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Speaker 2: All right, welcome to the me Eater Podcast.
Speaker 1: They we're gonna dig into something of great importance that
Speaker 1: we touched on a bunch of times in the past.
Speaker 1: Is what in the world happened to and what is
Speaker 1: going on with the Columbia River and the same runs.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is a story that's played out over
Speaker 1: centuries historically the Columbia.
Speaker 2: I pulled this from your guys website. The guests. I'm
Speaker 2: going to introduce a minute.
Speaker 1: I had always read that the historically the Columbia had
Speaker 1: runs annual runs of ten to twelve million salmon. I
Speaker 1: was reena today it could have been some years as
Speaker 1: high as sixteen million salmon ran the Columbia. Our good
Speaker 1: old body's Lewis and Clark, who come up every time
Speaker 1: you're trying to describe something from the old timey days,
Speaker 1: describe salmon in the Columbia as being inconceivable the numbers
Speaker 1: they had fish, salmon species running from March to October, steelhead
Speaker 1: in there all winter. And then, as we'll get into,
Speaker 1: just a never ending series of mistakes, intentional actions, accidental
Speaker 1: action have led it to be where it is just
Speaker 1: small fractions of that small fractions of those numbers running
Speaker 1: up and down the river. And we're going to talk
Speaker 1: with a couple of guests today who have been involved
Speaker 1: in sam and recovery on the Columbia River from an
Speaker 1: intertribal perspective. So the Columbia River flowed through, how can
Speaker 1: you guys, I'm leading up to my intro here of
Speaker 1: you guys, but can you remind me how many miles
Speaker 1: of river are in the Columbia basin. I think I
Speaker 1: was reading about to say, I can't remember the number.
Speaker 3: Well, the Columbia River itself, like where it's coming from
Speaker 3: Canada is about seven hundred and fifty miles from the ocean,
Speaker 3: but half of the Columbia's north of Canada. And then
Speaker 3: you've got all of the major tribs, you know, from
Speaker 3: the Yakama, the Wenatchee, the Snake, the Wyamat, you know,
Speaker 3: just all up and down the river. So you're looking
Speaker 3: at even now in the high water years, half a
Speaker 3: million cfs have flowed down by Bonnonville Dam.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so half a million cubic feet per second YEP
Speaker 1: of water flowing through there. And the folks we're gonna
Speaker 1: talk today about tribal efforts to recover fish. The tribes
Speaker 1: acknowledging that the states just aren't doing it at the
Speaker 1: speed they would like and with the vision that they
Speaker 1: would like them to have. The Feds aren't doing it
Speaker 1: at the speed they would like, and they're not pursuing
Speaker 1: the vision they would like them to pursue. So increasingly
Speaker 1: the tribes Native American tribes have been getting involved in this.
Speaker 2: And we're going to.
Speaker 1: Speak today with Doug Hatch, who's the deputy manager of
Speaker 1: the Fishery Science Department of the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission,
Speaker 1: and also Donella Donnella. Donella Miller is the Fishery Science manager.
Speaker 1: And real quick, before we dig in too much, can
Speaker 1: you can you tell people what tribes are in inner
Speaker 1: tribal organization.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we're a consortia. We represent we're a technical arm
Speaker 4: of of course the Yackamanation, which I'm a tribal member of,
Speaker 4: and also the Confederated Tribes and bands of the Yu
Speaker 4: Matilla Indian Reservation, which my grandmother was from, so I'm
Speaker 4: also part of Matilla as well, but also the Warm
Speaker 4: Springs Tribe and Oregon and the nez Pers in Idaho, Okay.
Speaker 4: So yeah, we work with those four tribes on Columbia
Speaker 4: basin issues and all four you know treaty tribes. We
Speaker 4: signed treaties with the government in eighteen fifty five to
Speaker 4: retain our you know, hunting, fishing, and gathering rights throughout
Speaker 4: our our usual and accustomed areas. And that's really key
Speaker 4: because you know, we seated land to the to the
Speaker 4: government in exchange for the set boundaries of the reservation
Speaker 4: and also to hunt, fish and gather in perpetuity throughout
Speaker 4: our you know, our natural areas.
