Making Fish
The 100-year History of Hatcheries in the Columbia River Basin
— John Harrison, April 2021 —
Fish farming has a long history in the Columbia River Basin.
Since the late 1800s, fish hatcheries, essentially fish farms, have raised and released fish, particularly salmon, into the Columbia River, primarily for the benefit of commercial fisheries. Hatchery fish boosted the number of salmon in the river and ocean to support the commercial fishery and the enormous canning industry on the lower Columbia, and also provided fish for recreational fisheries.
Most of the Columbia River salmon hatcheries, like most of the commercial fishing, operated downstream of Bonneville Dam. Over time, human activities like logging, agriculture, mining, unregulated commercial fishing, hydropower dams, and urban development took a toll on salmon and steelhead and their spawning habitat. The number of wild fish returning annually to spawning grounds upstream from Bonneville Dam decreased, and the numbers of fish returning to lower-river hatcheries increased.
Hydropower dams that were built without fish-passage facilities block about 30 percent of the river miles once accessible to salmon, steelhead, and other species that are born in freshwater, mature in the ocean, and then return to freshwater to reproduce (spawn). Other types of development in the basin blocked passage to about 17 percent of the once-available spawning and rearing habitat, meaning that nearly half of the historic habitat in the basin has been blocked over time.
In recent decades, particularly since Congress passed the Northwest Power Act in 1980, which authorized the four Northwest states to form the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, new hatcheries have been built upstream of Bonneville. Today, 14 of these are funded by the Bonneville Power Administration through the Council’s Columbia River Basin Fish and Wildlife Program and are managed or co-managed by Indian tribes as partial compensation for the impacts to fish and wildlife from the construction and operation of hydropower dams. Some are operated to provide fish for harvest, some provide fish to supplement and rebuild naturally spawning runs, and one, for Snake River sockeye, is operated to prevent the species from extinction while also rebuilding naturally spawning runs.
The Early paradigm:
Follow the science, raise fish like livestock
Such nuanced operating criteria were not part of the original rationale for hatcheries. In fact, the earliest hatchery practices in the basin were simple by modern standards. Animal husbandry techniques, which successfully produced herds of farm animals, were the basis for the earliest fish farms. If feedlots and open rangeland could produce cows, hatcheries could produce salmon, or so the basic thinking went. However, salmon are not cows, the ocean is not the open range, hatcheries can’t be operated like feedlots, and the unique life history of salmon was not appreciated at the time.
In 1875, Spencer Baird, the United States Fish Commissioner, advised the commercial fishing industry that artificial propagation of salmon would be so successful it would eliminate the need to regulate harvest. Regulation was a controversial issue at the time, as the salmon runs were being fished heavily for economic gain but without effective regulation, and some scientists already were concerned that overfishing might prove catastrophic to the runs.
Baird was optimistic about the future of salmon farming because he saw it as a remedy for problems that already were beginning to affect the fish – excessive commercial fishing, the impact of dams, and the destruction of spawning habitat by human activities including agriculture, logging, and mining. He believed sufficient numbers of fish could be produced in hatcheries to satisfy the demand of commercial fishers, as hatcheries could be located on tributaries of the Columbia where the fish would not have to pass dams on their way to the ocean as juveniles or back from the ocean as adults. He was unconcerned about habitat destruction because so many fish would be spawned artificially at the hatcheries that the sheer number of fish would be sufficient for the commercial fishery, even if most of them came from hatcheries in the lower river. In other words, hatcheries protected the commercial fishery and cannery industries, and not the historic genetic diversity of the fish, which spawned in the main river and tributaries as far as the Canadian headwaters 1,200 miles from the ocean.
Canneries were a major industry on the Columbia River. At the industry’s peak in the 1880s, there were 39 of them on the river. Ironically, it was the decline of the wild runs of salmon, as the result of unregulated harvest, overfishing, and the booming canning industry that supplied fish to markets literally around the world, that prompted construction of the first Columbia River hatchery, in 1877. And perhaps equally ironically, it was the cannery industry that paid for it. In that year, as the prized Columbia River Chinook salmon runs were noticeably declining, the Oregon & Washington Fish Propagation Company raised $21,000 in donations and built a salmon hatchery on the Clackamas River.
Operated by the United States Fish Commission, its ongoing funding came from the cannery operators and the states of Oregon and Washington. It opened and closed several times as its funding ebbed and flowed, and eventually was taken over completely by the Unites States Fish Commission. The success of the facility was never questioned, as it was considered successful as long as it continued pumping out fish for the politically important commercial fishing industry. But the truth was that the hatchery was not so successful. By the 1890s, salmon runs were declining again, particularly in upriver tributaries in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho.
