Post by JoeOverlock on Feb 1, 2006 8:40:10 GMT -5
www.boston.com/news/local/maine/articles/2006/01/31/effort_to_save_maine_salmon_is_losing_ground/
Effort to save Maine salmon is losing ground
By Beth Daley, Globe Staff | January 31, 2006
EAST ORLAND, MAINE -- Five years after the federal government declared Atlantic salmon endangered in Maine, the fish continue to vanish despite a rescue effort that so far has cost taxpayers at least $20 million, and scientists are fearful that they are witnessing an extinction unfold.
Restocking of Maine rivers with native salmon bred in a hatchery, the centerpiece of the recovery program, has been an exercise in frustration. Hardly any of the fish have returned to their home streams to spawn after swimming out to the ocean; today there are only about 80 returning adult salmon in the eight rivers where their population is endangered. A decade ago, there were more than twice as many salmon in those rivers.
Scientists are racing to figure out how they might still save the salmon before the fish, and continued public support for the government program, disappear.
''These rivers are in trauma mode, the IV is in," said Joseph Zydlewski, research scientist with the Maine Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Unit for the US Geological Survey.
Zydlewski and some other scientists are calling for more aggressive, though potentially risky, actions to rescue the native salmon, such as introducing different types of salmon into the rivers.
But other scientists and advocates are urging caution, saying that one wrong move could wipe out the population for good.
Maine's rivers once teemed with the leaping silvery sport fish that became so popular one was ceremoniously delivered to the US president each year. But water pollution and acid rain, dams, overfishing, habitat loss, and a host of maddening unknowns are believed to have slashed their numbers over the last century.
All Atlantic salmon in Maine are doing poorly, but scientists are particularly worried about the population in the eight rivers because their gene pool is believed to be the least diluted and their survival offers the best chance to restore Maine's historic wild salmon runs, with fish leaping upstream to return to their ancestral spawning grounds.
Last month, federal officials released a long-awaited $34 million recovery plan that broadly spells out 14 major threats to the endangered salmon population and steps required to increase their numbers, including keeping the hatchery effort going, more research on water quality, and ensuring the endangered population maintains enough genetic diversity to avoid inbreeding.
Yet some scientists and advocates say current restoration efforts go far enough.
''Now is the time to feel out ideas and experiment, before you get to the point where there is no choice," Zydlewski said. He wants to place Penobscot River salmon, which are not endangered, into the Dennys River, one of the rivers where salmon are endangered, to better understand why Penobscot salmon return from the ocean in greater numbers. Zydlewski figures a head-to-head comparison will help determine whether something is wrong with the Dennys river or with the endangered salmon breeding stock. The other seven waterways are the East Machias, Machias, Pleasant, Narraguagus, Ducktrap, and Sheepscot rivers and Cove Brook.
But if Zydlewski's experiment backfires and the two salmon populations interbreed, it may pollute the endangered salmon's gene pool, critics say. Other ideas, even seemingly benign ones such as a proposal to release older salmon from the federal hatchery upstream as opposed to downstream, where the fish appear to die, have become a source of debate because it is unclear whether the older fish will affect the survival of the younger ones.
Caution should rule supreme, say other scientists and advocates. No one knows exactly why the salmon in the rivers have disappeared, they say, so managers shouldn't do anything that has even the slightest chance of hastening the fish's demise.
''New thoughts aren't necessarily what is needed," said Dwayne Shaw, executive director of the Downeast Salmon Federation, an advocacy group that wants to see salmon restored and fishing eventually allowed. His group has not taken a position on Zydlewski's proposal, but would like to see more effort placed on programs that are known to be harming salmon, such as water quality and dam removal. ''We may be chasing a solution without fully testing many existing efforts."
Some state officials want to allow anglers to catch and release nonendangered Penobscot River salmon to garner political and public support for the endangered salmon recovery. But others say the Penobscot River salmon numbers have also crashed to around 1,000 returning adults and research is ongoing to determine if these should be listed as endangered. It makes no ecological sense, they say, to put any stress on the fragile animals. Fishing for salmon on all Maine rivers has been banned since the late 1990s.
The majestic Atlantic salmon is legendary in Maine. Unlike farmed salmon that are raised in pens off Maine's coast before heading to dinner plates, wild salmon are born in Maine rivers and after two or three years travel out into the ocean off Greenland. They return a few years later to the same river they started from, to spawn.
