Transcript of Bob Lohn's presentation at the  November 15, 2006 Council Meeting

Tom Karier:  First of all I’d like to start off by thanking Bob for making the trip out to a Council Meeting. I think it has been a little while since you’ve been here last. It has been overdue. We always appreciate when you can come and brief us on the activities of NOAA Fisheries. So, welcome Bob and the floor is yours.

Bob Lohn:  Thank you. Good morning, Dr. Karier, members of the Council. It is indeed a treat to be back here. One of the pleasures is finding that the Council of all the institutions that I deal with seems to be the most stable and in some sense has the shortest memory. That is when I walk in the door I’m welcomed and I think if only people knew or remembered all that I had done while I was at the Council, they would probably be throwing me out. It really is a sense of homecoming.

Dr. Karier, I thought I would cover just a few topics. You had raised a couple of issues, and then simply stand open for questions. It has been a while and I’d like to simply respond to any concerns or interests that you all have. In terms of items of the day, this is kind of just a grab bag. I do want to talk a little bit about the progress in the Biological Opinion. I’ll turn to that last; I just wanted to cover a couple of other items.

First of all, I wanted to express to you, sometimes you probably don’t hear it or may lose the perspective on the value of the Council’s actions and how much all of us depend on those. Several years ago, a number of years ago now, I’d asked the Council to support subbasin planning and you folks stepped up in a magnificent way to deal with the most comprehensive biological assessment of riparian areas ever conducted, as far as I know ever conducted in the world. These plans we promised we would use as the foundation for our recovery planning for salmon recovery in the Columbia Basin. We could not have made progress without it. That is, the plans while they varied in quality all were at least competent and many were superb. In some instances the plans were fundamentally technical; in other instances thanks to your help they went well beyond it and brought public grass-roots support along with the plans. Those have been critical to salmon recovery.

Alongside that we have laid the work of technical recovery teams and other biological efforts to sort of identify where the leading salmon populations are, decide how they fit into major population groups and ultimately into the listed ESUs, allowing us to determine what the building blocks are, but underneath this are the subbasin plans that allow us to determine what the status of the fish are in an area, what the status of the habitat is, what’s acceptable ways might be to fix the problems. So we go forward, those have been constant points of reference in our recovery plans, we rely on them heavily, and I just want to say we would not have been able to make meaningful progress without them.

Having said that, I also want to say that we are at an interesting point. In every problem there is the need to break it down into sufficiently distinct component parts that you can begin to solve it. You solve it at too large a level, you will be solving with generalities and never really address the underlying issues. If you solve it at too small a level, you will be lost in the details and never fix significant portions of the problem. We think we’re now at about the right level for solving the problem, that is having identified populations, we are able to begin to make decisions in the region as to which ones deserve emphasis, which are really relied on for recovery, which are more of the maintenance level to determine how those fit into local desires and trust and treaty rights and responsibilities, and, finally, to add them up to recovery. On recovery on one hand if you look at the details looks more complex than it ever has. I’m more optimistic about achieving it because I see not generalities but fixable causes. And they often differ from population to population.

Another effort alongside this that we’re looking at is a review of Columbia River hatchery programs. As you know, there are 189 hatchery programs. Now there are fewer than that in terms of hatcheries. One hatchery may have several programs. But 189 distinct hatchery programs. All of them exist for a reason; a few of them have been coordinated together and often that reason has been lost in history, and the hatchery continues to function because it is desirable to produce fish and ultimately they will be harvested. But without addressing the fundamental questions of how do the fish produced there fit with other needs within the basin. Do they support recovery in that area?  Do they support meaningful harvest of places where we want to have them?  Do they inadvertently create targets for harvests that are causing us to harvest at a time in which there are species in the river that especially need protection?  In other words, are they creating a harvest target when we want none?  And finally a question that needs to be asked and is beginning to be asked is are those the right fish for this place?  That is, if it’s a so-called mitigation hatchery producing fish primarily for harvest, are we producing the fish that we most want to harvest in the places and times and of the kind and quality that we most want?  The answers are coming out I think in a very informative way. This is a process that will take another year to year and a half. It is done methodically, I hope with a high degree of collaboration with states and tribes. Not trying to force decisions; those decisions will be made by the managers not this process, but certainly to reveal the interaction in the choices we need to make and out of this already I’m seeing substantial room for improvement.

So I see a future in which both salmon runs are likely to move convincingly closer to recovery and some of them I think will reach recovery in the not distant future; others will take longer. And I see management efforts that are likely to produce frankly better opportunities for harvest. So it is a brighter picture that’s out there. That doesn’t mean I’m painting away the complexity, the cost or the challenges in doing so.

I do note with some dismay that this morning an organization, Save Our Wild Salmon, is offering a report, they held a Washington, D.C. press conference, and the report is on their web site. I’m afraid this probably does not further salmon recovery as I understand it. The reason is that the report is clear, simple, elegantly prepared, but glosses over the underlying facts. In particular, this report basically argues it would be cheaper to remove the lower Snake River dams  than it would be to continue with our salmon recovery efforts for the Snake. The difficulty with that report is the authors have confused the numbers. The numbers they are using for costs are the tables we provided a few years ago indicating the expected outlays by federal agencies for salmon in the Columbia River system. Now you know but the public does not necessarily understand that only four of those 13 listed ESUs pass through the Snake River dams. You know but the public does not always know that much of the interest in salmon recovery is not just about listed fish, but about the harvestable runs that we can make better that aren’t listed, and we hope never will need to be listed. And that money is by no means all devoted to Snake River dams or to the fish of the Snake River.

