Fish & Fishing, ANIMAL PEOPLE May 1997

Fish & Fishing

From: Animal People May 1997

King salmon close to ESA listing
	SEATTLE––National Marine Fisheries Service biologists reported on April 10 that the coveted chinook or king salmon could qualify for Endangered Species Act protection––four months after Canadian fisheries minister Fred Mifflin pronounced chinook well enough recovered to reopen sport fishing of the species off the west coast of Vancouver Island, with a year-long limit of two per day.
Artwork by Ellie, grade 5, Riverside School
The Puget Sound chinook count is down to 71,000, NMFS said, from an estimated 690,000 in 1911. Wild-run chinook account for under 25% of the current population. The rest come from hatcheries. Similar declines were reported in Oregon and northern California rivers. But the Oregon and California coastal populations were said to be still healthy. An ESA listing, favored by major environmental groups, could lead to the removal of dams from some spawning streams, cutting hydroelectric output; might take water from farm irrigation; and could further restrict logging, in a region whose unemployed loggers are already more inclined to blame the ESA for hard times than exhausted forests. Hoping to avoid ESA listing of the chinook, Oregon has already adopted legislation taxing logging companies to fund salmon restoration, Idaho governor Phil Batt has introduced a similar proposal, and Washington authorities are seeking politically expedient ways to cut back fishing.
As ANIMAL PEOPLE went to press, Oregon and California elected officials were anxiously awaiting a long-pending federal decision, due April 25, as to whether or not to list northern California coho salmon under the ESA. Many spawn in rivers rising from the Oregon side of the state line. Fishing for coho, once accounting for 25% of the total California commercial catch and half the Oregon catch, has been forbidden since 1993.

Southern coho, spawning from Humboldt County to Santa Cruz, were already listed last October, killing a lucrative recreational fishery. The current southern coho stock is believed to be fewer than 6,000 fish. Steelhead trout are also under consideration for an ESA listing. British Columbia reported disastrous 1996 coho and sockeye runs in the more heavily inhabited and fished central and southern parts of the province––but to the north, the Fraser River sockeye run came in at 4.3 million, three times the original forecast, while the Skeena River run set records. Alaska has for three years in a row had record chum salmon runs, enabling fishers to catch far more than canneries want to buy. More than half a million chum were donated to soup kitchens in the Lower 48 last year. An estimated 2.5 million were merely stripped of roe, pulverized, and dumped at sea to feed other fish.
Smaller, short-lived fish like the chum have significant advantages over slower-maturing giants like the chinook in today’s climate of intensive netting, an effect also evident on the Columbia River. While salmon are scarce, shad introduced to San Francisco Bay in 1868 spread up the coast to the Columbia, were caught commercially in the Columbia by 1938, and long since became the most abundant fish in the river, reportedly even crowding salmon and steelhead out of fish ladders in spawning season.
	Artwork by Roger McPhail
Cod’s walloped
	Like the North Sea nations and Canada, New England is combatting a cod crisis. Since 1982, the New England cod, yellowtail, and haddock catches, combined, are down from 86,000 tons to 17,600 tons.
Photograph courtesy the Sacramento Bee/José Luis Villegas
After the New England fleet killed 17% more cod from May through August last year than the New England Fishery Management Council set as the regional quota for the year, scientific advisors recommended a 41% cut in the cod take to protect adequate spawning stock. Initially proposing to cut the number of allowable fishing days per vessel from an already restricted 88 to just 14, the council eventually settled on weight limits for catches prorated by size of vessel. Earlier limits on fishing days and an outright prohibition of fishing in certain areas meanwhile won a February 5 court challenge from the Associated Fisheries of Maine. As the debate went on, 164 fishers, representing a third of the northeastern cod fleet, took advantage of a $23 million federal offer to buy them out of groundfishing. NMFS meanwhile unveiled a satellite tracking system to insure that fishers don’t sail more days than allowed, just five months after Senator Edward Kennedy, NASA, and the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth announced a federally funded four-year project to use satellites to help them find and kill more fish, faster.
Along with cod, fluke, monkfish, scallops, and crabs are under restriction along the New England coast because of alleged overfishing. Maine fishers sold 1.4 million pounds of sea urchins in 1987, but boosted that to 41 million pounds in 1993, after Japanese demand depleted west coast stocks––and now the Maine sea urchin catch is in decline too.
	Photograph by Bonnie J. McKay and Alan C. Finlayson
NMFS hopes a $4.3 million fine and lifetime ban from federal waters levied on April 3 against brothers James and Peter Spalt of Barnstable, Massachusetts, will restrain fish poaching, which may be conducted on a scale sufficient to cause authorities to seriously underestimate the amount of fish taken. The Spalts ran at least seven fishing companies, owned five fishing vessels, and allegedly committed more than 300 violations of federal fisheries law between March 1994 and February 1995.