ANOTHER STUDY REVEALS THE FAILURES OF HATCHERIES

 

During the latter half of the 19^th Century, as many as 16 million salmon and steelhead (sea-run rainbow trout) returned to the Columbia River each year.  Today, less than one-tenth of that number return.

The decline is largely due to overfishing and the 14 dams that have been built across the river, denying the salmon adequate access to their spawning grounds.  Twelve distinct “runs” of salmon and steelhead have been listed as either “threatened” or “endangered” under the federal Endangered Species Act. 

Recovering such threatened and endangered runs would require managers to restore runs of wild, naturally spawning fish.  Unfortunately, for well over a century, state, federal, and tribal managers have instead focused on creating an artificial abundance of steelhead and salmon through intensive hatchery propagation.  The best available evidence suggests that the hatcheries have neither significantly increased the number of wild fish nor increased abundance of artificially propagated salmon to targeted levels.

By the late 1800s, the salmon runs were already badly depleted by overfishing.  Spencer Baird, the first Commissioner of Fish and Fisheries for the United States Fish Commission, argued at the time that such hatchery production would

“maintain the present numbers indefinitely, and even…increase them,”

but things didn’t work out that way.  

By the late 1920s, the federal Department of Fisheries had determined that the early hatcheries were doing nothing to conserve Pacific salmon, and generally abandoned salmon rearing as a cost-saving measure during the Great Depression.  However, the construction of dams on the Columbia River, and the obstacles that they created for returning salmon, breathed new life into the hatchery program.

The mindset at the time was that the economic “progress” represented by dams outweighed any damage that they might do to the salmon runs.  An article published by Oregon Public Broadcasting quoted a 1947 memo from President Harry Truman’s Secretary of the Interior, which read, in part,

“The overall benefits to the Pacific Northwest from a thorough-going development of the Snake and Columbia are such that the present salmon run must be sacrificed.  Efforts should be directed toward ameliorating the impact of this development upon the injured interests and not toward a vain attempt to hold still the hands of the clock.  [emphasis added]”

In other words, the government would try to offset the harm the dams caused the salmon with salmon hatcheries—even though prior experience gave them good reason to think that such effort would fail.

And, in fact, the effort did fail, whether “failure” is measured by an increase in naturally spawned fish, or in a significant increase in the hatchery-raised salmon and steelhead populations.

A recent paper, titled “Return(s) on investment:  Restoration spending in the Columbia River Basin and increased abundance of salmon and steelhead,” published in the journal Plos One on July 28, 2023, makes the case that despite the $9 billion spent on hatcheries and other efforts to restore anadromous fish in the Columbia River Basin over the past 30 years, there is no convincing evidence that such spending has increased the numbers of wild salmon and steelhead in the region.

Instead, the study notes that

“Hatchery production…negatively impacted wild stocks through a variety of mechanisms including competition for habitat, food supply, genetic effects and disease, predation by hatchery fish on wild fish, and other adverse effects.’

The study also notes that biological opinions (BiOps) required by the Endangered Species Act, to document the state of the listed stocks and set forth the mitigation measures intended to promote their recovery, have regularly fallen afoul of the law.

“Beginning in 1992, NMFS has issued a sequence of BiOps for EDA-listed fish in the [Columbia River Basin], nearly all of which have been found to be noncompliant with the ESA.  Since 2000, all or parts of multiple BiOps and their supplements have been rejected by the courts, including finding the 2014 Supplementary BiOp to be arbitrary and capricious. The assemblage of these federal recovery programs has repeatedly been rejected by the US courts as failing to be in compliance with the requirements of the ESA, mainly for failing to identify or document specific mitigation measures and plans that were reasonably specific or reasonably certain to occur.”

 In the context of rebuilding wild salmon and steelhead stocks, the $9 billion spent over the past 40 years was effectively cash dropped down a rathole.

The hatcheries aren’t even doing a good job of keeping man-made fish in the rivers.  Managers hoped to see 5 million fish returning to the Columbia River each year, beginning no later than 2025, but the actual returns are falling far short of that target, averaging about 1.5 million per year.

The Oregon Public Broadcasting piece, referenced earlier, observed that, for the years 2014 through 2018, the last years for which complete information is available, the survival rate for hatchery-raised salmon was near all-time lows.  It quotes Aaron Penney, a long-time manager of the Nez Perce tribe’s Idaho hatchery, as saying

“It’s not self-sustaining.  We don’t have the numbers”

of salmon returning to the river.

The same article notes that many hatcheries are not achieving target production levels, and that some are “scrambling” for salmon that can be used as brood stock.  It also notes that

“At the largest cluster of federally subsidized hatcheries on the Columbia, the government spends between $250 and $650 for every salmon that returns to the river.  [emphasis added]”

That’s a lot to spend on a single, man-made fish.  From an purely economic perspective, it would probably make more sense, and cost less money, to simply make direct payments to those businesses that depend on the salmon and steelhead runs, and shut the hatcheries down.

But the failure of the Columbia River hatcheries is important and notable not just because of the salmon’s declining prospects—something that we’ve known about for a while—but because of a recent trend that has become apparent elsewhere on the coast, which sees various members of the recreational fishing industry, and various representatives of “anglers’ rights” groups, advocating for hatcheries—what they euphemistically call “stock enhancement”—as a solution to fishery management issues.  State fishery managers are becoming increasingly amenable to such approach.

Texas was one of the states that pioneered the concept of saltwater hatcheries.  It freely admits that

“Stock enhancement…serves as a tool used by [Texas Parks and Wildlife Department] to manage the marine fishery along the Texas coast to ensure that harvest levels are sustained and stocks are replenished.  [emphasis added]”

And that, of course, is the problem with hatcheries, whether used in salt water or anywhere else.

The proper use of hatcheries is to address what we might consider the real “basket cases” of fisheries management, species such as Apache trout, or Lahontan cutthroats, or any other stock that has fallen on such dire times that it can’t be safely rebuilt in the wild.  In such cases, when even a complete cessation of harvest is not enough to assure rebuilding, it is entirely appropriate to avoid extinction by establishing a captive, hatchery population, and use that hatchery population to reintroduce a species into its former home waters in the course of nursing the species back to health.

But that’s not how hatcheries are usually used.  Instead of being used to avoid a species’ extinction, they’re most often used to escape human responsibility.  In the case of Pacific salmon, hatcheries were first used as a way to perpetuate overfishing, and avoid responsible fisheries management.  Later, they became an illusory solution to the destruction of salmon habitat, and spawning runs, by dams built to enrich agriculture and other commercial interests which stood to profit from the altered rivers’ flows.

In Texas, hatcheries provide an alternative to responsible recreational fishery management; by pumping enough man-made fish into the state’s barrier lagoons, the state has found a way to allow its anglers to continually harvest fish at levels that could not be sustained by a natural population.

In neither case, nor in other instances where hatchery fish are introduced into the marine environment, is the intent to increase the size of the naturally spawned population.  Instead, the goal is to allow human activity—whether that activity is commercial or recreational fishing, irrigation or, as is the case in Florida, unbridled and irresponsible development—to proceed at a greater pace than the natural world can sustain.

The nation’s coastal fisheries deserve better.  They deserve healthy, natural populations of native fish, managed in a way that is sustainable in the long term, free to migrate to their spawning grounds, free of the impacts of agriculture, extractive activities, or runaway real estate development.

To the extent that hatcheries provide a band-aid that merely covers over irresponsible use of our lands and waters, they deserve freedom from hatcheries, too.