Nonetheless, the argument being made is if you only remove the Snake River dams the region would save, the federal government would save about $600 million a year, a little over that. That’s interesting because the savings they see would mean ceasing most of the Council’s program, it would mean no Pacific coast salmon recovery funds for any part of the Columbia Basin, the Mitchell Act program would come to an end, USDA would stop spending money on CRP and CREP programs to provide habitat, the Forest Service would no longer need to do fish protection, the EPA would not be providing any regulatory assistance in the direction of salmon and so on. The cost that they have identified are the costs that we as a region have committed to salmon recovery generally, not to the Snake River. And I want to emphasize that for two purposes. First of all, salmon recovery is never as simple as removing four dams. Now I’m not saying there wouldn’t be a benefit for fish; I just want to say that you know that the public does not know that the problem is considerably different than the one described there. My great concern in this is not whether or not there is a public debate about dam removal — that is a legitimate debate, but it is one that should be had on the facts. What I am concerned about is the belief that salmon recovery somehow in the Northwest in the Columbia River Basin has a simple, brief and clear solution that if only you took it, all would be well.

Salmon recovery as we know from your subbasin plans and as we know from our recovery plans built on those, as we know increasingly every day, is complex. It needs to be sustained, it involves protecting riparian areas, fishing, screening, viewing with a complex web of hatchery production and harvests, meeting the needs of a multitude of citizens even while we live in a developing region. That does not cease simply because you remove some dams. So I wanted to simply note that and comment that I think that kind of simplistic thinking on one hand is a fair challenge, so why do you need a complex program?  But it holds out the false promise that recovery would be as simple as a single action when in fact it is much more complicated than that.

Another factor of past interest to the Council that I certainly gained here and have not lost interest in is the effect of ocean conditions on salmon runs. For the last several years I’ve been working with our science center, asking them to develop what I’ve called an ocean index, that is some kind of predictor that would say based on ocean conditions this year, we have an idea of what the returns will be. I’m pleased to say that in a few days we will be publicly announcing that and opening a web site. Our science center has been monitoring a number of conditions, environmental conditions, in the ocean, particularly the near shore area, the estuary, the plume of the Columbia River. We’ve been able to determine that some elements are strong predictors of what will happen to those fish runs, that is how many adult fish we will get out of those years. What we’re seeing are variable ocean conditions, different groups of fish using the ocean differently, but the fact is that what happens in the ocean in terms of nutrients and ultimately the food that grows from that profoundly affects our salmon runs. We have to do everything in river right but unless the ocean is ready, we will not be rewarded. Conversely, if the ocean conditions are superb we can perform very badly in the river and appear to get good results. Knowing what caused the good results is as important, is nearly as important as getting those. So we hope this will be an asset to the region and the amount of funding required to do this is relatively modest because it pulls information out of a whole plethora of sampling programs, but underneath this I suspect as you probably find in your funding allocation decisions each year, underneath it are pieces of information that are gathered from one program or another, they are contributing, and so many programs are important to this.

Finally, a collaborative effort that has been of value that I was specifically lobbied on but from a colleague whose advice I’ve always admired and respected, Peter Paquet, but Peter wanted me to mention the ongoing collaboration on the Northwest Environmental Database, the NED program. We’ve certainly appreciated it. We’ve used that to tie our Pacific Coast Salmon Recovery funding to that database. We find it as a solid underpinning for much of what we’re doing. I just wanted to appreciate your support in making Peter available to help us think through that and your support of that program.

So with that, Mr. Chairman, I know there were some specific questions. I think I’ve said way too much in general. Let me just turn to Council Member questions and for the time being everything is fair ground. If I have to dodge a question, I’ll tell you I’m dodging it.

Karier:  Okay. Thanks for the candid note, and thanks for the outline of those issues. Those are all critical to the Council’s work and very important to us. Any questions or comments?  Member Danielson.

Judi Danielson:  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Bob, it is always good to see you. You are always smiling, too, I don’t know why. Since you raised it and I heard there was something coming out today from Save our Wild Salmon, but raising that issue and the one mitigation effort is not going to do the trick, but it has always appeared to me that if you did remove for instance the four lower dams that the mitigation would quite possibly be even more costly for some years to come, even with removal, because of silt backlog and other issues. Have you guys thought that one through?

Lohn:  Member Danielson, I have to refer back to the report done by the Corps of Engineers earlier. I think it’s pretty thorough. I imagine the costs would have to be updated for inflation. But there are substantial issues with sediments. The nature of our society is such that because we’re a society that has used and allowed to enter the water stream various strains of toxics those tend to end up in the sediments. So there are some short-term issues that are pretty substantial. I think long-term just to be - my job is to be honest - long-term would the fish be better off without the dams, the answer is probably so. What considerations would there be for the fish?  What wouldn’t it return the runs spectacularly? 

