The article about changing salmon management caught my attention. I grew up on salmon hatcheries in the Columbia Gorge. My dad and two of my uncles managed hatcheries from 1924 to 1994.

My mother was a seasonal Corps of Engineers fisheries tech, marking fish, counting fish and working as an assistant to Ivan Donaldson, BPA’s first fisheries biologist. They were studying fish passage issues at Bonneville Dam. Yes, dams kill fish, but many modifications, based on these studies, have reduced mortality to a predictable quantity.

I went to school to be a fisheries biologist. When I graduated in 1957 there were no jobs available, so I became a science teacher. I have never lost interest in salmon. I was on the Mid-Columbia Steelhead Recovery Advisory Board and have been on the Umatilla Basin Watershed Board since 2000. I have also written numerous editorials when I felt it would help salmon.

If I had to make a list of suggestions for success, I would advise the tribes to emulate what was successful in the heyday of salmon production during the years my family was involved. For starters, hatcheries will be a necessity. Reasons for saying this are many and varied. Leaving sperm to the outside chance it can find an egg is slim in most situations.

Salmon have been extirpated from those areas that had the best conditions. I am talking about the right kind of gravels, the right speed of water and the high density of spawning salmon found in ancestral streams. Fertilization rates in hatcheries are better than 90%.

From my observation, animal husbandry was as valuable in rearing salmon for food as it has been for the local stock grower raising meat for the table. The question is: Do we want meat for the table? The mandate of the early hatcheries was more fish and bigger fish; more food for the public, more jobs for the workers and more money for the cannery owners.

For many years I helped my father select males over 40 pounds and females over 20 pounds for brood stock. The canneries and the orcas in Puget Sound loved these big fish. The biologist, not so much. One day I overheard a new biologist ask my dad to use a greater assortment of males. My dad asked, “Why would I want to do that?”

The biologist responded, “Because that big fish might be seven years old.” My dad responded, “If in seven years I have more fish come back than I had this year, I will have done my job.” He also informed the biologist, “I raise cattle and I don’t use the runt to breed my cows.”

To blame hatcheries for the declines in wild fish, while predators are multiplying exponentially, leads me to question the scientific intellect of those not managing the predators. The Fish Commission of Oregon had a hired seal/sea lion hunter who kept the seals and sea lions out of the Columbia River until the late 1960s.

A study done about 15 years ago determined seals and sea lions were taking about 50% of the endangered upriver stocks. The predator population has increased immensely since then. I would advocate that seals and sea lions, eating three to six salmon from the Columbia per day, be culled.

This would be especially important for the March through June period when the fish in the river are destined for upriver destinations. Native fisheries are restricted to areas above Bonneville Dam.

The tribes would do the culling. Archaeologists have evidence from their village site studies that seals and sea lions were utilized as far upriver as Celio. The meat is high in protein and could be a health food because they have no chemical additives. In addition to using the meat to enrich their diet, they could also sell the nutritious meat and hides as part of their native industries.

Editor’s Note

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