Troubled Salmon and the 'Industry of Man'
"The serenity of the climate, the innumerable pleasing landscapes, and the abundant fertility that unassisted nature puts forth, require only to be enriched by the industry of man with villages, cottages and other buildings, to render it the most lovely country that can be imagined. . . ." Capt. George Vancouver, 1792
On a gray July morning, we steer the sloop Velella south along the east shore of Bainbridge Island, past beach cottages and million-dollar mansions huddled nearly wall-to-wall along the narrow ledge between island and sea. Across Puget Sound, the glass towers of downtown Seattle glisten like an artist's overstated rendition of a futuristic city.
We wonder if this is what Capt. George Vancouver had in mind when he suggested all Puget Sound needed was "the industry of man."
Two hundred years ago, Vancouver followed a similar course before dropping anchor at the southeast corner of Bainbridge Island. Here the Discovery stayed for 12 days while the ship's company set out in small boats to explore the south Sound.
We cruise past Vancouver's anchorage and across to Manchester, mooring the Velella offshore from a nondescript compound of frame buildings and floating pens on the shallow bay. These are the Manchester labs of the federal Northwest Fisheries Science Center, where some of Puget Sound's smartest scientists are busily trying to apply the industry of man to problems created in large part by the industry of man.
Over the next several hours, we peer into perhaps a dozen prosaic, 20-foot diameter tanks, each containing marine creatures - copper rockfish, sablefish, halibut and more. But the stars of this show are in two tanks marked "Redfish Lake sockeye." These are the prized progeny of the last 16 sockeye that struggled up the Columbia and Snake rivers to an Idaho lake whose salmon run teeters on the brink of extinction.
"They're about ready to spawn," explains biologist Tom Flagg, peering over the edge of the tank.
He speaks much as a proud father would at the graduation of his first-born son.
How these Idaho sockeye came to rural Kitsap County is a story about innovation and technology in the marine environment. It may also be a glimpse into the future of Puget Sound chinook salmon, the runs considered to be most at risk of extinction. Puget Sound salmon always have been highly cyclical. A century of harvest data looks like a statistical roller coaster of good years plummeting to bad and back again. To offset the low years, the government long ago began trying to hatch and grow salmon artificially, removing eggs from female fish, hatching them under controlled conditions, then releasing them into the Sound or Pacific Ocean so fishermen could catch them. In the past four decades, salmon hatcheries have grown like crazy from Puget Sound to Japan, releasing 5.5 billion juvenile salmon a year to the Pacific, including nearly 1 billion to the waters around Washington.
But while hatcheries pump out juvenile fish, natural-salmon populations have plummeted. Several Columbia River runs already are formally listed as endangered, and Puget Sound runs are likely to be next. Confronted by this growing crisis, scientists such as Flagg started working on another strategy. They began breeding Pacific salmon in captivity. Eventually, they applied what they had learned to Atlantic salmon, which were dwindling even faster in New England.
Atlantic salmon proved to be easier to "domesticate," and the project worked. The result is a salmon-farming industry that now reaches from Norway and Scotland to Chile and is as close as Bainbridge Island. Just across the channel from Manchester, Global Aquaculture plans to harvest and sell 6 million pounds of Atlantic salmon this year.
Now, as Puget Sound runs dwindle, the scientists at Manchester are trying to invent strategies for preserving fish at their doorstep. The concept is simple. In their natural environment, a spawning salmon will produce thousands of eggs, Flagg says. The vast majority of those eggs will die or be eaten by other fish. If just one-tenth of 1 percent of them survive to spawn again, the run will be considered successful.
In the controlled environment at Manchester and other labs, they can achieve success rates of 50 percent to 70 percent. "Even if we only have a few spawners, we can take thousands of eggs and amplify them to thousands of adults," Flagg says.
And if it works with salmon, why not copper rockfish or sablefish?
So today we have two alternatives to Mother Nature: hatcheries that produce juvenile fish and release them into the ocean to be caught later by fishermen; and floating farms that hatch and raise salmon much like chickens. On the surface, at least, both strategies appear to have been hugely successful. About 65 government and tribal-owned hatcheries produce salmon in Puget Sound. There are far fewer salmon farms in local waters, but dozens along the British Columbia coast.
These days, however, each of those technologies is increasingly suspected of contributing to the demise of Puget Sound's wild salmon. Critics say hatchery fish mingling with wild salmon weaken the gene pool or spread disease among wild stocks. They compete for food, and the younger wild fish frequently are the losers. One Oregon study suggests that in some cases larger hatchery fish feed on wild juveniles. Flagg recently co-authored an academic paper that asks whether releasing 5.5 billion hatchery fish every year is taxing the ecosystem not just of Puget Sound but of the North Pacific. While there is no conclusive evidence, the risks should be enough to cause governments to rethink how many fish they are adding to the environment, he and his colleagues say.
Bern Shanks, the former state fisheries director, came under fire in part because he listened to biologists who argued that hundreds of millions of dollars worth of hatcheries may have done salmon runs more harm than good. Under his leadership, the state adopted a controversial policy requiring that sports and commercial fishing be regulated in a way that prevents depletion of wild runs. Putting that policy into effect may require cutting back or even closing hatcheries whose fish compete with wild runs.
Salmon farms, on the other hand, are attacked for introducing pollution, including fish feces, to the environment. And the escape of 300,000 Atlantic salmon from the Global Aquaculture farm at South Bainbridge last year raised fears of East Coast salmon interbreeding with Puget Sound stocks.
There is no evidence, however, to support those fears, says Dayton Lee Alverson, a Seattle consultant and respected authority on marine sciences. It might be accomplished in laboratory conditions, but the chances of it occurring in the wild are slim, he says.
These fears are not new to the biologists at Manchester, and Flagg thinks some of them are legitimate. Fish raised in hatcheries or pens are not the equal of those raised in their natural environment, he says. To offset the problems of captivity, Flagg and his colleagues find themselves in the odd position of teaching salmon to behave like salmon. Before releasing mature fish they expose them to the scents of potential predators or even to the predators themselves. They even constructed an artificial raceway that emulates a natural stream with real gravel, logs and other obstacles likely to be encountered in nature.
And there's good reason they're keeping rockfish and other less familiar in nearby tanks: They're learning how to breed these species in captivity just in case they, too, become threatened.
Back on the sloop we sit with Alverson, who years ago served as teacher and mentor to many of the scientists now trying to rescue Puget Sound's wildlife. The wild-salmon debate is interesting, he says. In a complex ecosystem like Puget Sound, nature is bound to be affected by the genetics of hatcheries and salmon farms. Scientists call this genetic drift, the tendency for organisms to undergo genetic change when isolated from their natural environment.
"But out here, the issues of genetics are subordinate to habitat," he says, nodding across the Sound toward the Seattle skyline. "Puget Sound's population has doubled in a generation, and it will have doubled again in the next generation. I don't see how we can sustain that growth without substantially changing the ecosystem."
The scientists here are trying to anticipate those changes, much as Vancouver surveyed this seascape, conjured images of cities and towns, and made a map for those who would follow to apply the industry of man.