The answer would be first of all the dams themselves would inadvertently provide some opportunities that would be lost. The fish use the habitat that is available and there are spawning zones and so forth that probably exist because the dams are there curiously enough. Why you would ask?  Because fish tend to spawn, particularly mainstem spawners like fall Chinook in areas in which there is upwelling, but not just any upwelling, upwelling of river water that has total nutrients and some living creatures. They choose that over the sterile water that simply is coming off the mountains that is sort of an under the floor spring. Given that you see in the Hanford Reach the Priest Rapids Dam raises the water level and we see a fair amount of upwelling below it in the Hanford Reach. It hasn’t been extensively studied but the Hanford Reach has one of its great strengths because of the upwelling there and I’m not saying build more dams so fish will be better off. Please don’t hear me as saying that. I’m saying that as you begin to take something apart, you want to look at the existing system and know what effect it is having. Beyond that, the state of Idaho depends for the bulk of its hydroelectricity on the Hells Canyon Complex, that is a full barrier to the salmon, the fall Chinook in particular, some spring Chinook, some steelhead live above there, and without dealing with that and water quality issues upstream it unlikely that you would see the return of huge numbers of fish. It is a complex problem.

Karier:  Member Cassidy.

Cassidy: Thanks Mr. Chairman. Bob, it is always nice to have you here. I take exception to your remarks that we might want you to leave for the work you did when you were our division director. I thought it was great work and enjoyed working with you every bit of the time. I would make one comment about the Snake River dams that I think needs to be added in here. It is my personal view that the (change of tape) gigantic public support by virtue of the perception of removing the dams on the Snake River when in fact I think we can still continue recovery without that process. I think that’s a huge issue. And if we don’t have public support and public enjoyment of the resource, I don’t know how you justify the public expenditure.

Lohn:  Mr. Cassidy, I’d have to agree and I know speaking now, wearing my administration hat, this is strongly viewed by the President, he stood at Ice Harbor Dam and gave me as well as our agency our directions which are we are to support renewable energy, he sees it as a national security issue as well as an economic issue for the Northwest, and that he believes the dams on the Snake River are an important part of that, both for the transportation opportunities they provide, the energy they provide, so that certainly would reflect our job to achieve salmon recovery in a way that is supportable and right now I don’t think that dam removal is supportable.

Larry Cassidy:  So it’s good to have you back and it’s good to see you, but that being said, I have an issue that we think we need an explanation on. This Council and the fish managers throughout Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana have worked arduously for a number of years on establishing a hatchery program in the Lostine River, the Northeast Oregon Master Hatchery plan is the total title. And not a minor amount of expense has been expended on this and finally we have achieved successful majority approval of this Council to build that hatchery. And it is a supplementation/augmentation hatchery for spring Chinook, similar to the Yakima Cle Elum Hatchery using wild stock as a brood stock, etc. Bonneville has refused to fund that project until your agency works out the crediting policy with respect to what crediting towards recovery will occur from the success of that hatchery which we fully expect we wouldn’t be funding it if it wasn’t going to be successful. So I’m asking you to be time specific and also policy specific with respect to when you’re going to get that answer back to Bonneville so we can proceed with this, and at the same time I think it’s important to tell us again why successful hatchery programs based on supplementation can’t have an additional chapter in the book of recovery for salmon and steelhead.

Lohn:  Let me focus first on Northeast Oregon. First of all, we’re on record repeatedly on supporting that hatchery. We believe it is useful, it is desirable, it adds to salmon recovery. We have sent letters to both your process and to the Council stating our positions, so there should be no doubt about our support re Northeast Oregon. Secondly, the funding decision, I’m not trying to point fingers but the funding decision is a Bonneville decision, it is not fundamentally a biological decision or a NMFS decision. The request we received from the Bonneville Power Administration was even while we said it is good, it will be useful, was in effect tell us more specifically what value this will be under the Biological Opinion that’s now being worked upon. The shorter answer is until there is agreement on what is being done for the fish in that area, that is what recovery looks like, which populations should be emphasized, none of us can say exactly what the value of that hatchery is. That was our response. Not that we think it’s of no value, but can we tell you precisely what the value is?  It’s a bit like - I don’t want to use too mechanistic an explanation - but it’s a bit like having a computer, a PC. We could say that a brand new PC is desirable, we know that it will do good things, we know that the managers, the people that have the PC will use it in a useful way, but someone will say what specifically will be the output from this computer?  The answer is until we know what programs people want to run, we can’t tell you how this machine will contribute. We can tell you it is very likely that this will do some useful things. So that has been our discussion.