Speaker 1: And that and then that right is infringed by the
Speaker 1: fact that then the people you signed the treaty with
Speaker 1: went ahead and destroyed the fishery.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and that's really key. The work that we do is,
Speaker 4: you know, those rights mean nothing if there's no fish
Speaker 4: to catch. The right isn't just to dip our nets
Speaker 4: in empty waters. It's actual catch fish. And there's language
Speaker 4: in the treaty that talks about our ability to maintain
Speaker 4: a modest living and people can support themselves on it anymore.
Speaker 4: Our people unfortunately live in poverty up and down the
Speaker 4: Columbia River at treaty access sites that aren't meant to
Speaker 4: be lived in. It's more or less boat ramps, and
Speaker 4: you know, they don't have water power, just a bathroom.
Speaker 4: But it's not definitely not what we signed up for.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, So we're gonna tell that story first. I
Speaker 1: gotta I want to do what day? When did the
Speaker 1: thing drop that we made in Texas?
Speaker 2: When is it? Because I explained this all big time.
Speaker 5: In text already dropped, but we're trying to hit it
Speaker 5: multiple times.
Speaker 1: Just being cognizant of the fact that So we record
Speaker 1: a showdown in Texas talk about taint and meat, skunks,
Speaker 1: nutsign a cat in that we explained that there's if
Speaker 1: you subscribe to the show, you're gonna see If you
Speaker 1: subscribe to the podcast.
Speaker 2: You're gonna see some changes coming up.
Speaker 1: In March nine, So starting is it March nine, that's
Speaker 1: what that's gonna happen. Yeah, starting in March nine, you're
Speaker 1: gonna start seeing every week you're gonna see two Meat
Speaker 1: Eater podcasts drops. The regular Monday thing that you subscribe
Speaker 1: to you now stays the same, and that's like the
Speaker 1: interview show. So that would be like what we're doing
Speaker 1: right here, right now, we're sitting around with tribal fisheries
Speaker 1: managers having an interview with them about their area of expertise.
Speaker 2: That's like the.
Speaker 1: Interview portion of the show, and that will always drop
Speaker 1: at the same time. In addition to that, there's gonna
Speaker 1: be a weekly news show, news and commentary drop. As
Speaker 1: I explained, it's like Spencer's concept. We cover our news,
Speaker 1: your news, and the news on the news show. Okay,
Speaker 1: three kinds of news that will drop sometime during the week.
Speaker 1: It'll vary to when it comes out. The folks you
Speaker 1: know and love, and the kind of material you know
Speaker 1: and love from Radio Live, that stuff will move on
Speaker 1: to this news show. Radio Live won't be like a
Speaker 1: set There won't be a live thing anymore, and it
Speaker 1: won't occur at a set time anymore. There'll be the
Speaker 1: news and commentary show which comes out. When it comes out,
Speaker 1: stay tuned for all that there'll be some new art work.
Speaker 1: You'll know what happened because there'll be a new artwork.
Speaker 1: That'll be the best way you'll know that that happens.
Speaker 1: You'll be like, oh, a new artwork? Must this thing happening?
Speaker 5: Please subscribe on YouTube and wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 4: That helps a lot.
Speaker 1: Uh, you know what word I learned today from you
Speaker 1: guys website. I'm gonna do a trivia test. Don't don't
Speaker 1: don't you know you guys notice we don't tell anybody.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna trivia test these guys. So I was on
Speaker 1: the Columbia River Inner Tribal Fish Commission site today.
Speaker 2: What is the word?
Speaker 1: I'm like Spenser here, what is the word for a
Speaker 1: fish that spawns once and dies? It's in the same
Speaker 1: vein of like anadromous catagromus. It's like that flavor of
Speaker 1: a word. But it's me you spawn once and die.