Lack of effective regulation was considered a major cause – indiscriminate fishing was the norm. In 1890, for example, it still was legal in Washington to “fish” with dynamite. In 1898, after traveling more than 3,000 miles through the interior Columbia River Basin, Washington’s fish commissioner, A.C. Little of Tacoma, reported that salmon runs had declined dramatically in Columbia River tributaries including the Tucannon, Yakima, and Touchet rivers. He estimated that less than 5 percent of the Chinook run in the Little Spokane River was present in 1898, compared to former years. Those fish were significant because the Spokane and its tributaries historically produced some of the biggest salmon in the Columbia River Basin, the June Hogs as they would be called in later years. He estimated at least 50 million salmon fry would have to be released annually in the upper Columbia tributaries “... to keep up the supply of the May and June run of Chinook to the amount of the last four or five years.”
Little’s solution to the decline was increased hatchery production funded by a tax on commercial fishers. He noted habitat destruction, water pollution in spawning areas caused by raw sewage, and other problems for the fish and worried that something had to be done about what he called “the current destruction.”
Despite growing skepticism about the value of hatcheries, there seemed to be no other solution to the problem of declining runs than to build more hatcheries. That is, if you can’t defeat the problem, outproduce it.
“There can be no doubt in the mind of anyone who has studied the question, that the future propensity of our salmon fisheries depend largely upon artificial propagation . . . I am convinced that not more than 10 percent of the ova spawned in the open streams are hatched, owing principally to spawn-eating fish that prey on them... while from artificial propagation, 90 percent are successfully hatched. What more need be said in favor of fish culture?”
— From the Oregon State Fish and Game Protector’s annual report, 1896.
Little recommended that hatchery production be tripled, and that more hatcheries be constructed in the interior Columbia River Basin. Meanwhile, little if anything was done to confront the real problems. By 1908, more than 34 million juvenile salmon were being released from hatcheries every year, and still the number of adult fish returning from the ocean continued to decline. The following year, the state of Oregon constructed the Central Hatchery, which later was renamed Bonneville Hatchery, on Tanner Creek on the lower Columbia River just downstream from the present-day Bonneville Dam. The Central Hatchery served as a place to incubate salmon eggs brought in from other hatcheries. The resulting fry were shipped to streams all over the Northwest, not to their home streams. Some were released directly into the Columbia at the hatchery.
Sometimes eggs from as far away as Alaska were incubated at the Central Hatchery and then released into the Columbia. In this way, scientists of the time believed, fisheries science would rebuild the depleted Columbia salmon runs with fish from other rivers. But in hindsight, these so-called stock transfers created the biological equivalent of hash, a melting pot of fish genes that diluted native stocks. This was a problem, but it was not understood at the time. A fish from Alaska simply does not adapt well to environmental conditions in the Columbia, and vice versa. Transferring salmon from other river basins to the Columbia disrupted the process of natural selection and adaptation that made Columbia River salmon uniquely suited to their home streams. As a consequence, the fry from outside the Columbia that were incubated at the hatchery and then released into streams in the basin generally did not survive well.
Paradigm shift:
Hatcheries are harming, not helping, salmon
By the 1920s, a growing understanding of the complex life history of salmon – born in freshwater, mature in saltwater, and return to freshwater to spawn and die – caused biologists to question whether hatcheries actually might do more harm than good by overproducing salmon, which led to harvests based on anticipated high numbers of returning adult hatchery fish and, because the fishery comprised both hatchery and wild fish, declining numbers of wild species. At the time, hatcheries continued to release large numbers of juvenile fish, but the number of adult fish returning to spawn, while large, was not increasing. A United States Bureau of Fisheries report in 1920 noted that “the hatcheries probably inflicted as much, or more, damage to the salmon runs than they had service of value.”
In 1922, biologist Willis Rich reported there was no evidence that artificial propagation of salmon had conserved the runs. From his investigation of the commercial harvest and the production of the canneries, Rich concluded that “… the popular conception, that the maintenance of the [cannery] pack on the Columbia River is due to hatchery operations, is not justified by the available science.” Similarly, in 1923 the United States Fish Commission, which existed primarily to promote hatchery production, reported that without better knowledge of unique salmon life histories, the artificial production of salmon and efforts to conserve them by restricting and reducing harvests “may prove wasteful and ineffective while at the same time imposing futile obstacles to the development of a legitimate and essential industry.”
Increasingly, scientists could find no correlation between fish abundance and hatchery production. There was no scientific basis for the hatchery programs, and no regular or ongoing evaluation of their successes and failures. In a 1930 report, the dean of the School of Fisheries at the University of Washington, John Cobb, called hatcheries a threat to salmon fisheries and chastised the lack of critical evaluation of hatchery programs.