It segued into a second discussion - the Nez Perce Tribe has been faithful in trying to work through these problems, they have been very diligent. I met recently with the chair and members of the Nez Perce Council committed to resolving this and I went to Lapwai to talk with them and that was a valuable and I hope congenial discussion. The Nez Perce Tribe has taken on the hard issue of trying to figure out in general how hatcheries should be credited when they are used to recover listed fish. They have submitted a paper, we’ve submitted a paper, our staffs are working on it. I think we are very close to a resolution on that. We believe that should answer Bonneville’s question. When I say it should we’ll say in general here’s how hatcheries will be treated under this Biological Opinion. Here’s how you would calculate so-called credit, and we believe this should answer your question. Now if the question comes back again, now that’s not enough, tell us right here exactly how this hatchery, then with all due candor that will have to wait until there is a specific decision, either proposed action from the federal agencies or an agreement from the managers as to what’s going to be done from that ESU, for that major population group, for that particular population, so you can say exactly how that fits. My sense is we don’t have to wait that long and so to cut to the bottom line I think that my expectation is within less than a month we certainly will have worked out the differences. I hope we come to complete common ground on the crediting scheme and we will submit that back to Bonneville. I have also talked with Steve Wright and I know it is Steve’s general desire to get this matter going in time for the construction season this year. He is aware of the deadline and he has actually called me to express his interest so I see it on its way to being resolved.

Cassidy:  so that’s good news I think to the extent we get there. But can I interpret that - not to try to push your words into something - but can I interpret that then as influencing a change in the present policy of hatchery vs. wild fish as far as they affect recovery anywhere in the basin?

Lohn:  I’m not sure so much of a change as it is - I’ve heard various interpretations of what that policy would be. In general, our policy has been that when fish are added to supplement a population and they return as adults, they are counted as members of that listed population as are their progeny. The question for ESA purposes, however, is not whether you count the fish in the group but whether or not there is a scientific basis to show that hatcheries can be expected to contribute long-term. And there have been a couple of studies, one which was widely publicized and generally misunderstood having to do with fish out at Hood River. It was a Bonneville and Council-supported program of analysis dealing with steelhead. There was another study published by our science center in Puget Sound that reached about the same conclusions at the same time. What those studies — I guess a little bit of background on hatchery fish — like other academic professions, the fisheries field goes through pendulum swings. There will be one group of people that come in and say this is the way the world is. And the next generation comes in and says absolutely not and we can show you why not. In fisheries, in the say sixties and early seventies, it was generally thought that hatcheries were the solution, they were producing fine fish, they looked fine, very catchable, survived in the wild, why worry about it?  The problem was there was no problem. Then those young Turks came in and said you know, there is a problem. These fish are not released in the wild performing very well. And they proved that. So we went from hatcheries are neutral to good to hatcheries can be very bad and that’s well documented. The next question is and where the pendulum is swinging now is in what circumstances can hatcheries be of real value?  And the studies that came out were some of the earliest of what I expect will be a long series of studies.

The Hood River study was particularly interesting because it involved two groups of steelhead. One, a brood stock that was selected without regard to the local area, they were out of basin, I don’t’ know what they were adapted to other than the Hood River hatchery, but they sure weren’t adapted to that location. The other one was a group of fish that were taken right out of the native brood stock and reared carefully and released carefully so they were as wild-like as possible. What the study showed is that the reproductive success in the wild of the first group, the out of area brood stock, was terrible. When these fish reproduced whether or not their mate was a natural fish from that area or a hatchery fish, their progeny survived at very low rates. Typical number 25, 30 percent success rate. Those are fish you’d say we don’t even want them spawning because it reduces the chance of getting a healthy mix generation. In contrast, the performance of the native brood stock reared in the hatchery was indistinguishable from the natural fish. In other words you didn’t care in that generation which fish was spawning, you were going to get the same results.

We did a similar study on Puget Sound, also with steelhead, and got exactly the same results. Here it was confounded because there had been a hatchery running for many years, was drawing its brood stock out of that area and probably the hatchery and native brood stock were highly intermixed. But the presence of these fish in the hatchery didn’t affect their success of leading a life, and coming back and spawning and producing fish of a mixed generation. The next scientific question is so we know that supplementation used carefully can work well for first generation. The next question is how long can you continue to supplement?  I don’t think anyone in the fisheries management field feels good about extremely high levels of supplementation for a very long time, there are genetic and mathematical arguments about how that kind of separates one group of characteristics from another. It leaves the fish less well adapted. But figuring out the limits of this is an area where science is really camping out. Our view in this Biological Opinion will be consistent with that science, consistent with our hatchery policy, that is if fish are being used in a way that the science says is supportable, we’ll consider that a positive for recovery. Now if someone said we’re going to supplement for the next 50 years at extremely high levels and we want you to declare that a success, I would say the science probably won’t take us there. But for the short term I would say that the positive — some confusion came in because the Technical Recovery Team or some of their work, and the Technical Recovery Team is chaired by some scientists, it is an independent science group, it is not a NOAA science group - that team indicated in one of their documents that they weren’t counting hatchery fish — it wasn’t expressing the position that hatchery fish have no value, it was simply saying that for the purpose of their calculations they were ruling out those, but they were taking into account there were hatchery fish that were having an adverse impact that were clearly unrelated to that area. Removal of those hatchery fish they would count as a positive toward recovery. That was simply their view and running their particular mathematics. It didn’t reflect our view or for that matter it didn’t reflect the general view from the TRT about the value of hatchery fish. It was just for these equations these are our assumptions.

