The problem with the Columbia river fisheries

From The Land of the One-Eyed Jacks


We could not have done more to destroy the Salmon if we had declared
salmon to be an enemy of mankind. Help me list the ways we have harmed
the various salmon runs in Oregon & Washington.

First, Salmon have that pink meat because of the important feeds for
Salmon is Shrimp. But in the Land of one-eyed-jacks, we have developed
a large industry devoted to harvesting various species of shrimp.
Shrimp boats drag the ocean's bottom with large nets in order to
harvest tons of shrimp. Most restaurants offer shrimp on their menu
and every grocery store sells shrimp.

There is no way to know how much the shrimp industry deprives salmon of
shrimp and thereby limits this important food fore salmon.

Hatcheries were developed to maintain salmon runs by raising "welfare
salmon" that must be fed fish pellets rather than allowing young
salmon called "fry" to learn what feed is and how to catch it in a
natural environment where dead salmon have fertilized the stream where
fry flourish. These naturally raised fry survive better than welfare
salmon who have near survival rates.

The absence of dead salmon in the rivers leading to the Columbia River
creates a barrier with no food for salmon fry as they float to the
ocean. When the migrating salmon arrive near the mouth of the Columbia
River, Caspian Terns feed on the starving salmon because the Army
Engineers have deposited dredging spoils along the Columbia River.
These spoil islands prove to be good nesting areas for the Caspian
Terns. As a result, the Caspian Tern population has greatly increased
this protected bird's numbers.

It appears that it is against the law to grade off the top of these
spoil island so that tidal flooding of the spoil islands will prevent
the Caspian Terns from nesting. Welcome to the land of the
one-eye-jacks!

When the Grand Coulee Dam was built, no provision was made to provide
fish ladders or other means to transport Salmon over the Grand Coulee
Dam. This eliminated a thousand miles that used to provide spawning
"reds" (spawning beds) for salmon.

One of the unforeseen consequences of building the Grand Coulee Dam was
that the impoundment of warm water behind the dam provided good habitat
for chubs that overwhelmed the trout population. The Washington Fish
Commission decided to import Walleye Pike from the Eastern United
States to control the chubs. They imported the pike in violation of
Washington's laws about importing foreign species and without regard
to the fact that Walleyed pike are predators. They did not foresee
that pike would be flushed through the turbine at Grand Coulee and
populate the lower Columbia River. The Walleye pike flourish in the
Lower Columbia River by feeding on crayfish, trash fish and starving
salmon fry.
The "squaw fish", a native species, which has been renamed
"pikeminnow" in order to be politically correct, is still the most
important predator in the lower Columbia River and its tributaries.
The problem of Squaw fish predation has become so severe that Fish
Management Agencies now have a program to pay fishermen, "fishers"
to catch nine inch and larger squaw fish $4 dollars for the first 100
"pikeminnows", $5 for each of the next 400 squaw fish, and $8
dollars for each pikeminnow they catch thereafter. One fisher made
$21,834 dollars catching squaw fish and pike minnows in the Columbia
River during the 2004 fishing season.

Not only did the government destroy 1000 miles of salmon spawning
rivers but they introduced a very efficient predatory Walleyed Pike to
prey on migrating salmon when they built the Grand Coulee Dam.

Did you ever wonder why immature salmon are called "fry"? This is
because salmon fry are easy to catch and fry in a frying pan or
threaded on a stick and cooked over a campfire.

The Army Engineers and Fisheries Departments have sponsored the
building of fish ladders to enable salmon to migrate upstream over dams
but they never have developed a way for the young salmon (fry) to get
back downstream except through the turbine where they are subjected to
great pressure and turbulence. This is why sturgeon fishing is so good
below Bonneville Dam!

The Lamprey Eel (Petromyzonidae) is a predaceous eel that is andromous,
meaning that they live in the ocean most of their lives and then
migrate up fresh water streams to spawn. They are about 26" long and
are notable for their circular mouth that is lined with sucking parts
and a ring of teeth that rasp flesh from their prey like salmon. They
migrate up fresh-water streams by the tens of thousands.

This is another example of the "one-eyed-jack" way of thinking.
The government would rather deal with hatcheries than a predaceous
parasitic eel that they knew almost nothing about. Lamprey eels wiped
out the lake trout fishery in the Great Lakes. The Lamprey eel has
been allowed to flourish while the salmon has been exploited from every
point of view.

If we could make a market for these eels for fish fertilizer or sale to
the Orient where eels are prized as food, we might put a slight
decrease in the population of lamprey eels. Lampreys could be
harvested at night by putting a net between them and the cement edge of
fish ladder walls when the salmon are not using the fisher ladders.
There may be other ways to limit or control the populations of Lamprey
Eels but we haven't tried to manage this serious predaceous parasitic
eel and we have no idea of how much damage they do to salmon runs. We
do know that every eel has consumed enough fish to make them earn their
name "lamprey". The Indians used the oil from their bodies to
light their wick lamps.

When you consider that each lamprey eel kills hundreds of fish in its
life time and hundreds of thousands of them migrate up our fresh water
streams each year, these eels could be the most serious threat to
salmon populations.

It would be easy for the reader to add to this list of things we are
and have done to destroy the salmon and I am sure there are still some
people out there who still think that we could change our ways and
practices in order to preserve and protect some salmon runs.

After all, all the salmon require is a few months of clean, clear, cool
water to complete their life cycle.