A ten-year government-funded study in British Columbia, which concluded in 1936, could not find a significant difference between the efficiency of natural salmon production and artificial salmon production. As a result, the government could not justify spending money on hatcheries and ordered them closed. In the United States, where there was strong ideological and political support for hatcheries, the results of the Canadian study were ignored.
By this time, the decline of salmon and steelhead runs was obvious, and it was becoming increasingly clear that simply building more hatcheries was not going to stop the decline. In 1938, Congress passed the Mitchell Act, which was intended to mitigate the impacts to fish from water diversions, dams on the mainstem of the Columbia River, pollution and logging. In terms of fish conservation, it was two steps forward and one step back, as the law envisioned mitigation happening through the construction of additional hatcheries, but also through the installation of juvenile fish diversion screens at irrigation water withdrawals. At least the law recognized that human activities were damaging the streams where salmon spawned.
The Mitchell Act included an initial appropriation of $500,000 for surveys and improvements in the Columbia River watershed for the benefit of salmon and steelhead and other anadromous fish. Between 1905 and 1931, the federal government had received more than $500,000 in payments from commercial fishers for leasing seining grounds adjacent to Sand Island and Peacock Spit in the Columbia River estuary. Through the authorization, Congress intended to invest money received by the government for the use of fishing grounds in efforts to rebuild and conserve the fish runs. The Act recognized that salmon and steelhead populations were in a serious decline, and that the decline was caused by impacts on spawning and rearing habitat from deforestation, pollution, hydroelectric dams, and diversion of water for irrigation.
Today, there are 20 Mitchell Act facilities that operate 60 programs and release about 42 million fish annually. All are located in the lower Columbia River downstream from Hood River, Oregon.
By the 1940s, it was clear that artificial production of fish needed a better basis in fish science. The primary purposes of hatcheries continued to be the production of fish to compensate for habitat destruction and lost natural production, and also to produce large numbers of fish for commercial harvest. Scientific research accelerated as fish managers sought a better understanding of the complex salmon life cycle. Nutritional improvements boosted salmon production, as did improved understanding of the optimal times to release fish from hatcheries.
But not until the latter decades of the 20th century did fish biologists begin to understand the impacts that hatchery fish can have on fish that spawn in the wild. For decades, fish managers in their optimism assumed that hatcheries could compensate for lost spawning and rearing habitat by simply outproducing nature. It was becoming clear that hatcheries could not do that, and, moreover, were contributing to the decline of wild fish by introducing fish into streams that looked the same as their wild counterparts but behaved much differently.
Scientists began to understand that the hatchery environment acclimates fish to artificial conditions, and that juvenile fish released from hatcheries carry this learning into the natural environment. In the hatcheries, fish were raised by the hundreds of thousands in open concrete tanks called raceways and were fed pellets at regular intervals. The fish learned to eat the pellets as they fell through the water. They learned to dash for food when it appeared, and they had no awareness or fear of predators. Released into streams, they behaved the same way. Fish spawned in the natural environment, on the other hand, learned to conserve energy, avoid predators, eat when food is available, and disperse to places in the aquatic environment where food, shelter and appropriate water temperatures are available. In the stream environment, hatchery-bred fish out-competed naturally spawned fish for food and were easy targets for predators.
In 2021, the Council launched a new page on its website with information about salmon and steelhead hatcheries displayed in a storymap style. The storymap includes information about salmon and steelhead hatcheries funded by the Bonneville Power Administration through the Council’s Columbia River Basin Fish and Wildlife Program, and also salmon and steelhead production facilities operated in the basin by states, tribes, public utility districts, and federal agencies.
The goal of the hatcheries storymap is to communicate the purpose of hatcheries by providing information in a way that can be understood by the general public but also is useful to hatchery managers to understand the goals and production of other facilities in the basin.
Over time, salmon and steelhead hatcheries in the Columbia River Basin have been reviewed extensively. These have included:
1990-1992 Regional Assessment of Supplementation Project: The assessment was initiated to provide an overview of ongoing and planned hatchery programs, to construct a conceptual framework and model for evaluating the potential benefits and risks of these programs, and to develop a plan for better regional coordination of research, monitoring and evaluation of hatchery programs. To implement these efforts, a work group was formed to coordinate, review, and prioritize ongoing and planned supplementation studies in the basin.