Cassidy:  Just a follow-up. I’m sure other members will ask questions, but this is a rare opportunity. My understanding of the policy NOAA has been espousing is that if there are hatchery fish present in the subbasin, returning adults that is, that acts as a detriment against the number of wild fish required to achieve what you call recovery. An example would be if you had a pure natural stream with no fish planted you could say x number of thousand adults a success, but if there was a quantity of hatchery adults also present you would review as a policy your agency would require more adults to achieve the same level of quantified recovery. Is that correct or not?

Lohn:  Dr. Karier that sounds closer to the TRT’s statement than it has been to our agency’s statement. An area where we haven’t formed a public policy but we may have to in the course of this Biological Opinion, and I think the new science is helpful, is if it were proposed that over the long term you have a modest level of supplementation, let’s say 20 percent for ten years which is the likely - the term under discussion for the current Biological Opinion, if something like that were proposed could that be successful and could you consider it part of recovery?  Our basic test for recovery has been if you took your hands off would the fish survive?  And if we can see a condition for example that if we took our hands off, both positive impacts and hatchery impacts if this group of fish would survive, I think in general this isn’t intended to be a definitive legal statement, I think in general we would say that meets our standards. So it is not so much the fact that there are hatchery fish there as rather what the condition would be if we start — if we took our hands off.

Karier:  Member Dukes, do you have a question?

Joan Dukes:  Along that same line, supplementation hatcheries were initially intended for short periods of time and clearly they have been going on and on and on particularly in some areas and new ones are starting up in many other areas. What criteria are you using as you look at a hatchery, a supplementation hatchery that has been performing for say 10 years, and whether or not to continue it. Is it the percentage?  What criteria — it just seems to me that supplementation hatcheries are the new cure-all, and they were never intended to be a long-term solution.

Lohn:  I think that’s an emerging area and I won’t give you a definitive answer on that, Member Dukes. But I’ll give you some general background. The leading scientific work on the use of hatcheries together with natural populations came out of the hatchery scientific review group. It had strong bi-partisan support in Congress. Senator Gorton promoted it as did Congressman Norm Dicks and it dealt with the hatcheries in Puget Sound. Out of that a lot of the modeling and guidelines that we use for hatcheries for best practices have emerged. And their final report is relatively new. There are some guidelines in that report for example on how you manage your populations, how you intermix fish, the extent of genetic input and genetic drift that’s tolerable, but it is set up as a risk scale because honest science in this area isn’t able to say you can’t do something. It does say as you move more in this direction there’s increasing levels of risk. You as managers need to be thinking about how much risk you are prepared to accept here.

What those hatcheries — I would say that the science on the degree of hatchery input is still very much out. That is, the studies are just beginning and it probably will be a decade or two before we firmly come to grips, but in general what I would say is when a hatchery is in a particular area our first question will be area you following sort of good hatchery hygiene. That is, are your mating practices spawning and so forth, your hatchery disease controls, your rearing practices up to common standards?  That’s going to be for any hatchery. Next question will be what’s the interaction — which brood stock are you using and what’s the interaction of these fish with other fish in that area?  And incidentally we begin to look beyond that to the harvest effects and so on. But the first question is how will these fish interact. If they are located in a place where they’re really not — a terminal fishery for example — they are really not interacting with other fish, then our concerns are very different. If they are however, and the interaction can certainly be straying, not just location to hatchery, then we will want to see what we would call an integrated hatchery, that is one that is using local brood stock so even it may not be deliberate supplementation, so if those brood stocks stray they are similar enough to the fish in that area that they won’t be breeding in adaptations that are going to cause a loss of fitness.

The larger and tougher question is suppose you are deliberately adding a percentage of those fish to the wild populations with hopes of rebuilding it or with hopes of maintaining a higher harvest rate than you otherwise could. We know from the Snake River Fall Chinook that short-term supplementation, and this has been now over probably six or eight years we’ve been aggressively supplementing those, seems to work. That is we’ve rebuilt the run and they are spawning well naturally; we’re getting a relatively good level of returns from natural spawners, and I’m very confident we wouldn’t be there without aggressive use of supplementation. Beyond that the honest answer is we don’t know. The concern is that if you have too high — the hatchery fish as you bring them in carry a particular set of adaptations. They reflect whatever was in the wild population at that time. But if a majority of your fish in the next generation are from the hatchery and you keep on continuing, you will be not selecting for whatever subtle adaptations are occurring in the wild. Instead you’ll be sort of overrunning them with the characteristics of the fish you first brought into the hatchery. That is sort of a genetic — I don’t know if you’d call it a genetic drift properly — but that’s a separation in genetics where you’re not tracking the future adaptations. The problem is while we can run mathematics about what that means, no one knows how serious a problem that is over a given period of time. The science just doesn’t say. As we approach it then our first choice would be to work with the managers in the area and say okay, you know all the needs you are trying to meet. You also now need to understand the risks of meeting them this way. Let’s talk about the term and the risks and what we can do to manage those risks. So I don’t think it will be a universal decision. It is going to be very site-specific.