Speaker 5: I've heard it like a scientific name like die.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're being clever like diet.
Speaker 2: I thought he's being clever too.
Speaker 1: I didn't think at first. I didn't think he's being
Speaker 1: clever than I thought he's being clever. It's like, it's
Speaker 1: that flavor.
Speaker 2: What is that Latin? I don't know. Is it Latin? Diadronous,
Speaker 2: catatrouts Oh.
Speaker 6: No, I should look that up.
Speaker 7: Monogamous, No, no, I know I've heard it before, but
Speaker 7: I don't I.
Speaker 1: Know there was a word you ready, None of you
Speaker 1: guys got it. I've never even heard the damn word.
Speaker 5: Catatromist comes from Greek roots.
Speaker 2: Oh it's Greek. This is probably Greek sel paris.
Speaker 8: So it's not like those words really at all.
Speaker 1: When flavor, I mean like a foreign language sounding deal.
Speaker 1: You know, I guarantee it's greed. I never heard that
Speaker 1: word in my note You know, you got like a
Speaker 1: notes function on your phone. I keep words that I
Speaker 1: need to incorporate into my vocabulary on a little list like.
Speaker 8: So those but those are only the fish that after
Speaker 8: they sponsor, not atlantic head, not ocean run.
Speaker 5: Cuts, semil paris. I should know this because I took Latin.
Speaker 5: It does have Latin roots. It combines semol meaning once
Speaker 5: or a single time, and pario meaning to give birth
Speaker 5: or produce.
Speaker 2: Another thing. I learned.
Speaker 1: We're gonna go way back deep before you get to this.
Speaker 1: Nothing I learned on your site. The kind blew my
Speaker 1: mind is those dams, the dams on the Columbia system.
Speaker 2: Did a way to think about it.
Speaker 1: When baby salmon, when Smoltz are coming back down the river,
Speaker 1: it's basically you lose seven to fifteen percent of them
Speaker 1: die at each dam. Wow, just an incredible way to
Speaker 1: think about it.
Speaker 8: Yeah, can you and how many are there?
Speaker 2: How many dams are no? Idea? Well, there's four they
Speaker 2: can stay up to close your mic.
Speaker 4: Oh, there's four on the the lower part of the
Speaker 4: Mainstem Columbia, and then you have the four in the
Speaker 4: lower Snake River. And then there's also privately owned dams
Speaker 4: that are owned by the Mid Columbia Public Utility districts.
Speaker 4: So there's four four right in the mid Sea. So
Speaker 4: there's eight on the main Stem Columbia before you get
Speaker 4: to Roosevelt, right or well the Grand Cooley.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Chief Joseph is impassable and then Grand Cooley is
Speaker 3: upstream of that. But yeah, if you're going to the
Speaker 3: headwaters of the of the Columbia, which would be the
Speaker 3: Matau River, if you're up there, you're going to go
Speaker 3: over nine dams on the main stem. More, if you
Speaker 3: go on up the tributaries, if you go up the Snake,
Speaker 3: you're going over eight dams before you ever get to
Speaker 3: the Salmon River, the Naha or any of those big
Speaker 3: rivers in the Snake.
Speaker 2: Eight times fifteen, that's a big number.
Speaker 3: It's big.
Speaker 6: Let's say.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then there's mortality coming upstream too, you know,
Speaker 3: not just every adult just because there's a fish ladder.
Speaker 3: You got to find that fish ladder and you got
Speaker 3: to negotiate it, you got to get over it, you
Speaker 3: got to avoid the predators. You've got lots of stuff.
Speaker 2: Can can you guys lay out a little bit, like.