1992-1995 Integrated Hatchery Operations Team (IHOT): In developing its 1992 Strategy for Salmon, the Council recognized that hatcheries could be used to help rebuild wild and naturally spawning stocks; however, hatchery practices would need to enable hatchery fish to survive in the natural environment without adversely impacting naturally spawning fish. To meet this need, the Council formed IHOT. This multi-agency group was given several duties related to hatchery operations including the development of regionally integrated policies for hatchery operations that aligned with the region's goal of rebuilding wild and naturally spawning fish runs.
1997-1999 Artificial Production Review (APR): Directed by Congress, the Council facilitated the review of hatchery programs in the basin. The Council completed the first phase of the mandated review by producing the Artificial Production Review, a report that outlined recommendations to reform hatchery practices.
2001 Performance Standards and Indicators (PSI): The PSI effort extended the Council's Artificial Production Programs and Policies for Hatcheries in the Columbia River Basin into the next level of detail by incorporating the Science Review Team's guidelines, the Integrated Hatchery Operations Team's performance standards and indicators, and the Pacific Northwest Fish Health Protection Committee's guidelines. It was recognized that if the basin's hatchery programs were going to undergo a comprehensive review, a consistent set of PSI's would need to be uniformly applied to quantify the benefits and risks of using the programs as management tools within the purposes outlined in the APR.
2002-2005 Artificial Production Review and Evaluation (APRE) and Hatchery and Genetics Management Plan (HGMP): Through a series of basinwide workshops with harvest and hatchery managers, as well as interviews with hatchery operators, the APRE was completed for the basin's hatcheries and their associated programs. Data and information collected from the review aided in the completion of NOAA Fisheries' Hatchery Genetic Management Plans, which were used by NOAA and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to assess the effects of hatchery programs on listed anadromous species.
2003-2005 Independent Scientific Advisory Board Review of Salmon and Steelhead Supplementation: In 2003, the ISAB released the results of its evaluation of the basin's supplementation projects and the benefits and risks of supplementation to natural salmon and steelhead populations. A 2005 report on monitoring and evaluation of supplementation projects led to the formation of the Ad Hoc Supplementation Work Group to develop studies to resolve key scientific questions about the benefits and risks of supplementation.
2006-2007 Ad Hoc Supplementation Monitoring and Evaluation Workshops: Two workshops were convened resulting in recommendations that a basinwide evaluation of hatchery effects should include basic monitoring of annual population abundance and productivity in supplemented and non-supplemented streams and intensive monitoring to estimate return rates of hatchery- and natural-origin salmon/steelhead in a subset of supplemented streams. The fisheries biologists concluded that assessments, using similar techniques, would require multi-year efforts representing data sets from multiple populations.
2005-2015 Hatchery Scientific Review Group (HSRG): In 2005, Congress directed NOAA Fisheries to review the basin's hatchery programs through the Hatchery Reform Project. The HSRG, which was formed through the project, reviewed 178 hatchery programs associated with 351 salmon and steelhead populations, concluding that hatcheries play an important role in the management of salmon and steelhead populations in the basin and that hatchery reform alone will not achieve recovery of natural populations. The HSRG suggested that complementary actions taken by harvest, habitat, and hydropower managers (i.e., an All-H approach) are all necessary if long-term conservation goals are to be achieved. Because hatchery fish cannot replace lost habitat or the natural populations that rely on that habitat, programs must be viewed not as surrogates or replacements for lost habitat, but as tools that can be managed as part of a coordinated strategy to meet watershed or regional resource goals, in concert with actions affecting habitat, harvest rates, water allocation and other important components of the human environment.
Paradigm shift:
Hatchery management is ecosystem management
Clearly it was time for a management change. Through the 1980s and into the 1990s fisheries management began to undergo a transition from a fish-production focus to an ecosystem-management focus, in which fish and wildlife are managed as part of the environment that supports them. This approach “places artificial production in the basin in a very different role than that employed in the past,” a panel of independent scientists, the Scientific Review Team of the Independent Scientific Advisory Board, reported in a review commissioned by the Northwest Power and Conservation Council. The Council’s Columbia River Basin Fish and Wildlife Program directs funding to hatcheries operated by Indian tribes that are experimenting with fish production techniques – upriver from Bonneville Dam. At the time, Endangered Species Act listings of salmon and steelhead, as well as resident fish, increased the management emphasis on wild and naturally spawning stocks. The scientists noted this would increase concern about the potential for hatchery-bred fish to spawn with wild fish and cause genetic and ecological damage. However, the shift in management emphasis also could create a new and positive role for hatcheries to assist in species recovery, they suggested.