Dukes:  Well you have a very heavy responsibility for ESA. What are you doing about the species, I’m going to be on the edge, they’re not listed yet. The one that comes to mind that I’m more concerned about recently is lamprey, which I think could make the salmon look as though it wasn’t a big deal should they be listed. Do you have time?  I personally think NOAA Fisheries is understaffed and underfunded and I don’t say that about many federal agencies.

Lohn:  I certainly could agree with you. And we can talk about finances in a moment. Technically lamprey would for various reasons probably fall under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. There is a memorandum of agreement that kind of divides up the world of fish. But certainly we are very concerned about them. It is an important tribal issue. It is probably an important ecosystem issue, too. One of the things I keep my eye on in future fish passage efforts is does the fish passage means provide some accommodation for lamprey?  Something I’m particularly interested in is the weirs that the Corps is installing at the projects, the so-called fish slides, I don’t think they have been monitored for lamprey but they seem to be the kind of thing that the migratory stage of lamprey are likely to pass through most easily. I think if you are to protect lamprey properly there is more work to be done on their upriver passage. If you watch them at the dams they swim a little bit and then they fasten their sucker to some gripping place and in the past there have been efforts to remove the number of gripping places so you’ll get lamprey and clear them out of the fish window. I think we need to move away from that; I think people are now more conscious of that.

Karier:  Member Danielson.

Danielson:  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I’ll keep it short and it is mostly a comment. But it has more to do with mortality issues. I’ve seen some work lately that between stream harvest, alternative life histories and stuff, between dams and in some cases that is counted as dam mortality, as those numbers add up without even using credit or [audio unintelligible], they seem to add up to some pretty high numbers that we had not really acknowledged as much as we probably should have in the past.

Lohn:  One of the advantages of having a sustained set of data, particularly with PIT tags, is it allows us to see where fish are disappearing. I think for some migrants, especially for spring migrants that are basically they are fish that are fairly mature and eager to get down the river, those losses for juveniles give us a pretty accurate picture of what’s happening in the reservoirs. We need to pay attention to it; we need to look at where those mortalities are occurring. For summer migrants those figures are interesting but maybe misleading. For adults, they are also of value and should cause us to ask what’s happening. As we look beneath the numbers the story for each group of fish is a little different. Sometimes we can only speculate but other times we have a pretty good indication. For spring juveniles as I indicated, most of the loss will either be due to passage  losses which is I think a minority but it is still serious, or to predation. The kind of comparisons you want to do is not to a zero predation rate, but to the predation rates we’re finding in un-dammed, relatively healthy rivers. I know that some of the Canadian rivers have been somewhat studied and what is interesting is that some of our fish mortality rates are not that far away from some of the natural rivers. So it may be that given the structure of a river and the fact that there are predators, it may be that there is a level of losses that is unavoidable. For Fall Chinook, particularly out of the Snake River, the large surprise and this is one of the advantages of having the data, we saw what I could call a high disappearance rate which was credited as mortality, that is fish would show up at Lower Granite and wouldn’t show up elsewhere and we assumed that they were disappearing. Then came the fact that we started getting adults back that didn’t seem to have passed through any lower dams other than the first, but they were returning, and in fact as we look closer, they were really very productive. What we found was that some of those marked adults were holding over. They weren’t buying but they were choosing to stay through the season and come out the next year. Ironically they were coming out or are coming out at the time when the dams are least friendly. Most of the fish passage devices aren’t working in the first part of the year, that is not turned on, in January and February when the earliest migrants go and it looks like some of those fish are coming out then. And they are per fish some of the most productive fish other than the Snake River Fall Chinook. So you need to look beyond the numbers. Steelhead a similar phenomenon where they are very temperature sensitive and what you can see if you monitor the numbers is as temperature goes up, you’ll see steelhead smolts essentially pull off, they may or may not migrate out the next year, they tend not to, and you may end up with a trophy trout fishery in that area. That’s different some saying they died because of the dams. But we need to know how we can move them down at a time when the temperature is more receptive and so they’d move out. All tough questions.

Danielson:  I appreciate that, Bob. I’m glad to see new data coming in. The other is the fact that when current civilization showed up to the Columbia Basin we did create somewhat of a domesticated run so to speak, and if we look at the graphs, the runs that we have now are created by in many cases releases. Is that something that you and your folks have talked about maybe with those run releases in the future when there is a little bit more friendly habitat and water conditions?

Lohn:  Certainly have. Two-thirds of all the fish in the Columbia River Basin originate in hatcheries. So the choices we make in hatcheries really determine both when the harvests take place and what the majority of the fish are going to be. One of the questions that I think is well worth discussing with states and tribes and in other forums is are we rearing the right fish?  For example, the Columbia used to have a very strong summer run of fish. They were the June hogs, large fish. They were the first that the fishing industry went after because they were more fish for less effort. Fishermen are pragmatists, they go after where the opportunities are. That run is largely extirpated. I’m not saying it’s lost forever, there are some bits and pieces of Summer Chinook runs left, but I think there are real opportunities to deliberately choose to sort of rebuild that part of the curve of returning fish. So it is exciting to look at those.