Speaker 1: What did the system look like before the first major impact,
Speaker 1: before the first major negative impact came to, which I
Speaker 1: guess was the canary fish canaries? Like what did like
Speaker 1: just try to help people visualize, Like nowadays people think
Speaker 1: about salmon runs and it's like Alaska, right, when you
Speaker 1: think about salmon runs, it's Bristol Bay, right. This was
Speaker 1: a bigger salmon run than those, The biggest salmon run,
Speaker 1: the biggest salmon run in the country, the biggest salmon
Speaker 1: run in.
Speaker 2: The world was the Columbia. Yeah, you wouldn't have been
Speaker 2: that you had to get.
Speaker 1: You wouldn't go to Alaska to see big salmon runs,
Speaker 1: like the Columbia was the big salmon run? Like what
Speaker 1: did that look like? Like what fish were there? You know,
Speaker 1: to what quantity? Is it even possible? No one scientifically
Speaker 1: measured it, but like what did it look like?
Speaker 3: It was?
Speaker 4: Well, that's why Solilo falls, right, that's historically that was
Speaker 4: the major trading hub of the Pacific Northwest. You know
Speaker 4: that people came from you know, the the Midwest to
Speaker 4: trade Buffalo and the ocean area to trade salt for salmon.
Speaker 2: We had.
Speaker 4: It was even obsidian and tool making and things like that.
Speaker 4: It was inconceivable. And that's why the over exploitation happened
Speaker 4: because you know, like you said, you read the old
Speaker 4: timey descriptions and they thought it was an inexhaustible resource,
Speaker 4: that there was so much that people were able to
Speaker 4: gather what they needed. And that's that's what sustained life
Speaker 4: in our region for millennia. And it was just you know,
Speaker 4: the the trading and the tribal people living amongst the
Speaker 4: land is you know, in physically a part of nature,
Speaker 4: and you know, it's just a it was a completely
Speaker 4: different way of thinking of you know, like exploitation and
Speaker 4: things like that, but that I don't know that That's
Speaker 4: why it seems so that thought process was different from
Speaker 4: the way that we lived, as you know, taking and
Speaker 4: being a part of the system versus coming in Like
Speaker 4: how you said, the first major negative impact would have
Speaker 4: been the fish wheels and the and even the sainting
Speaker 4: and things like that, and so those types of things happened.
Speaker 4: And you know, when you look at different everything is
Speaker 4: always viewed as a resource and how can that benefit man?
Speaker 4: And you know, you hear about the salmon, but even
Speaker 4: further down the road, the salmon kind of became a
Speaker 4: problem to development in the of the Columbia River system
Speaker 4: when they were looking at the placement of the hydro system,
Speaker 4: because then they would have to incorporate fish ladders and
Speaker 4: deal with the salmon. It would have been easier if
Speaker 4: they did away from with all these natural runs and
Speaker 4: we could retain salmon, but you retain it in the
Speaker 4: lower river below the dams, so they didn't have to
Speaker 4: do all these extra steps to maintain the stocks. That's
Speaker 4: why you see a lot of those hatcheries are below
Speaker 4: Bonnaville Dam, and it's unnatural, you know, spring Chinook and
Speaker 4: Koho and things like that, and those hatteries still operate,
Speaker 4: but the tribes have been working to try to restore
Speaker 4: and bring them back into their natal areas throughout and
Speaker 4: even to me, I think those numbers that you read
Speaker 4: are actually kind of low, the.
Speaker 2: Ten to sixteen million.
Speaker 4: Airess, because even today you could get you know, there's
Speaker 4: been a lot of work in the Okanagan Basin and
Speaker 4: Lake Okanagan in Canada where they've we've seen ski returns
Speaker 4: up to eight hundred thousand adult sakai returning past Bonneville.
Speaker 4: And just to think that's just one lake and there's
Speaker 4: all these other block areas and the tributaries and if
Speaker 4: today we could get back almost a million of just
Speaker 4: one stock, that and a lot of that work was done.
