Upstream

by Langdon Cook

  One of Rene’s inspirations, retired fisheries biologist Jim Lichatowich, has expressed his own reservations about the concept in his recent memoir, Salmon, People, and Place. Lichatowich is known for having questioned the efficacy of hatcheries at a time when most of his colleagues were still silent on the issue. He worries that so-called conservation and brood-stock hatcheries are more of the same. When I talked to him on the phone, he softened his criticism. “In dire circumstances, putting salmon on life support is a step that can be taken—just like with humans,” he said. “But the question is, for how long? The proof in the pudding will be when they stop the hatchery program and see if the run can sustain itself.” The Snake River sockeye restoration is just one of many such efforts. Similar brood-stock hatcheries are up and running for Russian River coho in California, North Puget Sound chinook, and Elwha River pink salmon. Lichatowich still worries that these conservation-hatchery plans have neither end dates nor criteria for evaluating success. Furthermore, the reasons for the decline—habitat loss and so on—need to be addressed in tandem with the restoration efforts. Conservation hatcheries treat a symptom, not a cause.

  “The intimate connection with the ecosystem has been lost,” Lichatowich continued. “You’re creating something that looks like a salmon run, that exhibits the external characteristics of a salmon run, but the intimate connection the salmon had with the habitat has eroded away. We’re ending up with what look like salmon populations, but they’re different.” He paraphrased the philosopher and nature writer Gary Nabhan: Animals don’t go extinct because we shoot them all. They go extinct because of an unraveling ecosystem. They lose ecological companionship. Fish hatched from brood stock, though derived from wild parents, aren’t the same as those from the previous generation. “When you take a fish out of the river and put it in a hatchery, then release it, you’re depriving the fish of ecological relationships.”

  I turned the question around for Lichatowich: Is humanity busy depriving itself of those same ecological relationships? He sighed. The world is indeed becoming a lonelier place.

  —

  “WE’RE THE OPPOSITE OF pure-breed-dog breeders,” was how Christine Kozfkay put it. She’s the hatchery’s full-time staff geneticist. Framed degrees and watercolor paintings of salmon hang on her office walls, the sort of artwork only a fish geek could love, including one titled “The 900-Mile Journey,” which depicts a male sockeye on its spawning gravels, crimson body and emerald head, its jaws twisted and toothy. Another proclaims “Sockeye Recovery” across the top and features Idaho’s stunning canyon country etched into the flanks of a leaping salmon. It’s Kozfkay’s job to poke and prod every single sockeye that comes through the hatchery door. Her DNA samples reveal the parentage of each fish, which in turn determines whether they will spawn in the wild or remain at the hatchery. In all, nearly fifteen hundred sockeye salmon will be trapped and sorted this year. These are wild fish making the full trip upriver, and this population will be supplemented, in turn, with Redfish Lake sockeye raised in the hatchery from a parentage of previously trapped wild fish. This is what is meant by the term “captive brood stock.” Kozfkay analyzes the genetics of all the fish, wild and hatchery-raised. “Then I rank them.” Unlike a dog breeder, she wants as much variability in her fish as possible. “The goal is to maximize our effective population size and the retention of genetic diversity. I determine which ones they should keep and which they should release.” For this she has a big spreadsheet that she continually updates with new information.

  When it comes to genetics and sleuthing out the ways of salmon, the sockeye represents the pinnacle of Kozfkay’s profession. Of all the Pacific salmon species, excluding steelhead, it has the most diverse life history. Though sockeye typically make use of a freshwater lake during their life cycle, spawning in tributaries above and below the lake—or sometimes in the lake itself if the substrate is gravelly and there’s enough oxygenated flow—not all sockeye follow this program; some will spawn in rivers that provide a sufficient backwater-rearing habitat, known to anglers as frog water. Kozfkay has data on Redfish Lake sockeye going back about a decade. Occasionally, she said, fish that return to the lake are off the radar. These mystery sockeye, referred to as “unassigned” fish, are possibly crosses between sockeye and what the biologists call residuals. Residuals are wild sockeye that like their environment enough to skip out-migration as juveniles and stay right where they are, maturing in the lake. They never go to sea, and so they evade capture and identification. Residuals add another layer of variability to the sockeye genome. As Rene Henery would say, diversity makes the species stronger, especially in an environment prone to mishap. And there is yet one more layer: a non-anadromous form of sockeye commonly known as kokanee. Though usually landlocked and much smaller in stature, the kokanee is technically the same species as a sockeye, and given the right environmental conditions and physical access, it will sometimes head for the sea. In this way, the highly adaptive sockeye salmon has a fail-safe mechanism that has served it well through catastrophic changes in its habitat, whether natural or otherwise.

