Oregon News

Which would make one wonder what the economic benefit of condor hatcheries, butterfly hatcheries, turtle and frog hatcheries, myriad plant nurseries working with ESA and proposed ESA listed plants, and the Yellowstone NP wolf hatchery? There has to be a quantifiable benefit, no?

I only mention the other hatcheries due to strong objection to salmon hatcheries on the West Coast and Columbia, Snake, Sacramento, and San Joaquin rivers. Evidently hatcheries and their being selectors for fish that do well in a hatchery, and any of this origin do harm to "wild" fish in the environment. The problem, of course, is there is no DNA evidence of differences between "wild" and "hatchery" fish.

With no hatchery out put that is being talked about, Oregon's Willamette River has a run of fall coho salmon that evidently is self sustaining, although the fish was never native to that river due to a substantial falls that allows for fish passage only during concurrent flood events on the Columbia and the Willamette, on a high tide time of the month. Those types of freshet are no longer possible due to 12 flood control dams upstream on the Willamette tributaries. So the fish have to pass by using the fish ladder, or on rare occasions, the locks. There have been some "hatch box" efforts by STEP (salmon-steelhead trout enhancement program) volunteers, and maybe those mini hatcheries are the font of fall fun coho salmon. Nobody is talking.

No matter, hatcheries are providing for many more salmon and steelhead to the Snake and its tribs today, than we have seen in the past. That some chinook smolts are not taking the spring freshet route to sea, but are lingering in dam pools to grow to much larger size and then heading for sea much larger than their compatriots who go early and have ten times the survival rate, is an interesting adaptation as is the overwintering below the lower Snake River dams by steelhead, who resume their upstream migration in early spring. Genetic diversity, even from hatchery fish, is selecting for fish who are successfully adapting to the dam controlled river. You do have to think about Missoula Floods, catastrophic land slides, volcanism, and all the other barriers to salmonid survival, and yet here they are, able to adjust to present conditions because of their trials over millennia.

The NGOs of the environment are poised to try to kill hatcheries, and it is nice to see the economic impact being so large. This issue with fish and hatcheries, is that the fish still need cool, clean, productive water in which to live, no matter where they are born. California's decision to appropriate every drop of water for town or agriculture, drying up the rivers, is the most egregious misuse of water and insult to fish in this country. Few know that more than a million acre feet, annually, is diverted from the Klamath River watershed to the Central Valley irrigation projects 600 miles away in another watershed, all the while the press ballyhoos the ongoing negotiations to remove 4 Klamath River hydroelectric dams, the power from which will be replaced by sixty times more expensive and less green wind power, or by burning natural gas fossil fuels. Ratepayers will be billed for the change. Yet ratepayers get none of the power produced by that water diverted to the Sacramento River, nor do they benefit from the water sales to the Westside Irrigation District. Funny how that works. Oregon ratepayers subsidizing California irrigation water and salmon destruction, all the while Oregonians no longer can fish for chinook in the ocean because we might catch a Klamath River origin fish or a Sacramento or San Joaquin origin fish, all of which are in serious trouble, many due to no water in the rivers, and the sordid fact of salmon hatcheries being behind the irrigation interests in line for water. Yep. Some hatcheries don't have enough water in the creek to allow the fish to get to the hatchery. Irrigators in Pelosi Land take it all. And still bitch that they are not getting enough. Go figure.

I applaud this study of the contributions of fish hatcheries to the New West economy.