Case Study: Kalama River

KALAMA, Cowlitz County - If the state Fish and Wildlife Department stopped putting hatchery salmon and steelhead in the Kalama River, "the Kalama would have no fish in it," says Mike Eckert, who owns a tackle shop on Kalama River Road.

He's exaggerating. But not by much.

Over the past 15 years, two state salmon hatcheries on the Kalama have released an average of 10 million young coho and chinook into the river each year.

At the same time, the National Marine Fisheries Service says, wild coho on the Kalama and other Lower Columbia tributaries in Washington probably have become extinct. State biologists say few wild chinook remain.

Besides the salmon, the state plants about 180,000 young hatchery steelhead annually in the Kalama. But the wild summer run has been in trouble for years; it's officially classified as "depressed."

Why have the Kalama's wild fish disappeared? There's no simple explanation, no single cause.

But the hatcheries played a part, many scientists say.

Salmon hatcheries are under attack throughout the Northwest. The Kalama provides a case study of some of the reasons why.

No river in Washington has a longer history of artificial propagation. And on no river have interactions between hatchery and wild fish been studied more intensively.

Hatchery fish have largely replaced wild fish on the Kalama. They haven't transformed it into a river of plenty, however.

Salmon production throughout the Lower Columbia has taken a nosedive in recent years. Adult returns of coho and chinook to the Kalama have declined despite big cutbacks in ocean and river harvest.

Some scientists attribute the drop to changes in the ocean environment that affect hatchery and wild fish alike. Others say it raises questions about whether hatchery production is truly sustainable.

"The biodiversity of the Kalama River was just thrown away," says Bill Bakke, former executive director of the conservation group Oregon Trout and a hatchery critic. "We thought we could manufacture fish like you would make canned peas or brown shoes. Now we're paying the price."

Wild fish overwhelmed

Washington's first salmon hatchery, Fallert Creek, was built on the Kalama for $5,000 in 1895.

The river's second hatchery, built upstream at Kalama Falls in the 1950s, was one of more than 30 built to compensate for production lost to Columbia River dams.

For the most part, the ancestors of the Kalama's hatchery fish weren't native to the river. The coho, for instance, are genetic stews, mostly derived from Toutle and Cowlitz river stock.

Other Washington hatcheries on the Lower Columbia rear the same fish; egg transfers among them are common. So much mixing has occurred that coho from all the hatcheries now are managed as just two stocks.

Little effort was made to keep those homogenized hatchery salmon separate from the Kalama's wild fish. Until recently, millions of young hatchery coho were planted in tributaries away from the hatcheries.

Such "outplants" were common throughout the Lower Columbia; the National Marine Fisheries Service says managers often released more coho fry and smolts than stream habitat could support.

Over time, scientists agree, the more numerous hatchery coho simply overwhelmed any wild fish remaining in the Lower Columbia, breeding with them, perhaps outcompeting them.

Any wild coho that did survive the competition and genetic dilution likely were caught in fisheries that targeted hatchery fish.

When the National Marine Fisheries Service announced in 1991 that it could find no surviving wild Lower Columbia coho, it got no protest from state officials.

"This should not have been a surprise to anyone," one state biologist wrote, "since the entire Columbia River system has been a hatchery-fish management zone for about three decades."

Coho and chinook do still spawn naturally in the Kalama. But federal and state biologists say almost all are hatchery strays or returning hatchery outplants that apparently have little success reproducing in the wild.

Close down the hatcheries, scientists say, and the natural spawners would mostly disappear.

The hatcheries don't exert their influence in a vacuum, however. Overfishing, logging and development already had taken a big toll on the Lower Columbia's wild salmon by the 1960s, when hatchery production intensified.

It's possible the wild salmon would have disappeared even if the hatcheries had never been built. But there's no way to untangle those threads now.

`This is a hatchery river'

The old state Game Department, now part of Fish and Wildlife, began planting hatchery steelhead in the Kalama in the 1950s. Twenty years later, it opened a research station on the Kalama to learn what effect those hatchery fish were having on natural production.

That station has since generated some of the most troubling research in the world on interactions between hatchery and wild fish.

The Kalama's hatchery summer steelhead are imported from the state's Skamania Hatchery on the Washougal River, 50 miles away. Skamania steelhead were derived from Washougal and Klickitat River fish 40 years ago.

The stock has been planted in rivers as far away as Puget Sound, North Carolina and Rhode Island.

Over two decades the Kalama researchers learned that:

-- While they are outnumbered 4 to 1 by hatchery spawners, each wild summer steelhead that returns to the Kalama on average produces eight times as many adult offspring as a hatchery fish.

-- Wild and hatchery summer steelhead interbreed. While hatchery fish on average spawn a month earlier than wild fish, there is significant overlap.

Put those findings together, Kalama researchers Pat Hulett and Steve Leider say, and they spell trouble for wild fish:

Hatchery steelhead may be introducing the genes responsible for their poor survival into the wild stock, decreasing its fitness and, ultimately, its future.

Critics of Hulett's and Leider's work contend that, while the Skamania summer steelhead fared poorly in the Kalama, a more genetically compatible, locally adapted hatchery stock might do much better.

What's more, they say, the Kalama team hasn't provided the missing link: conclusive proof that hatchery genes in fact are harming the fitness of the wild population.

True, Hulett acknowledges. But the Kalama's wild summer steelhead population has been down for years. He suspects a connection.

To boost wild steelhead numbers, the state now requires that Kalama anglers release all wild fish they catch.

But the Fish and Wildlife Department continues to release young hatchery steelhead into the Kalama each year. Bakke, the former Oregon Trout leader, says that's unconscionable, especially in light of Hulett and Leider's work.

Dan Rawding, the state's regional steelhead-management biologist, says a new wild-salmon protection policy his agency is preparing almost certainly will require changes to protect the Kalama's steelhead.

That could take the form of a new, locally derived hatchery stock, to minimize the genetic impact of interbreeding. Or steps to ensure wild and hatchery fish don't spawn in the same place at the same time.

Or, Rawding acknowledges, a drop in hatchery steelhead plants.

That last alternative is political TNT. "It wouldn't be very popular with the fishermen who enjoy catching those fish," Hulett says.

Eckert, the Kalama tackle-shop owner, concurs. "This is a hatchery river now," he says.