  In another life, Kozfkay might have been hired to follow a cheating spouse. Teasing out the secrets of sockeye salmon isn’t much different, and it too requires a dedicated financial input. Thanks to the Endangered Species Act, the funding is there, though skeptical editorial pages love to tally up the cost of each ESA-protected fish, and even many salmon advocates argue that it’s a waste of money trying to keep populations of fish on life support when the funds can be used to protect more robust runs elsewhere. But these Redfish Lake sockeye, as the southernmost population in North America and with the longest, steepest migration, offer a suite of genetics that makes them special. To lose them would be a blow to the species. Rene agreed. “We used to look at genetics mainly as a predictor. Now we use genetics as a tool to help ensure we have all the material that a fish needs to fully express itself.”

  Kozfkay studied him for a moment. Rene was dressed in a cowboy shirt and boots, his curly black hair pulled into a ponytail, earrings flashing in the overhead lights. Still, clearly he knew a few things about fish. “Where did you say you guys have been?” she asked.

  We told her about our trek.

  “You don’t look all that tired.”

  “We have a car,” Rene said. “And we’re eating. That would have been a nice twist—to start fasting from the get-go.” As it was, we had begun our pilgrimage two days earlier with a huge plate of fish ’n’ chips from the Bowpicker, a colorful take-out stand reclaimed from an old fishing boat, overlooking the windy mouth of the Columbia in Astoria, Oregon. The catch of the day wasn’t salmon or Pacific cod. It was albacore tuna, an increasingly common visitor to the Northwest coast in an era of warming oceans.

  We followed Kozfkay from her office to the tanks, where Travis Brown and his staff were still busy using her spreadsheets to separate keep fish from release fish. The sheer numbers of returning sockeye this year gave everyone hope. Besides preserving genetic integrity, captive brood-stock programs also boost population numbers. With more than 50 percent egg-to-adult survival—a significantly higher percentage than in the wild—such programs can multiply the overall numbers much more quickly than natural reproduction does. The question is whether these gains are temporary or not. Critics are convinced that the recent increases in Snake River sockeye have much more to do with court-mandated water spillage through the Columbia dam complex than with brood-stock hatcheries. They point to another population of Columbia Basin sockeye, those of Osoyoos Lake on the British Columbia–Washington State border, where wild sockeye have increased dramatically since 2008 due to changes in water management and better flow regimes. As a result, hatchery efforts there are being phased out. But when looked at more closely through the lens of biodiversity and overall species health, especially in an age of climate change, the high-country fish of the Sawtooths represent a unique genetic contribution that demands special attention, and Kozfkay’s gumsho
e perseverance gets at the root of those genetics.

  “Through our pedigree work, we even know what kind of contribution Larry made,” Kozfkay added, lifting her gaze. Everyone turned to look toward a far corner of the building. There, against the wall, stood an orange-and-white canister about the size of a pony keg. It was a cryogenic storage chamber, Lonesome Larry’s final spawning ground. Larry was gone now, all used up. The last of his genetic material had been exhausted a couple of years earlier. Kozfkay figured Larry had sired about ten generations of Redfish Lake sockeye. But his journey isn’t over. Larry’s stuffed body continues to circulate around the halls of government and academia, where he brightens offices and joins exhibits, an educational trophy in red and green.

  LIKE RENE’S CUTTHROAT LAKE HIGH in the mountains above us, Redfish Lake is a body of water so turquoise in color we might as well have been standing on a tropical shore. But the torn and serrated peaks of the Sawtooths surround Redfish, and come winter it ices over into the frozen domain of snowshoe hares and backcountry skiers. On this day, visitors to the lake were treated to a different sort of scenery.