The scientists were not encouraged by the past inability of hatchery programs to respond to changing realities and changing scientific knowledge, but they were hopeful that hatchery management would change to allow experiments that might help solve past problems that contributed to the salmon decline. These problems included inbreeding, domestication, overemphasis on a few types of fish, and producing more fish than the receiving streams and rivers could support. The primary experimental fish production technique is called supplementation. This is the practice of raising fish in the artificial environment, which sometimes is made more natural by shading the water and placing woody debris, rocks and sand in the raceways where the fish rear, and then releasing the fish into streams – not from hatcheries. The theory is that the fish will return to spawn in the streams, not the hatchery, and thus rebuild naturally spawning runs. Importantly, fish raised in supplementation facilities come from local stocks – not transfers from Alaska or other parts of the Columbia River Basin. This increases the probability that the fish will adapt to the new environment.
Supplementation facilities have had successes in terms of adult fish returning to streams to spawn naturally, but the technique remains controversial among some scientists. For example, it remains unclear whether genetic interactions between hatchery fish and wild fish could dilute the gene pool of the remaining wild fish. As well, artificially increasing a declining population of fish through supplementation is not a viable practice in the long run, a point noted by the Council’s Independent Scientific Review Panel (ISRP), among others. In a 2018 report on the monitoring and evaluation plan for the Umatilla Tribe’s new hatchery for spring Chinook on the South Fork Walla Walla River, the ISRP commented: “A hatchery can be used to artificially maintain the abundance of natural spawners above the habitat’s capacity, but it is important to recognize that this abundance is not naturally sustainable.”
Despite that well-understood caution, a gradual shift in hatchery management has been underway in the Columbia River Basin since the 1980s. Hatchery management changed from the old-school focus on mass production in the lower parts of the basin primarily for the benefit of commercial fisheries in the river and the ocean to supplementation, conservation and recovery of threatened and endangered species, and increased production for harvest in the upper parts of the basin.
To better understand the necessary changes in hatchery practice, in 2007 Congress authorized an independent review of hatcheries in the Columbia River Basin, and in 2009 the Hatchery Scientific Review Group (HSRG) issued a report with recommendations that had as its foundation the concept that salmon conservation goals need to be met for key naturally spawning populations while at the same time maximizing salmon harvest. In order for hatchery actions to effectively address conservation goals, harvest reforms are also necessary, according to the HSRG, which previously studied hatcheries and recommended reforms for facilities in Puget Sound. The HSRG analyzed every state, federal, and tribal salmon and steelhead hatchery program in the Columbia River watershed, covering 178 hatchery programs and 351 salmon and steelhead populations. The resulting report, issued in 2009, included scientific principles of reform, hatchery-specific recommendations, new analytical tools, and procedures that provide a foundation for managing hatcheries more effectively into the future.
Throughout the Columbia River Basin, harvest is a primary goal of most hatchery programs, but conservation of unique genetic material is becoming increasingly important. In order for hatcheries to operate effectively for either purpose, interactions with naturally spawning fish populations need to be addressed. The HSRG identified two strategies for limiting the adverse effects of hatchery fish on natural populations: 1) sufficiently isolate hatchery fish from wild fish; and 2) assure that the hatchery fish are as similar to wild fish as possible. To this end, hatchery programs should be managed as either genetically integrated with, or segregated from, the natural populations they most directly affect, according to the HSRG. The intent in either case should be to not allow hatchery fish on the spawning grounds with wild fish, as the hatchery-origin fish pose a risk of genetic dilution to natural fish.
“My take is, the general population – those that don’t live and breathe it – is not aware of the reform that has taken place... over the last 20-25 years.”
— Guy Norman, Council Member
Consistent with this recommendation, there are two types of hatcheries in the Columbia Basin: integrated and segregated. In segregated programs, hatchery fish are marked in a way that distinguishes them from wild fish, such as by clipping the adipose fin, and then releasing them away from wild fish to avoid inbreeding. This allows hatchery fish to be distinguished from unmarked wild fish so that the two life histories can be effectively managed and distinguished in fisheries – anglers can release wild fish and keep hatchery fish. In integrated hatchery programs, wild fish are captured and spawned in the hatchery and then their offspring are released into their native streams to grow with wild fish in an effort to rebuild wild-spawning stocks. It’s a risk, but integrated programs exist because the naturally spawning, wild stock is at low numbers and might disappear without such extraordinary efforts to intervene.
HSRG recommendations have been adopted, or are being considered, by hatchery managers throughout the Columbia River Basin, including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the states. Guy Norman, a Washington member of the Council and, before that, Southwest Washington regional director of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, told the Clearing Up newsletter in March 2021 that ever since Columbia River Basin salmon and steelhead stocks were listed under the Endangered Species Act, hatcheries have been focusing on ESA compliance. He said he was struck with the realization that the focus of hatchery programs recently has shifted to also assuring that hatchery programs meet their ESA requirements.
