What is extremely frustrating to me having attended the Prey Working Group meetings is the seeming unwillingness to incorporate some level of pinniped removal; both immediate and ongoing.

Can the goal of adequately feeding the Orcas be achieved without pinniped management?

The short answer, Larry, is no. The long answer is no. But, at the same time, the marine mixed stock harvests of salmon need to be cut way back.

IF we want to have have SRKW we first need to define the size of population. Then, calculate the food needs on an annual basis. Then figure how to get from where we are now to there. This analysis would also include insuring that the SRKW food has sufficient food for itself. Ecosystem analysis.

At that point, we can see where we are, where we need to get, and how to get there. At which point we can decide if we want to do that or not.

Most of the time I see harbor seals, they are feeding on herring or squid. Since these are also food for Salmon and other larger fish, I would think there would be an additional benefit to the ecosystem overall, and could help return higher numbers of salmon than just the benefits from just the effect of less predation.

The problem is that the ecosystem is so interconnected. The salmon numbers are down because of over harvest, habitat destruction, and (now) lack of food in some parts of the ocean. Chinook and coho are "suffering because of increased pinks. Not to mention climate changes.

Killing the seals will allow them to increase, which might benefit if they have sufficient food. If not, no benefit. They might come back in bigger numbers have crappy places to spawn. No benefit.

The seals may be also eating something else that is keeping a lid on, say, Humboldt Squid.

We too often manage in what are called silos, bunkers made of very strong concrete that resist the penetration of new ideas.

We need to understand that removal of the seals will "fix" one short term problem but is not dealing with the overall picture. Unfortunately, that is also why we do nothing because no one thing, other than removing 90-95% of earth's humans, will fix the problem.

Well stated Carcassman!

90-95% may be extreme. I think it would really help if we could select for stupidity and general tendency to do evil in the culling of humans. Granted, that only leaves about 30% left over (and I'm not sure if I'd make the cut), but that's less bleak than 5-10%.

Yeah, it may have been a bit excessive. But, how many humans lived in WA when the ecosystem was functioning full bore? It was before the commercial loggers arrived. And Ag. There is even evidence in some areas that Tribal harvests depressed local populations of game certainly and fish maybe.

https://www.king5.com/video/news/local/orcas-in-the-northwest-at-risk/281-8204233

...and harbor seals may be part of the problem.

Fish on...

Todd

Didn't take them long to pull that story. I can't find it anywhere on King 5 now.

Lol too much “real” for the softies, probably had people calling the paper crying.

What a hoot! The 404 error msg says they have their best investigative reporters on the search for the missing page. Waiting, waiting.....and waiting.

I learned that Seals are cute and cuddly. Sport fishermen train them by feeding them salmon by hand.
Glad they pulled it, he set a bad example.

I think he was trying to make a point which seemed to take away from the message. Anyway, I seriously doubt that was why the article just disappeared.

This morning's (Tacoma) News Tribune had an editorial on the Orca crisis and listed a number of contributory factors but somehow left out competition for food (AKA pinniped predation on salmonids).

So did the governor's task force.
http://nwsportsmanmag.com/orca-task-forc...seal-predation/