Chew on these salmon costs

The numbers represent how much it cost to build, staff, manage and monitor hatcheries that hatch fish, feed them and deliver them to the river system. The young salmon, called smolts, head for the ocean and, if everything works, return as mighty adults in two, three or four years.

Most fish don’t make it, hence the hefty tab for survivors.

The value of a legally caught fish is even higher.

The hatchery system comprises more than 100 hatcheries throughout the Columbia Basin. It keeps fish in rivers for recreational and commercial harvest and for the sustenance of dwindling species.

Some exist to create fish for harvest; others exist to replenish specific rivers that have declining stocks of wild salmon; yet others exist to compensate for spawning grounds cut off by dams.

There are no measures by which to gauge hatchery success or failure. Columbia Basin salmon, overall, are not recovering on their own, despite improved runs in the past two years.

Now the Northwest Power Planning Council is on the case.

The council, composed of two representatives each from Oregon, Idaho, Washington and Montana, has started a yearlong review of hatchery policies and practices.

The first step was having independent economists examine hatchery costs by averaging returns over several years.

The study is not yet complete. But their preliminary calculations, among them the price per returning fish at six hatcheries in the Columbia Basin, are startling.

"We have a whole bunch of hatcheries in the Columbia Basin with a wide spectrum of objectives," said Hans Radtke, a member of the economics board. "Hatcheries need to be categorized by measurable objectives. Until we do that, we can’t compare one hatchery to another one and find ways to improve the system."

Daniel Huppert, a scientist colleague working on the review, puts it another way: "You have all these different hatchery programs started at different times and places for different reasons and different funding. There’s nobody responsible for reviewing them as a unit."

Does that mean $300 or $7,400 is too much — or too little — for an individual fish?

The Nez Perce Tribal Hatchery is designed to produce salmon that will breed naturally in the Clearwater River, where salmon are having trouble, and seven of its tributaries.

If that effort to reintroduce fish to the wild works, Radtke says, expensive salmon may be worth the price.

This hatchery may be a cheaper alternative than some other measures, such as taking out dams or restoring habitat, he says.

Likewise, Idaho Fish and Game’s sockeye salmon hatchery in Eagle, Idaho, is designed to save Redfish Lake sockeye salmon from extinction.

Just 26 adult hatchery-born sockeye returned last year, and the average in the past three years was 96 fish.

Operating the hatchery and monitoring the results costs $714,000 a year, making each one of those 96 survivors worth $7,437.50 a price that Paul Kline, hatchery manager, thinks may be worth paying.

"How do you assign a price to saving this last remnant of a population?" Kline said.

Until hatcheries are managed as a unified system, it’s impossible to make such a judgment definitively.

Some biologists worry that hatchery fish could weaken wild stocks by taking their food or habitat and by interbreeding with them.

Anglers are allowed to keep hatchery-born salmon, identifying them by their missing adipose fins. Most wild-born salmon and non-clipped hatchery salmon, such as the ones from Idaho’s Eagle Hatchery, are off-limits to anglers.

Jim Lichatowich, a fisheries biologist, says hatcheries have never solved the problem of declining salmon runs.

"We made a bargain 126 years ago and traded habitat and rational harvest for hatcheries," said Lichatowich, whose 1999 book "Salmon Without Rivers" argues that hatcheries have failed to stop the decline of Pacific salmon in the Northwest.

Hatcheries exploded throughout the Columbia Basin after the region’s first one was built on the Clackamas River in 1877.

Now they’re operated or funded by each of the Northwest states, by tribes, by utility companies and by federal agencies.

Most funding comes from federal tax revenues or from the Bonneville Power Administration. But no agency is in charge of calculating how much is spent to run hatcheries. A tally by The Oregonian found federal and ratepayer funding last year exceeded $80 million.

The evaluation Lichatowich longs for, however, has begun.

It will be guided by the power council study and a separate assessment titled the Hatchery and Genetic Management Plan, to be carried out by the National Marine Fisheries Service, which manages Northwest salmon recovery.

When it’s done, every hatchery in the Northwest will have been examined, with its goals identified and its ability to meet its goals gauged.

Associated Press

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