“My take is, the general population—those that don’t live and breathe it—is not aware of the reform that has taken place,” Norman told Clearing Up. “There have been a lot of changes over the last 20 to 25 years. We’ve been on the path of evaluating hatcheries and trying to determine what the needs are to meet conservation, and to meet mitigation,” he said.
Today, most of the hatchery production occurs at facilities upriver from Bonneville. In a March 2021 report to the Council, Maureen Hess, a biologist with the Council’s Fish and Wildlife Division, said about 70 percent of the roughly 140 million juvenile fish released each year into the Columbia are released from those upriver hatcheries.
Approximately 12 percent of the upriver hatchery release programs are funded by the Bonneville Power Administration through the Council’s Columbia River Basin Fish and Wildlife Program, which mitigates the impact of hydropower dams. However, those aren’t the only hatchery programs, and Bonneville isn’t the only funder. In all, there are 155 juvenile-fish release programs for salmon and steelhead co-managed by tribal, state, and federal partners and funded by several private or public utilities and federal agencies. Approximately 78 percent of the production upriver from Bonneville Dam is funded by federal agencies – the Bonneville Power Administration, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Reclamation. The remainder is funded by public and private utilities that operate hydropower dams, and others.
Aging hatcheries, new science, and optimism
Columbia River Basin salmon and steelhead hatcheries are aging. Most are at least 20 years old, and some of the federal facilities date to the early 20th century. In some cases, problems caused by aging equipment are resulting in reduced production. For example, Hess said the Umatilla Hatchery near Irrigon, Oregon, which began operation in 1991, had to release some juvenile Chinook and steelhead earlier than usual in 2020 because of water supply problems caused by deteriorating wells.
These problems are well known, though, and for hatcheries funded through the Council’s program, they are being addressed through the 2018 Asset Management Strategic Plan. The plan was initiated in the Council’s 2014 Fish and Wildlife Program and developed over about four years by a committee of hatchery managers plus the Council and the Bonneville Power Administration. The plan is not a static document, but an ongoing effort to identify and address long-term maintenance, rehabilitation, and replacement needs for hatcheries and associated production programs. The plan also addresses fish-diversion screens in water intakes, and land acquired for wildlife.
Aging infrastructure and needed maintenance at hatcheries funded by others than the Council also has been identified. For example, in 2020, state, federal, and tribal partners in the Lower Snake River Compensation Plan (LSRCP) identified a total of $131 million in needed repairs and upgrades at many of its 26 facilities, some of which are nearing 40 years old.
Despite growing skepticism about the value of hatcheries, there seemed to be no other solution to the problem of declining runs than to build more hatcheries. That is, if you can't defeat the problem, outproduce it.
Little recommended that hatchery production be tripled, and that more hatcheries be constructed in the interior Columbia River Basin. Meanwhile, little if anything was done to confront the real problems. By 1908, more than 34 million juvenile salmon were being released from hatcheries every year, and still the number of adult fish returning from the ocean continued to decline. The following year, the state of Oregon constructed the Central Hatchery, which later was renamed Bonneville Hatchery, on Tanner Creek on the lower Columbia River just downstream from the present-day Bonneville Dam. The Central Hatchery served as a place to incubate salmon eggs brought in from other hatcheries. The resulting fry were shipped to streams all over the Northwest, not to their home streams. Some were released directly into the Columbia at the hatchery.
— Oregon State Fish and Game Protector’s annual report, 1896
The LSRCP has an annual budget of about $31 million. The Compensation Plan hatcheries and related facilities are responsible for 60 percent of all the hatchery-raised salmon and steelhead produced in the Snake River Basin, which is 20 percent of total hatchery production in the Columbia River Basin above Bonneville Dam. The plan was approved by Congress in 1976 and is intended to compensate for the salmon and steelhead lost to construction and operation of the four federal dams on the lower Snake River, a loss estimated at 48 percent of pre-dam production.
Needed maintenance at the LSRCP facilities includes about $102 million for construction projects, $4 million for deferred maintenance, and about $25 million for highest-priority projects that are ready to proceed. However, the facility managers, which include fish and wildlife agencies (state and federal) and tribes, expressed concern that the annual budget for maintaining the facilities, about $5 million, while sufficient in the past, would not be sufficient in the future. In fact, at the rate of $5 million a year, it would take 26 years to do all the currently identified work.
Among the problems identified with aging infrastructure, some anticipated and others not, the managers cited the failure of a water pumping station at the Lyons Ferry Fish Hatchery at the confluence of the Palouse and Snake Rivers, which cost $4.5 million to repair. Also, damage to a two-mile-long water pipeline that supplies the hatchery cost $800,000 to repair; replacing it will consume about half of the identified $131 million in needed repairs and replacements. The pipeline, now 40 years old, had an anticipated life of 25-30 years. The managers also cited the need to repair major weather damage to structures at the Lookingglass Hatchery on a tributary of the Grand Ronde River in Northeastern Oregon.