Over the generations, more than a dozen salmon fishing clubs were established in Maine. But by the mid-1800s, the salmon began declining and soon after, the first federal hatchery was built to stock the rivers for fishermen.
It worked for a while. The rivers were stocked with fish from Canada and other parts of Maine -- even from the West Coast -- but it proved to be a temporary salve. By the time the federal government classified the salmon as endangered, most of the eight rivers were at an all-time low for returning fish -- fewer than 10 a year in most cases.
Maine officials argued against the endangered listing, saying the salmon in the eight rivers had undergone so much stocking they were no more Maine's own than any other exotic fish raised in a tank. But federal scientists were able to prove that the population still had genes remaining from salmon native to Maine.
To buy the fish time, the Orland hatchery has been transformed into a salmon gene bank. Scientists have built separate rooms for salmon from each river because the fish tend to do best in the waterways they originally come from. Hundreds of thousands of salmon eggs taken from breeding stocks in the hatchery are placed in blue trays until they hatch. The fingerlings are then raised in tanks in their river-specific room. Most of the fish are released into the wild when they are young while others are kept at the hatchery as part of the breeding stock. Scientists release fish only into the rivers that their progenitors came from and re-collect some fish in the wild to enhance the genetics of the breeding stock back at the hatchery.
The Bush administration announced last week that on the West Coast it would phase out hatcheries used to supplement wild fish populations after complaints arose that hatchery fish were diluting the gene pool of wild salmon. But the West Coast still has a large population of salmon that are naturally reproducing. If the hatcheries closed in Maine, one federal fisheries scientist says, salmon could disappear in the eight rivers within 20 years.
Despite the grim numbers, scientists say that if they can only get the equation right to help salmon, the fish can return in glorious numbers. In the right conditions, salmon have explosive population growth.
Some conservationists see a cautionary tale in spending millions to save a single species. In the Connecticut River, salmon restoration funding was sliced in recent years after years of poor recovery efforts reduced political will to continue spending freely. To succeed, these conservationists say, fish managers should move away from just trying to protect the salmon and look at the problem of declining fish species ecosystem-wide.
''We've been single-species focused for the last 100 years and it hasn't worked," said Andrew Goode, vice president of US operations for the Atlantic Salmon Federation. He says research has shown salmon have interdependencies with other native fish in rivers. ''To save Atlantic salmon we need to save all the native species in the rivers."
Effort to save Maine salmon is losing ground
By Beth Daley, Globe Staff | January 31, 2006
EAST ORLAND, MAINE -- Five years after the federal government declared Atlantic salmon endangered in Maine, the fish continue to vanish despite a rescue effort that so far has cost taxpayers at least $20 million, and scientists are fearful that they are witnessing an extinction unfold.
Restocking of Maine rivers with native salmon bred in a hatchery, the centerpiece of the recovery program, has been an exercise in frustration. Hardly any of the fish have returned to their home streams to spawn after swimming out to the ocean; today there are only about 80 returning adult salmon in the eight rivers where their population is endangered. A decade ago, there were more than twice as many salmon in those rivers.
Scientists are racing to figure out how they might still save the salmon before the fish, and continued public support for the government program, disappear.
''These rivers are in trauma mode, the IV is in," said Joseph Zydlewski, research scientist with the Maine Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Unit for the US Geological Survey.
Zydlewski and some other scientists are calling for more aggressive, though potentially risky, actions to rescue the native salmon, such as introducing different types of salmon into the rivers.
But other scientists and advocates are urging caution, saying that one wrong move could wipe out the population for good.
Maine's rivers once teemed with the leaping silvery sport fish that became so popular one was ceremoniously delivered to the US president each year. But water pollution and acid rain, dams, overfishing, habitat loss, and a host of maddening unknowns are believed to have slashed their numbers over the last century.
All Atlantic salmon in Maine are doing poorly, but scientists are particularly worried about the population in the eight rivers because their gene pool is believed to be the least diluted and their survival offers the best chance to restore Maine's historic wild salmon runs, with fish leaping upstream to return to their ancestral spawning grounds.
Last month, federal officials released a long-awaited $34 million recovery plan that broadly spells out 14 major threats to the endangered salmon population and steps required to increase their numbers, including keeping the hatchery effort going, more research on water quality, and ensuring the endangered population maintains enough genetic diversity to avoid inbreeding.
Yet some scientists and advocates say current restoration efforts go far enough.