Speaker 4: It was exhaustive estimate, and they looked at a lot
Speaker 4: of the cannery records and what they were able to process,
Speaker 4: but I think there was more waste than there were
Speaker 4: fish actual process. You see those old pictures where you
Speaker 4: know you have salmon four feet deep and they're just
Speaker 4: working those cannory lines, Well, when that obviously went bad,
Speaker 4: every day they just shove it out and bring in more.
Speaker 4: So there was because you yeah, yeah, that's the way
Speaker 4: it was viewed. And just kind of going back to
Speaker 4: what you what we were talking about the fifteen percent
Speaker 4: at every project. That's only the impact of what that
Speaker 4: dam itself causes, like fish going through the turbines or
Speaker 4: you know, like in the spill way they get disoriented
Speaker 4: and things like that. But that's not adding in all
Speaker 4: of the other factors that those dams create, the reservoirs
Speaker 4: and the slack water water quality and the predation and
Speaker 4: all those types of things. So the impacts are huge,
Speaker 4: and you're right, you add it up, there shouldn't be
Speaker 4: any more fish left. It's just amazing that that we
Speaker 4: still have fish coming back.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I's clarifying that percentage.
Speaker 1: I was making a joke about fifteen times eight, but
Speaker 1: the estimate is seven to fifteen percent, so it's not all.
Speaker 2: You know, fifteen percent is the high end of what
Speaker 2: the estimated loss.
Speaker 3: Is just direct dam mortality, but that doesn't take into
Speaker 3: account the slack water it creates, the habitat that creates
Speaker 3: for pacivorous predators to eat the fish. They get disoriented
Speaker 3: when they go through the dam, birds pick them off.
Speaker 3: So all of that predation part isn't part of that
Speaker 3: damn mortality. That's just the direct mortality from the dam
Speaker 3: and kind of quickly, I guess historically by the numbers,
Speaker 3: it was right now, you've got a spring chinook run, right,
Speaker 3: that's like eighty to one hundred and fifty thousand fish,
Speaker 3: and then it drops way off for the summers down
Speaker 3: to ten or twenty thousand. And then in the fall
Speaker 3: that's the big run now, and it's gonna run a
Speaker 3: couple hundred thousand fish, you know, you know, a really
Speaker 3: good years half million or something. And historically it was
Speaker 3: it was a big curve, it was a big mountain.
Speaker 3: That summer chinook run. That's so low that was the peak.
Speaker 3: Oh so Harvard, all of these impacts have split it
Speaker 3: into these three different groups of chinook. And so you've
Speaker 3: got the fall chinook, which seems like which is the
Speaker 3: biggest now, But historically that was the tail. You know,
Speaker 3: it was those summer run and so and and that's
Speaker 3: what they were going after the early canneries and stuff
Speaker 3: was the most abundant, you know, group, and so they
Speaker 3: they made those big impacts on that, and that was
Speaker 3: the June hogs. That included all of the really big
Speaker 3: fish that went up, you know, into the Lower Snake
Speaker 3: River up in the Upper Columbia. You know, the fish
Speaker 3: that were one hundred and thirty, one hundred and forty pounds.
Speaker 2: Man, jeez, that's a big fish.
Speaker 8: It's like, yeah, yeah, we catch those like eight ten
Speaker 8: pounders in southeast.
Speaker 2: Like, yeah, they gotta be twenty eight where we fish,
Speaker 2: they gotta be twenty eight inches. Your eyes like, sweet,
Speaker 2: he's twenty.
Speaker 1: And like you go into the bars, you know, you
Speaker 1: go into old bars, you know, and you know, I
Speaker 1: see these kings you know from whatever, yep, half century ago,
Speaker 1: and you're like, dude, are they you know, are they
Speaker 1: there anymore?
Speaker 2: These one hundred plus pound fish? But just like there's not,
Speaker 2: and there's fewer and viewer and viewer and viewer fewer
Speaker 2: and fewer.
Speaker 3: We do we do sampling up Bonneville, damn. So we
Speaker 3: we sample all of the fish runs coming through Bonneville,
Speaker 3: and we'll get a text from from from the texts
Speaker 3: that are sampling. It's like, here's a really big one.