While many Columbia River Basin hatcheries are showing their age and need maintenance, and while these problems seem to be mounting to a formidable challenge, there is some good news. For example, in January 2020, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation broke ground on their new spring Chinook hatchery on the South Fork Walla Walla River that has been in the planning stages for more than 30 years. The production facility is intended to restore spring Chinook salmon to a portion of their historic range for the benefit of present and future generations. Spring Chinook were extirpated from the Walla Walla River Basin in the early to mid-1900s. With the new hatchery, salmon smolt production in the Walla Walla basin is expected to double, from the current 250,000 to about a half-million annually.
The majority of the smolts will be acclimated and released into the South Fork Walla Walla, with approximately 20 percent going to the Touchet River, a Walla Walla River tributary, and some others into Mill Creek, also a tributary. The goal is to re-establish a self‐sustaining, naturally spawning population to provide harvest for treaty and non‐treaty fisheries. The hatchery is part of a larger salmon-restoration project that also includes improvements to spawning habitat and fish passage.
In 2019, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completed work on a new salmon collection and processing facility at Minto on the North Fork Santiam River, a tributary of Oregon’s Willamette River. The Corps operates a system of 13 dams in Oregon’s Willamette River Basin, built on the western slopes of the Cascade Mountains. The dams were built in the 1940s and ‘50s primarily for flood control, but some also generate electricity. Unlike most dams on the Columbia, which have passage facilities for juvenile and adult salmon and steelhead, the Willamette dams do not. Fish passage, required for certain Willamette species under the Endangered Species Act, is made all the more difficult at some of the dams because of their extreme height, particularly for juvenile fish.
The Willamette River tributaries the dams were built on, forks of the Santiam, Middle Willamette, and McKenzie rivers, once supported large populations of salmon and steelhead, but because the dams blocked access to historic habitat, and other factors including ocean conditions, predation, and harvest, the fish runs declined. Today Upper Willamette Spring Chinook salmon and Upper Willamette Winter Steelhead are listed as threatened species under the federal Endangered Species Act. Both species historically spawned in the North Fork Santiam River, one of the tributaries where fish passage and collection facilities are being rebuilt, or built for the first time, in response to requirements of the ESA to protect and rebuild the populations.
NOAA Fisheries, the federal agency responsible for protecting the listed Willamette species, issued a biological opinion in 2008 that requires a number of activities to protect the fish. These include construction of a new “safe and effective" fish-collection facility at Minto, which is about four miles downstream from Big Cliff Dam. Big Cliff is about five miles downriver from Detroit Dam, which creates the reservoir known as Detroit Lake. Both dams were completed in 1953 and are owned and operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. While flood control is the primary purpose of the dams, together they also generate about 184 average megawatts of electricity, small in comparison to dams on the Columbia. The elevation difference between the river below the dams and Detroit Lake is about 300 feet, making fish passage a formidable challenge.
NOAA did not require fish passage at the dams, but in the biological opinion did require improved collection of adult fish at Minto, long the site of a fish-collection facility, and improved survival of juvenile fish past the two dams as they migrate to the ocean. Adult fish are trapped at Minto, where they can be processed as broodstock for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Marion Forks Hatchery, or if they are wild fish, released back to the river to spawn in a designated sanctuary in the four miles between Minto and Big Cliff Dam. Some fish are loaded live into trucks and transported to spawning areas upstream above Detroit Lake, such as in the Breitenbush River.
Other dam operators have built salmon and steelhead hatcheries in the Columbia River, as well. For example, the Bureau of Reclamation built a hatchery on Icicle Creek, a tributary of the Wenatchee River, in 1939-40 to raise fish to compensate for the impacts of Grand Coulee Dam, which blocked fish passage to the upper Columbia River beginning in the late 1930s. The Leavenworth National Fish Hatchery releases about 1.2 million spring Chinook juveniles annually. The Leavenworth hatchery operates in conjunction with two other Bureau hatcheries, Entiat and Winthrop, completed in 1941 and 1942, respectively, and also built to compensate for the impacts of Grand Coulee Dam.
“Hatcheries have been responsive [to changing science and goals]. But that’s going to be a continuum. They need to continue to respond, and that’s the whole idea of operating those hatcheries with science.”