  With a curious crowd gathered around it, a hatchery truck backed down the boat ramp until its rear wheels were submerged to the hubs. Someone turned a valve on the truck, spilling water through a hose and into the shallows, and, one by one, fish streamed out of the hose, some of them nearly vermillion: vibrant red fish finning in teal-green water, an unlikely tone poem in Technicolor, splashed across a panoramic page. As if watching a big game from the bleachers, onlookers stood shoulder to shoulder on a nearby dock. They all seemed to know the story of these fish. Travis Brown, wearing a drysuit, floated on the surface, breathing through a snorkel and watching through his dive mask. His colleague Mike Peterson, a tall, sturdy biologist with a trim beard, stood in the lake, wearing waders, and addressed the crowd: “Not since the mid-1950s has this lake seen so much red.” A cheer went up from the dock.

  Soon a hundred or more fish made lazy circles as they schooled together near the outlet of the hose. Some of them rose, their emerald heads breaking the surface, before they porpoised back down through the ripples. Contrary to appearances, they weren’t sipping insects the way hungry trout do; they were taking gulps of oxygen to restore the balance in their swim bladders after a long, perilous migration that included a final detour on mountain roads in the crowded confines of a mobile fish tank. Several years from now, their offspring—those few that survived—would make the same journey, and they too would come up against four dams on the lower Snake River. A brood-stock hatchery or conservation hatchery or whatever else you wanted to call it couldn’t fix the problem of those dams.

  Like the whale watchers I had met on San Juan Island, the people on the dock, many of them just passing through for the day, couldn’t believe their good fortune at witnessing the spectacle of these rare fish. In coming weeks the females would dig redds in suitable lake-bottom gravel beds, and the males would compete to fertilize the eggs. Already some of the males displayed the elongated snouts and canine teeth they would use to nip at their competitors on the spawning grounds. They were marathoners, all of them, and their race was nearly run.

  CHAPTER 10

  ATTACK OF THE KILLER BLOB

  On the third haul of the day I felt a warm, tingling sensation spread across my left wrist. An instant later and my whole hand was throbbing as if from a million tiny pinpricks. Jellyfish. It was my first time grabbing web—reef-netter lingo for hauling in the net—and I was learning the hard way. I pulled my gloves back on and tried to tuck them into my cuffs. The arms of my sweatshirt were already soaked underneath my rain jacket. “The red ones really hurt,” said Chef, the newest member of Lummi Island Wild. “You’re pulling hard and they’re all over your hands. They get mashed up in the net and there are little bits everywhere, like stinging nettles.”

  When Riley Starks invited me back to the island for a day on the water, I’d imagined heavy nets full of sleek salmon, not slimy invertebrates. But all sorts of flotsam drifting by gets hauled up, from seaweed and flounders to deadhead stumps and trash. The jellies were just a temporary annoyance. A flounder’s stinging spine posed a more painful threat.

  The reef netters didn’t seem too concerned. “You can pee on jellyfish sting to make it go away,” a deckhand named Sean said, and the others nodded gravely. This reminded Sean of the time one of his crewmates got stung in the eyes and was temporarily blinded. “I watched his internal turmoil until, finally, he peed into his hands and rubbed it into his eyes. Then he could work again.” I peeled off my glove once more and looked at my tingling hand. Though a little red, it would survive. More urgent, I needed to iron out some issues of technique. A large sockeye, maybe eight or nine pounds, had escaped from the net because of my failure to keep a wrinkle from forming as we pulled it in, while grabbing web. This wrinkle is called a banana. With proper technique, the reef netters can haul in such a way that a single pocket of webbing siphons all the fish into the holding tank, like a slide at the playground. Bananas allow fish to wriggle out the side. No one said anything, but we’d all seen the big one escape. A few quick calculations in my head suggested a crisp twenty-dollar bill had just slipped away. Missed fish add up quickly.

  On the next haul we took about thirty fish, most of them bright sockeye salmon of six or seven pounds apiece. Gorgeous fish, they flickered like diamonds, throwing all the colors of the rainbow from their glistening sides. Sockeye have a bluer complexion than other salmon, a more streamlined body shape. “Bluebacks,” the Quinault Indians of the Washington Coast call them. Another reef netter, named Josh, started sorting fish as they slid into the live tank. Five of the salmon looked different from the others. Larger, with wide tails and black spots on their backs, these were chinook, and quite possibly endangered ones at that. They had noticeable adipose fins: wild fish. One after another, Josh caught each fish and gently cradled it over the side and back into the current. With a powerful flex of the tail, the chinook continued on their way, bound for rivers somewhere in Washington or British Columbia, maybe even minor tributaries nearly devoid of salmon, where their spawning might keep a population alive for another generation. Letting these big king salmon go felt just as satisfying as catching a mess of sockeye.

