West coast salmon recovery

[atlas]

32 million Sacramento fall run smolts are released every year.

 

[atlas]

 

[Hydrophilic]

That's a problem.

You have massive meta data analysis like that usgs study I linked that very explicitly concludes that despite the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on fresh water habitat it hasn't equated to ANY additional wild fish, yet no one changes their minds.

Habitat restoration is akin to a religion for some people.

Habitat restoration is akin to religion for some people, just like SE Alaska harvest can be for others, and others believe more hatchery fish is all we need. That doesn't mean habitat, harvest, and hatcheries aren't part of the answer in various ways, or vice versa. The tribes have re-established a lot of new runs with hatchery fish, and had failures. Cutting harvest has improved some runs, done nothing to others. Allowing fish to access habitat, or fixing identified pinchpoints in habitat, have improved some runs, done nothing to others.

I've seen those papers and I wouldn't say nobody changes their minds. There's a difference between being more critical of habitat projects, or placing less weight on the importance of habitat in particular systems and outright dismissing habitat altogether, everywhere. You might be referencing the Columbia river paper that talked about spending 9 billion over decades on salmon habitat restoration? The truth is only something like 25% went to actual salmon habitat restoration (Still a large amount), most of it went to the agency bloat / monitoring / etc. Other papers include foregone revenue as part of the costs (value of electricity not generated due to dam spills).

The Columbia watershed is really impacted by ocean harvest, predation, dams, and fragmented habitat. So if you have a watershed which has been so altered, and resembles almost nothing of its former self, it's fair to say there are a lot of different pinchpoints. We might increase smolt production with a habitat project, but if the birds pick them off, is it still a success? Maybe not. But if you remove all the birds and the smolt still get torn up at the dams, fried from hot water, poisoned with polluted water...was the bird removal project a success? So on and so forth. Need to work on all of the problems.

One of the salmon biologists I like, albeit I find his takes generally more negative, is Robert Lackey. He regularly writes about religious ecology and normative science. He comes off a bit pessimistic and critical of how much money we've spent trying to recover salmon. He seems to take the position that no scientist knows the answer or which issue is the most important to address. And he's probably right. That doesn't mean habitat is not an issue altogether, to varying degrees the tribes, feds, even the fisheries biologists who focus on the ocean still acknowledge habitat as an issue. And to be clear - I believe habitat, harvest, hatcheries, ocean conditions, climate change, and predation are all issues, I am very much not just a habitat guy.

From one of his 2025 papers (Six Policy Realities Revealed by Analyzing the
200-Year Salmon Decline on the Pacific Coast)

 

[Hydrophilic]

Mostly hatchery strays attracted by pulse flows. Some natural reproduction. California releases smolts at the Golden Gate and a variety of other places which results in high ocean abundance, while having relatively low hatchery return rates. This is because these fish stray like crazy.

Another thing about king salmon in California is that they don't go up to Alaska and the BC coast. Meaning that there is a lot more control in who is actually commercially fishing these fish... recently it's been closed entirely with a limited recreational fishery and a quota.

This is different than fish in say Washington, which can get caught in Washington, BC and Alaska. They also encounter trawlers which Sacramento river fish do not.

That is exactly right.

There is nothing wrong with hatchery fish straying and recolonizing spawning habitat, I'd call that a goal in different scenarios, especially if the hatcheries are well run and with good genetics.

The tribes have done this a lot. There are various self sustaining wild runs all over the west coast which were started this way - that information can be tracked down. A good non tribal example is Coho on the upper willamette river, which was not within their reach previously. In 2024 they counted over 50,000 - wild and self sustaining, pretty remarkable.

It seems like there's a bit of motivation here to be overly critical of any habitat project. There are others but I digress, not really my intent to change minds, just a salmon lover hoping for the best.