Karier:  I have a couple of questions. In the earlier discussion about supplementation, there have been some ideas that NOAA might put a cap on how many years or how many generations it would be reasonable to count supplementation as a benefit to recovery, and it sounds to me like NOAA is not headed in that direction of a specific cap, or is it?

Lohn:  Dr. Karier, in applying science we try to do two things. First of all, and these are my expectations of the science center and I very much value their input. But what I request of them is not only what the science is but to tell me what its limitations are — what’s known and along with it what’s not known, and to the extent that there are uncertainties to identifying the risks. Today we are at a stage in which the science is incomplete, won’t be complete for a number of years and the best I can expect from them is the limited information we have, including a literature search of all other studies which is valuable, and a candid discussion of the uncertainties. We’ve had parts of that discussion, certainly developing the hatchery listing policy and we’ll have more as we do this Biological Opinion. Right now there is not a set formula. I don’t think it is likely that we’ll have a one size fits all formula. I think our intent here is as the discussions about the Biological Opinion and proposed actions move ahead, is to really look at them by case — look at the specifics and look at what’s achieved there and what the unique risks are there. I’m not say that we would say every degree of supplementation is okay, even for the term of the Biological Opinion, but we’ve seen enough benefit for supplementation in terms of rebuilding runs that we’re certainly willing to consider it, and we won’t have a flat rule that in any way precludes it.

Karier:  Final question is just in coordination of the Council’s work with NOAA in the future. As you know, the Council recently made recommendations in funding for 07-09 and in that process we wanted to coordinate with the new Biological Opinion that will be coming out later, and the Council’s recommendations included a budget reserve that would have some money available for a number of purposes including future ESA projects that would come out of that schedule. So I was wondering what your current schedule is that would develop those kinds of projects for actions so that we can coordinate it with the Council and with your current schedule do you have confidence that you’ll be able to meet that?

Lohn:  Let’s talk for a moment about the future Biological Opinion and where discussions are because that obviously drives the answer. On that front, as you know there is a court order of confidentiality so I have to be very general in what I say and I don’t in any way want to violate it although all of you have access to individuals who are closer to this and can discuss this in greater detail than I can this morning. I think that the opportunity for the region at this time is to decide whether the problem we are solving in the course of these discussions is simply the recovery of listed stocks or whether it is the long-term management and recovery of salmon in the Columbia River Basin. Sometimes the Biological Opinion I believe or portions of it have been advocated for not so much because of a deep love or high value placed on one of the listed stocks as it is because protecting that stock would incidentally provide values to stocks that were much more of interest to the region. I’m not accusing anyone of bad faith; it is still legitimate to protect the listed stock, but I think the right discussion for the region to have if it is willing is what is it that we are trying to do for salmon recovery over the next decade or two or decade or so — whatever the term is that people want to discuss, and how do we fit in the recovery of listed stocks as part of that. But have the large discussion rather than the small discussion. I know when I talk to my colleagues on the tribes that certainly is a part of tribal interests. Their trust and treaty rights depend not just on the existence of the species but on the opportunity to harvest them in certain places that are special to that tribe. And rather than going at it in a round about way it might be better to talk about the tribal needs and fit that as part of a larger package. I think that the region’s opportunity is to try to get to agreement on such a set of measures. I have enough history with these things to say that the probabilities are not in our favor. I have enough knowledge of the current situation to say I believe everyone could be better off if we did it, and I’m impressed enough by the good faith of those involved to say that I think this time there’s a real chance.

So, there are really discussions on two fronts. One the larger salmon agreement. This would obviously have major implications for the Council because you are by far and away the organizations that selects, screens, encourages, provides funding for this larger set of projects as well as projects under the Biological Opinion. My own estimate and this isn’t because there is some magic timetable, is that there is a window of a couple of months in which it will become clear whether we are as a region able to do this or not. If we are not, the law is still the law and we will move ahead with the Biological Opinion and the federal agencies will prepare a proposed action. It likely will be a narrow action, that is as it is in biological opinions, we would focus on listed stocks, not unlisted stocks, and we would write our response to that.

I want to emphasize that in doing biological opinions it is the action agencies that present us with something. Now that doesn’t mean there aren’t discussions along the way; they don’t come in blindly and say try this. But it ultimately is their decision as to what they propose. I have also indicated that our willingness to accept risk in this decision, in this matter, in part depends on the willingness of others to support taking that risk. I talked about risks associated with supplementation. If we’re in a biological opinion in which there is no regional agreement and we know it will be highly contentious, you can expect that on the science side the decisions we will be making are very conservative on risk. Don’t do this because someone could challenge it. If it is more broadly supported and people are willing to spend not just as governmental entities or interested parties, but as people who have a legal involvement in the management of fisheries and knowledge there saying yes, there is some risk, but we support taking it for these reasons, I think we’re more willing to accept the risk. In terms of what this means for the Council, I think there is a great opportunity for the Council to maintain and increase its role in this area. But it is an opportunity that depends on two things: one, on Bonneville’s willingness to use the Council for this purpose and I don’t speak of any Bonneville dissatisfaction there, I haven’t had that conversation with my colleagues at Bonneville; and two about the Council’s willingness to step up and face these hard issues. I have great praise and appreciation for you guys and the processes you are involved in because allocating money where the needs are always greater than the available funds — and that’s the nature of this business — is a really tough business. You have to strike equity among species, equity among tribes and states, equity among you as members. Each of you may have different interests. Those are tough things. I am very pleased with the process by which you do it — that is there is a good technical underpinning, there is a good science underpinning. I would see this as an excellent basis for reviewing all of the programs that are going to be funded under this biological opinion. I’m not the one who says the money goes this route, I want to make that clear. But I see that you add value. I’m obviously in your camp on that; I’m supportive of it.

