The Fate of Some Hatchery Salmon

Nice, but rather inefficient...

September’s rainy weather has brought hundreds of hatchery Chinook salmon back from the ocean early, a boon for food banks across the region.

At a hatchery in Coos Bay, crews pulled out 650 salmon on Wednesday, about 11,000 pounds worth. Early harvesting of the hatchery fish means less risk that the fish will die and pollute streams and creeks, wildlife officials said.

The fish killed Wednesday were trucked to Bellingham, Wash., to be processed and distributed to Oregon food banks.

A spokesman for the Oregon Food Bank said the fish donations are especially welcome because fresh protein makes up only two percent of all the donations the group gets.

Tom Rumreich, a biologist with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, said reintroducing the fish back upstream would have required a permit from the Oregon DEQ, which is hard to get on short notice.

Let's review:

- A hatchery in Coos Bay captures salmon that officials don't want breeding in our rivers...they might mix genetically with wild ones.

- Releasing them for fisherman isn't practical...the governmental red tape would take too long to untangle. It's not like this has never happened before, so why isn't there a better system in place?

- Letting hatchery salmon die in our streams is polluting. The same isn't true for wild salmon.

- Foodbanks could really use the fresh protein to offer to our poor.

The decision tree was a bit tortured, but the end result certainly seems like a good one, at least until we get to how the salmon are processed and distributed. If the Oregon Food Bank official spoke correctly about the salmon being fresh protein, that should mean they're not canned. We have to truck the salmon over 450 miles one way--all the way to northern Washington--to get them gutted, filleted, skinned, cut-up, and packaged, then driven back at least 250 miles to Oregon for distribution?

Let's hope the official misspoke. Bellingham has an Icicle Seafoods plant which can process fresh salmon or can it. But even if the salmon is being canned, do Oregon's salmon processors have so little flexibility or such price disadvantages that they can't compete with out-of-state salmon processors?

I hope there's a logical explanation for this apparent inefficiency.

Comments

[pril]

i seem to recall a couple of years ago a big stink about hatchery fish being bludgeouned and left in the river somewhere. I don't remember if that was local or somewhere else, but i figured this was a better idea anyway. Also the hatchery people will sometimes throw dead fish around the Millicoma (upper forks of the Coos) for nourishing the water, or something, which to me sounds weird.

Either way it's disturbing to go out shooting pictures in the upper reaches of the Millicoma and finding piles of dead hatchery salmon strewn around.

Why they trucked it to Bellingham? No more processing plants around here, i guess. Although there are enough local fishermen who could have probably gotten together and had a processing party and done it just as fast.

My friends' father works for the hatchery on the west fork of the millicoma, and they have a big gathering up there at some point where everyone comes over and they move the juvenile fish out into the river- by hand and in buckets. There really isn't much efficiency in that particular hatchery at all.

[RoguePundit]

If the salmon had a desire to swim further upstream, bears and others would be able to dine on them and not make much of a mess. Having a fish hatchery near the coast and civilization leaves the returning salmon to be rather confused and sometimes inconvenient. I agree that providing them to a food bank is a much better solution than what you mention regarding bashed fish. Yuck.

"Nourishing" water can be a valid thing to do environmentally, but it implies the water is artificially devoid of nutrients...and that's rare.

I had the same thought about a processing party, or even sending them to a few supermarkets and butcher shops to be carved up. I guess the places that smoke salmon are too small or specialized now.

[pril]

I would guess the fish are lazy :P hehe. But it isn't really "close" to the coast. The Millicoma hatchery is about 30+ road miles up from the mouth of Coos Bay. I think it's at an old girl scout camp that had been unused for a long time.

[Jim]

I just visited this very hatchery, actually, for a school field trip. Hatchery operations in general are usually inefficient because of low funding. This particular hatchery is run almost entirely by volunteers for most of its operations. As for pollution, salmon die after spawning, they rot, bacteria grow, there is eutrophication of the river (meaning it gets all nasty), and it is generally thought that this is meant to eventually feed the fry after hatching, ie- the parents feed their bodies to their babies to give them a better chance. Interesting that it is considered pollution.

[RoguePundit]

I think there's some validity to considering the rotting salmon as pollution when the natural predators, scavengers, etc. of the salmon are greatly reduced but salmon numbers aren't. That leaves far more nutrients in the river than would be there naturally, potentially stressing the environment. However, many western rivers naturally have widely varying salmon populations year-to-year (depending upon both river and ocean conditions), meaning a number of the local species have evolved to endure or thrive in feast-or-famine river conditions. People who watch returning salmon levels every year to determine the health of a river often overlook that natural variation. Of course, we don't understand everything that causes such natural (and unnatural) variations yet.

Unfortunately, most people just use their eyes and noses to judge if a river is "polluted" or not. Pollution can be a very subjective opinion. That was something I was alluding to in my comment on hatchery salmon being pollution but wild salmon not being pollution.