Abolish Salmon Hatcheries?By Jay Leo BaldwinDecember 27, 2018
Groups are pressuring the state not to close the fishery, and NOAA is asking the State for ways and means of increasing the availability of chinook salmon for Orcas that are starving,. Seals and sea lions are being found dead on the beach from a bullet probably by fisherman who think seals eat too many salmon. Seals are Orca food, too. We need a more eco-friendly system of raising salmon that more closely duplicates the natural cycle of salmon. Small remote hatchery sites, using gravel incubating systems from which hatched alevin could migrate into the gravel shoal naturally would be far better, much cheaper, too. New hatching techniques can be studied, that use far less water , during cold weather. Remote sites can even be labor free, and automated. Techy times are here. Why is that better? Migrations would be more natural, at the tiny, fry stage. The result of pond rearing over a hundred year period has over fed the predators with tamed, large, pond fed juveniles salmon, not wild fry. Large, stupid juveniles are slaughtered by predators; take a look at squaw fish, now classified a minnow called Northern Pike, It almost exclusively and voraciously feeds on salmon juveniles released from hatcheries and has become so established in the Columbia River that bounties are paid to catch them. In the Sacramento River the hatcheries truck their juveniles to the ocean to escape the slaughter by squaw fish. Now pike can weigh several pounds, and are particularly available in the large rivers with dams. Timing means everything for juveniles and adults, both. getting past the dams is one problem, on the way out, and then getting back upstream upon return is the other. Hydropower dalms need to be abandoned and get a crash program going for solar. We need another ‘New Deal’ for putting people to work building solar colonies to replace dams. Rivers have always had lakes, and some species hold over a year making their way downstream at the right time: chinook, sockeye and coho. Chum and pink salmon, however, usually spawn streams at lower elevations. Dams are getting old and are a danger to all. When spring comes the long sun days bring everything to life. The ocean blooms the same way. Juvenile salmon migrate to salt water at bloom time, but only at night for better survival. On the dark of the moon, before the spring equinox during the month of March, they make a dash for it, hiding during the daylight hours. And in April, during the dark moon, fry from the northern regions migrate, hiding during the day and .making their dash for the ocean at night. Some go down steam head first, some tail first. Nature is fantastically smart, and is the true university. We just need to study it more carefully and try not to disturb it, or as little as possible, and try to integrate into its rhythms. Hatcheries claimed to be an improvement on nature: Wow! What a political ego trip that is. Hatcheries put a bunch of eggs in a pail of water, introduce milt, male sperm fluid, mix it up and try to get it into trays, in the dark and motionless in a very few minutes, as they become very fragile. Light is lethal to fertilized eggs. That whole process has mongrelized the species, since nature is far different than hatching and pond rearing. Actually, mixing eggs from several females in a bucket, has reduced the size of hatchery fish by half, depriving the spawn of fertilization by the large, dominant male. Therefore, half the tonnage is missing from the ocean. No wonder Orcas are hungry. The survival of the fittest is still the natural order. In nature the females lay their eggs in a basin called a redd that has been created in the gravel by the femail laying on her side and using her tale like a vacuum. That creates the basin that she deposits her eggs into. The female then moves upstream to dig another redd. The gravel her actions produce drift downstream to quickly cover the fertilized redds below. Therefore, the large, dominate males fertilize perhaps 90% of the eggs in the redd. Chemicals released by egg laying results in male fights downstream for the right to spawn—the largest male spawns first, and then smaller males also try to spawn the rest, after waiting their turn. Therefore, hatcheries practice survival of the unfit—and the returns are dismal. Tamed Juveniles just don’t survive well—they are predator food—and there are a lot more predators than just squaw fish who have been dining on tame hatchery juveniles for about fifty years or more. I’m surprised salmon have lasted this long. . There is no way to inventory the ocean to see if there are actually more surviving hatchery fish than wild fish. Marking and tagging is a much later development. There is the likelihood of wild fry are also starving since the hatcheries discarded the carcasses of spent spawners or sold them for fertilizer and/or dog and cat food, leaving the stream environment devoid of any fry feed, thereby increasing mortality of wild fry... Hatchery fish are about half the size of large fish. Chinook used to get well over l00 pounds, now hatchery stock does well to make fifty pounds. What does this mean? It means there is about half the food out there—and in the case of chinook, killer whales are starving. What will they do about it? Probably build bigger and better hatcheries As they usually do until the species becames extinct. The main argument in favor of hatcheries is that during hard winters it guarantees a water flow for the eggs to hatch. We can do that at the steam site as well with no cement ponds at all. One large chinook may have three to five thousand eggs, which just about fills up a dog house hatchery site. New hatchery techniques use a spray for hatching eggs, instead of a constant stream flow, i.e., ar less water. What a gigantic savings to the tax payer!!! Video can monitor water flows with modern techy help, as well. . I’ll repeat the title of this article again ‘Abolish Salmon Hatcheries’! You thought it was a joke, right? Take down those electric shock stream weirs blocking and often killing migrations of all fish. Let the eco system receive the nutrients in the salmon carcasses that remain in the stream after the spawn—that creates a nutrient biome for the young migrating juveniles that emerge all hungry from the gravel streambeds the following spring. One vital nutrient needed by all the forest is phosphorus—the key element that determines the intensity of organic life in both the ocean and on land. Dr. Donald McDonald, a famous scholar, called it the chewing gum element since it sticks around the environment, by a process, as he describes in his doctoral thesis, all forms of life life reaches out and grabs it, holds it, and releases what it does not use, the following spring. .The study was conducted at Karluck Lake, Alaska years ago. Block the salmon: and you’ll kill the forest and all its creatures, eventually, of course. My recent book,’ Indian Spirit Man’, makes the same statement: That’s the magic of the greatest fighting fish: salmon. Eagles take carcasses to the highest mountains where they nest. Maybe that’s why salmon fight so hard to get back upstream, and have fought for so long-and so magnificently. People stand an watch for hours. It saves the life of everything in the forest glens, including you.. Jay Leo Baldwin About: Former Ketchikan resident.
Here is my poem, first published in 1984; now reprinted in my new book:, Indian Spirit Man
Old Salmon Friend A salmon leaps, again, again, Perhaps they’ll give ‘em eye of shark The Brave New World’s a sorry lot, Old bear still waits beside the stream, Persevere, old salmon friend Published
Editor's Note:
Received December 23, 2018 - Published December 27, 2018 Related Viewpoint: Viewpoints - Opinion Letters:
E-mail your letters
& opinions to editor@sitnews.us Published letters become the property of SitNews.
|
||