''Now is the time to feel out ideas and experiment, before you get to the point where there is no choice," Zydlewski said. He wants to place Penobscot River salmon, which are not endangered, into the Dennys River, one of the rivers where salmon are endangered, to better understand why Penobscot salmon return from the ocean in greater numbers. Zydlewski figures a head-to-head comparison will help determine whether something is wrong with the Dennys river or with the endangered salmon breeding stock. The other seven waterways are the East Machias, Machias, Pleasant, Narraguagus, Ducktrap, and Sheepscot rivers and Cove Brook.
But if Zydlewski's experiment backfires and the two salmon populations interbreed, it may pollute the endangered salmon's gene pool, critics say. Other ideas, even seemingly benign ones such as a proposal to release older salmon from the federal hatchery upstream as opposed to downstream, where the fish appear to die, have become a source of debate because it is unclear whether the older fish will affect the survival of the younger ones.
Caution should rule supreme, say other scientists and advocates. No one knows exactly why the salmon in the rivers have disappeared, they say, so managers shouldn't do anything that has even the slightest chance of hastening the fish's demise.
''New thoughts aren't necessarily what is needed," said Dwayne Shaw, executive director of the Downeast Salmon Federation, an advocacy group that wants to see salmon restored and fishing eventually allowed. His group has not taken a position on Zydlewski's proposal, but would like to see more effort placed on programs that are known to be harming salmon, such as water quality and dam removal. ''We may be chasing a solution without fully testing many existing efforts."
Some state officials want to allow anglers to catch and release nonendangered Penobscot River salmon to garner political and public support for the endangered salmon recovery. But others say the Penobscot River salmon numbers have also crashed to around 1,000 returning adults and research is ongoing to determine if these should be listed as endangered. It makes no ecological sense, they say, to put any stress on the fragile animals. Fishing for salmon on all Maine rivers has been banned since the late 1990s.
The majestic Atlantic salmon is legendary in Maine. Unlike farmed salmon that are raised in pens off Maine's coast before heading to dinner plates, wild salmon are born in Maine rivers and after two or three years travel out into the ocean off Greenland. They return a few years later to the same river they started from, to spawn.
Over the generations, more than a dozen salmon fishing clubs were established in Maine. But by the mid-1800s, the salmon began declining and soon after, the first federal hatchery was built to stock the rivers for fishermen.
It worked for a while. The rivers were stocked with fish from Canada and other parts of Maine -- even from the West Coast -- but it proved to be a temporary salve. By the time the federal government classified the salmon as endangered, most of the eight rivers were at an all-time low for returning fish -- fewer than 10 a year in most cases.
Maine officials argued against the endangered listing, saying the salmon in the eight rivers had undergone so much stocking they were no more Maine's own than any other exotic fish raised in a tank. But federal scientists were able to prove that the population still had genes remaining from salmon native to Maine.
To buy the fish time, the Orland hatchery has been transformed into a salmon gene bank. Scientists have built separate rooms for salmon from each river because the fish tend to do best in the waterways they originally come from. Hundreds of thousands of salmon eggs taken from breeding stocks in the hatchery are placed in blue trays until they hatch. The fingerlings are then raised in tanks in their river-specific room. Most of the fish are released into the wild when they are young while others are kept at the hatchery as part of the breeding stock. Scientists release fish only into the rivers that their progenitors came from and re-collect some fish in the wild to enhance the genetics of the breeding stock back at the hatchery.
The Bush administration announced last week that on the West Coast it would phase out hatcheries used to supplement wild fish populations after complaints arose that hatchery fish were diluting the gene pool of wild salmon. But the West Coast still has a large population of salmon that are naturally reproducing. If the hatcheries closed in Maine, one federal fisheries scientist says, salmon could disappear in the eight rivers within 20 years.
Despite the grim numbers, scientists say that if they can only get the equation right to help salmon, the fish can return in glorious numbers. In the right conditions, salmon have explosive population growth.
Some conservationists see a cautionary tale in spending millions to save a single species. In the Connecticut River, salmon restoration funding was sliced in recent years after years of poor recovery efforts reduced political will to continue spending freely. To succeed, these conservationists say, fish managers should move away from just trying to protect the salmon and look at the problem of declining fish species ecosystem-wide.
''We've been single-species focused for the last 100 years and it hasn't worked," said Andrew Goode, vice president of US operations for the Atlantic Salmon Federation. He says research has shown salmon have interdependencies with other native fish in rivers. ''To save Atlantic salmon we need to save all the native species in the rivers."