— Guy Norman, Council Member
The three mid-Columbia public utility districts in Washington, Grant, Chelan, and Douglas, also operate hatcheries and pay for spawning habitat improvements to compensate for the impacts of five Columbia River dams they own. In a presentation to the Council in February 2021, the PUDs reported that they are meeting the terms of salmon-survival agreements that require 93 percent survival for juvenile fish migrating downstream past the dams and through their reservoirs. The agreements, a requirement of the PUDs’ federal licenses to operate the dams, stipulate ‘no net impact’ from the dams and reservoirs, and incorporates hatcheries and predator management to mitigate for allowable mortalities – that is, fish losses are balanced with fish mitigation.
Artificial propagation of another anadromous species, Pacific Lamprey, is being studied and tested. The Yakama Nation is conducting experiments that may lead one day to raising the fish in hatcheries. If successful, artificial propagation could enhance ongoing efforts to restore naturally spawning populations of lamprey throughout their range, which is similar to the range of salmon and steelhead. Lamprey are a native species in the Columbia River Basin and are important to tribes for cultural, medicinal, and consumptive purposes. To date, the restoration effort has involved collecting adult lamprey at Bonneville and The Dalles dams as they return from the ocean to spawn, and transporting them to release points in streams farther inland.
Dams had an impact on resident fish, too
Salmon and steelhead are not the only fish raised in hatcheries to compensate for losses caused by hydropower. The Council’s fish and wildlife program also includes hatcheries to raise resident (non-ocean-going) fish in partial compensation for the salmon and steelhead runs that were blocked from historic habitat by dams such as Grand Coulee and Chief Joseph. This is known as resident fish substitution and is an important responsibility of the Council’s fish and wildlife program in the Northwest Power Act.
The law requires mitigation of the impacts of hydropower dams not only on salmon, steelhead and other anadromous fish, but also on native resident species such as White Sturgeon, Bull Trout, Burbot, Kokanee, and Westslope Cutthroat Trout. The Council’s fish and wildlife program recognizes the importance of all native resident fish and other freshwater species in maintaining ecosystem diversity and function, and contributing to tribes’ ceremonial and subsistence fisheries in the basin. The program relies on a diversity of strategies to address the losses, including habitat mitigation, hatcheries, harvest augmentation, and modifying hydrosystem operations.
Resident fish programs are operated by tribes and federal and state fish and wildlife agencies. The Colville and Spokane tribes, as well as Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW), operate hatchery programs that raise Rainbow Trout and Kokanee, and the Spokane Tribe and WDFW participate in a net pen program operated by volunteers that rears Rainbow Trout for release into Lake Roosevelt, the reservoir behind Grand Coulee Dam. The Ford Hatchery at Ford, Washington, built in 1941 and operated by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, is located on the eastern edge of the Spokane Indian Reservation. The hatchery raises Kokanee to enhance public recreational and tribal subsistence fisheries in Banks Lake, the irrigation reservoir for the Columbia Basin Project. The Kalispel Tribe currently uses its hatchery to rear triploid (sterile) Rainbow Trout for put-and-take fisheries on the reservation in Northeastern Washington. The Kootenai Tribe of Idaho operates two hatcheries on the Kootenai River in northern Idaho, one for White Sturgeon and the other for Burbot, which is a freshwater ling cod. White Sturgeon also are being raised by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife at the Sherman Creek Hatchery near Kettle Falls, Washington, for release into Lake Roosevelt.
The Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks raises Westslope Cutthroat Trout, a native species in the state, at its Sekokini Springs Hatchery for planting in the South Fork Flathead River drainage, an area where the state has removed non-native species and is working to restore and maintain populations of native species. The facility is funded by the Bonneville Power Administration through the Council’s fish and wildlife program as partial mitigation for the impacts of Hungry Horse Dam, a Bureau of Reclamation flood-control and hydropower dam on the South Fork Flathead River. Also as partial mitigation for Hungry Horse Dam, the Creston National Fish Hatchery in Kalispell, Montana, raises and releases Rainbow Trout and Westslope Cutthroat Trout, with Bonneville funding, for release through the Hungry Horse Dam Fishery Mitigation Program, and for other purposes.
These and other hatcheries in the Columbia River Basin always will be a work in progress. From the earliest fish-production facilities, which were based on animal production techniques adopted from livestock production, to the modern era of segregated and integrated production facilities with a dual focus on producing fish for harvest while also stressing conservation and recovery of the weakest runs, hatcheries always have been guided by the best available scientific knowledge. Of course, that science has changed dramatically over time, and so have hatchery operations.
As Council Member Norman told Clearing Up, “hatcheries have been responsive [to changing science and goals]. But that’s going to be a continuum. They need to continue to respond, and that’s the whole idea of operating those hatcheries with science.”