Oregon Public Broadcasting

An old idea for helping salmon is coming back into favor with some fishermen, farmers and local officials in Oregon and northern California.  That idea is to plant salmon eggs in streams – either directly in the gravel or in perforated “hatchboxes.” 

Other than the human-assisted conception, the salmon fry emerge to live their lives as wild fish.  This blurring of wild salmon and hatchery fish is being greeted with some hesitation by tribes and state agencies. 

Correspondent Tom Banse reports from Coos Bay.

Commercial fisherman Rick Goche sits on his boat tied to the dock, going nowhere.  A sea lion begs for scraps two slips away, but there’s nothing to get. 

Commercial fishermen Rick Goche on the bridge of his troller in Charleston.

Fishery regulators cancelled the ocean salmon fishing season this year along the south Oregon coast and California.  The same thing happened last year, too. Fisherman Goche is ready to experiment with new ways to rebuild salmon runs.

Rick Goche: “When you’re faced with some serious stock problems and serious species problems, you have to take some risks to try to fix the problem.  It’s not working the way it is.  Fixing the habitat and hoping is not working.”

Goche is intrigued by a salmon restoration technique perfected in Alaska.  Others became intrigued as well through a group Goche co-founded called the Klamath Common Ground Alliance. 

The technique goes by the acronym ARED (for Alaska Resource and Economic Development, Inc.).  It starts by stripping eggs and milt from salmon returning to spawn.  You fertilize the eggs in a bucket.  Then you incubate the eggs under controlled, disease free conditions from four to six weeks.

Rick Goche: “You don’t need to build a hatchery.  You can do this in the corner of your garage.”

Finally, the eggs get planted -- injected really -- in gravel stream beds, making little salmon nests.  An older method of egg planting uses a perforated plastic box to shelter the eggs underwater until they hatch.

Rick Goche: “It’s all natural from there on.  They aren’t fed by anybody.  They’re on their own, but we’ve given them a leg up.”

It’s a leg up that Siskiyou County natural resource policy specialist Ric Costales can quantify.

Ric Costales: “The emergence of the fry in a natural condition is around four percent.  With this technique, you’re looking upwards of eighty percent – in some cases, 95 percent -- emergence from the substrate."

Costales says his county board of supervisors is frustrated with so-called “purists,” who he perceives want to minimize human intervention in salmon rearing.  Costales says Siskiyou County is prepared to spend its own money to get the ball rolling.

Ric Costales: “It’s clearly in everybody’s interest for something to happen here. Ideally, it’d be the agencies or somebody else, but right now no one is one the horizon willing to take a plunge on this.”

In the Rogue Valley, sport fishermen leaned on their state Senator to force the hand of the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Department.  The sportsmen want an egg box program. 

ODFW’s Rogue watershed manager Russ Staff agrees hatchboxes “look good, feel good.” But he says the agency did a study and found the egg boxes usually don’t work.

Russ Stauff: “It may very well fix the problem, if that’s the problem; the problem being lack of unfed fry.  But we know from extensive fisheries research in a lot of rivers that that is not the problem.”

The problem most commonly he says is unfavorable ocean conditions, urbanization, or low nutrient levels in streams.

In Coos Bay, fisherman Rick Goche senses the salmon egg hatchboxes have gathered political baggage.  Which is why he’s promoting the direct injection egg planter pioneered in Alaska. 

Goche says he’s sensitive to concerns about becoming dependent on technology for salmon production.

Rick Goche: “We’re not talking about you know, test tube salmon ad infinitum here. We’re talking about giving a kick start to some of these places that have gone so far beyond recovery that they need our help. We broke it.  We have to be responsible for helping to fix it.”

The Coos Bay fisherman says several tributaries to the Klamath River have been identified as possible locations to try the salmon egg injections first. 

Separately, Oregon’s Department of Fish and Wildlife is negotiating with fishers and legislators about locations for a new hatchbox pilot project.

Online:

Alaska Resource and Economic Development, Inc.