  This is one of the things that separate the reef-net fishery from all others: It’s the only truly selective fishery on the high seas.

  It was late summer and the salmon were obeying their biological yearning, making journeys home to the same cobbles where they’d hatched several years ago, to spawn and die. Unlike the sockeye of Redfish Lake, these Fraser River sockeye, many from deep-interior British Columbia, don’t require barging or brood-stock hatcheries or sea-lion culling. In fact, back in March, fisheries managers had predicted a banner run, calling it perhaps the biggest return to the Fraser since record keeping first began nearly a century earlier. Why this was so, in an age of general decline, was something of a mystery, and while such predictions cause excitement, they also have the adverse effect of confusing the public about the health of the region’s salmon populations.

  Salmon runs are naturally cyclical, ebbing and flowing due to a variety of environmental factors, from ocean productivity to river flows. A heavy winter snowpack often means high spring runoff in the rivers, which in turn helps juvenile salmon with a speedier trip to the salt and less exposure to predators. Global weather patterns can impact salmon runs for years; sudden one-off, localized events like flash floods or ice storms cause more immediate short-term impacts. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation describes a cycle of warming and cooling that alternates between the ocean’s eastern and western hemispheres over the course of twenty or thirty years. Weather events like El Niño (a warming of the Pacific’s surface temperature) and La Niña (a cooling) are part of that oscillation. More recently, since 1998, scientists have noticed that the pattern has shortened in duration, making for extreme fluctuations and more problematic forecasting.

  While the bigge
st long-term threats to salmon are mostly human-caused, a favorable set of environmental conditions lining up can override man-made problems, if only briefly. This seems to be the case with the Fraser’s sockeye run. True, it’s less impacted by industrial development than other large river systems on the West Coast, such as the Columbia and Sacramento, and it isn’t burdened with fish-killing hydroelectric dams. But the real benefactor, scientists suggest, is the North Pacific. Ocean conditions, always seesawing through periods of rich and poor, appeared to be on the upswing in recent years, at least for sockeye salmon. Upwellings of cool, nutrient-rich water from the bottom mean a bonanza of zooplankton, especially the blooms of tiny crustaceans like copepods and krill, which drift cloudlike in the currents and are a favorite of sockeye. Unfortunately, there is evidence that these fat times have already peaked and are coming to an end. Warm-water species like sunfish and mahi-mahi have started to show up on the Northwest coast—a thrilling catch for the unsuspecting angler but an ominous sign of things to come.

  Riley Starks had kept tabs on the Fraser’s sockeye run throughout the summer. Every now and then I’d get a text or phone message from him. “The fish are on their way,” he’d say. “Better mark your calendar.” I could hear the anticipation in his voice. The reef netters get two brief months to fish, maybe three if they’re lucky, before fall storms make the work too dangerous and the gears are dry-docked. The rest of the year is waiting. In late June he texted me: The first pulse of returning fish was showing off the Washington coast. Scouts, he called them. The sockeye targeted by the reef netters migrate from the ocean into the Strait of Juan de Fuca before turning toward Canada in northern Puget Sound. By early July, when I heard from Starks again, the vanguard of the run had entered the Fraser, where local fishing guides were already booked up for the season. Sport anglers flooded Internet message boards with their excitement. Tribal leaders in the interior spoke of a subsistence fishery the likes of which few had experienced in their lifetimes. Like everyone else dependent on the Fraser River’s salmon returns, the reef netters of Lummi Island felt a mounting buzz of anticipation. Thanks to Starks’s regular reports, I was feeling the excitement too. “You’ve seen the forecast, right?” he asked me. “They’re talking about a lot of salmon.” He didn’t want to quote the exact preseason numbers. It was bad luck to talk about it. But, yes, I had seen the forecast. The midrange called for twenty-three million sockeye, with a high of seventy-two million—a span that would seem to belie the very term forecast. Seventy-two million. That was even more sockeye than the best years of the famed Bristol Bay fishery in Alaska. Such numbers staggered the mind. The test fishery would reveal whether or not these ballyhooed predictions were proving accurate.