In terms of budgeting however, I have to provide a little bit of caveat. Biological opinion is about biology, not funding. I often — we do formal and informal 900 to 1,000 biological opinions a year so I have some sense of what a normal biological opinion looks like. By the way the Columbia River Biological Opinion is not the center of that scale. In the normal biological opinion we are often approached by someone who says there is a lot of uncertainty here, couldn’t we just agree that if I spent this money it would solve the problem?  And our answer consistently has to be no. This is not about financial limits, this is about biological performance. Now if we can get to agreement on what the expected biological results are, we’re okay. Or we can have a provision that says we expect these results but if we don’t get them, we’ll have to reopen this and look at what else needs to be done. But we’re never able to say here’s a slice of financing however generous and that meets the needs, because there is no clear match between money and biological performance. I wish there were. So coming into the Council program I very much appreciate your reserving some financial space for it, but ultimately whatever is agreed to in terms of programs and actions will be things that have to be carried out. It is our desire to see them carried out as reasonably and cost-effectively as possible, but we’re not able to say to you or to hear back from the action agencies gee, we allowed $10 million for this, it looks like the costs this year are going to be $15 million, I guess we won’t get the work done. That simply isn’t an answer that ESA allows us to accept. Please don’t take this as our desire to want to be the bull in the china closet and not cooperate with others. There is just no legal possibility of accepting that kind of outcome.

Cassidy:  It will be a quick question, I’m not sure it will be a quick answer. I’ve been listening very carefully to your last few words and particularly the part about a narrow biological opinion coming forth consistent with the present narrow biological opinion. I’m asking you is this the we don’t have a responsibility for recovery, we just have a responsibility for avoiding jeopardy issue that the government espoused sometime back?  You spoke repeatedly today about recovery. My understanding and not necessarily from you particularly, but from the government’s policy from Washington, D.C. on is that the only real responsibility that the federal government assumes is one of avoiding jeopardy which means don’t let the fish fall off the ladder, it doesn’t mean they assume responsibility for recovery. Could you comment on that?

Lohn:  Yes. As to the FCRPS Biological Opinion, the answer is when I say narrow I just meant the scope of the species covered, not the legal standard. We have heard very clearly the legal standard adopted by Judge Redden. We’ve indicated very clearly that we will follow it. In our last filing with the court there was a document filed which was basically our discussion of how we intend to apply recovery in this biological opinion. You may want to get a hold of that. The plaintiff filed a few excerpts from another document and our attorney said well, if you’re going to file that you probably ought to be looking at the larger picture and it was filed with the court I guess earlier this month, whenever it came out. But I do want to talk just a moment about what’s involved in these legal standards. I preface this by saying Judge Redden has been very clear about what’s involved. The decision on the upper Snake Bureau of Reclamation projects highlighted and sort of gave further meaning to what he was aiming at, and I think you’ll see in our statement exactly where we stand and it’s one that includes recovery. So there shouldn’t be any ambiguity on that. But the narrowness means and this is what I don’t think is best practices, but ESA focuses on these things to the powerful exclusion of others.

There is an anecdote I want to tell and it sort of brought it home for me. I was touring in Japan visiting a couple of our children who live in Asia and Japan happened to be the place where we meet. While in Kyoto we took a tour with a remarkable and somewhat famous older Japanese gentleman who was very candid on his walking tour about things Japanese. He wants you to understand the people and culture. So as we were entering the largest Buddhist temple in Japan and one of the very few that is open to foreigners, he wanted us to understand what the heart of Buddhism was as he practiced it. And he summarized it this way. He said in the seventh century there was a Buddhist priest - Buddhism originated in India, came to China, then came to Japan - a Buddhist priest who had a revelation. The revelation was that all people are going to paradise and that the job of Buddha is to get them there. He said you need to understand then what that means. He said Buddha doesn’t care — and we were asking do you pray to Buddha about this or that — and he said Buddha doesn’t care whether you are rich or poor, Buddha doesn’t care whether you are sick or healthy, Buddha doesn’t care whether you are good or bad, Buddha doesn’t even care if you believe in Buddha. Buddha only cares if you’re alive or dead and if you’re alive, Buddha doesn’t care. That focus to me seemed to bring home the heart of the ESA. If you’re listed, the whole world rests on your shoulders and if you’re not, Buddha doesn’t care. And that’s kind of what we mean about the narrow opinion. If we do that, we end up focusing on ESA species to the exclusion of others and I don’t think that’s the best way to manage.

Karier:  Okay, I think you made that point pretty clear about whether NOAA cares. We’d like to be able to invite you back to discuss further items. Thank you very much.