Speaker 3: And a big one now is you know, sixty seventy pounders? Ok? Yeah,
Speaker 3: those are pretty rare and it used to not be
Speaker 3: even you know, a mere thirty five years ago. When
Speaker 3: I started, it was we'd get a lot more of
Speaker 3: those than we do now. So definitely the size of
Speaker 3: mature or the size of the adult fish has gone down.
Speaker 4: The largest I've caught was sixty three pounds, and that
Speaker 4: seemed like a monster that Gilnetting, yeah, and our fall fishery,
Speaker 4: but I had it, really had an aha moment back
Speaker 4: when so I think I was eighteen as a technician
Speaker 4: working in the Metaw River. We're doing spring chinook spawning
Speaker 4: ground surveys and it was getting later in the season,
Speaker 4: and so there was this portion of the mainstem that
Speaker 4: would float on the on the Mettaw River and there's
Speaker 4: it runs into a wall, there's a big pool, and
Speaker 4: we floated our raft down and it was just there
Speaker 4: was a group of probably about thirty big june hogs summerschanook.
Speaker 4: They were huge. Of course you get the magnification of
Speaker 4: the water, but they were still huge. And we just
Speaker 4: floated around in there and watched them. They were just
Speaker 4: holding up, waiting to head up to spawn. But it's
Speaker 4: just so amazing to see those things. And you were
Speaker 4: talking about how many miles inland. Also, when I worked
Speaker 4: up in the Metal, where I think I looked at it.
Speaker 4: I looked on the map to see it was like
Speaker 4: eight hundred and forty miles or something.
Speaker 2: Well, they had come that far in this.
Speaker 4: Little bitty tributary to the Metal where we were doing
Speaker 4: a spawning ground survey, and I was like, just like,
Speaker 4: because we had to hike in and then walk down
Speaker 4: the creek, is like, how did this fish even make
Speaker 4: it back here? It's amazing. And then we were walking
Speaker 4: down another section and there's portions that get dewatered in
Speaker 4: the fall, and we found a couple of springs nook
Speaker 4: in this pocket by this boulder, and so my coworker
Speaker 4: he takes off one side of his hip waiter and
Speaker 4: then we fill it with water and put that fish
Speaker 4: in there, and we just ran it like a couple.
Speaker 4: He was stranded.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he was pulling off because irrigation draw.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So we ran it back to so he could
Speaker 4: reconnect with the river. It's like, you can't make it
Speaker 4: this far.
Speaker 6: And not live, O man.
Speaker 2: Really.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So the things you run into being out there,
Speaker 4: it's just that that's what really helps people's connection to understand,
Speaker 4: and you know, just thinking and realizing how much they've
Speaker 4: gone through to get back.
Speaker 1: Yeah, can you a little bit explain the process, I
Speaker 1: guess just the evolved thinking that that led to the
Speaker 1: creation of a tribal organization that would get involved in
Speaker 1: fisheries management. I know, like in some notes Krint had
Speaker 1: from pre interviews, she talked about that there was a
Speaker 1: growing frustration that the States and the Feds weren't moving
Speaker 1: the way, weren't moving this the way you wanted to move,
Speaker 1: and that the goal was set in a way that
Speaker 1: that the tribes weren't comfortable with the goal like say,
Speaker 1: like basically the goal being let's save the fish from
Speaker 1: genetic extinction. Yeah, and that wasn't that that doesn't satisfy
Speaker 1: native peoples on the river.
Speaker 4: No, Unfortunately, a lot of the fish are managed on
Speaker 4: ESA levels, right, that's holding things on the brink of extinction.
Speaker 4: And that's one of the issues with the ESA itself. Well,
Speaker 4: for one, it's not proactive, and two they have protections
Speaker 4: when things get really bad to save them from extinction.
Speaker 4: But there's nothing in the act that's binding its recommendations
Speaker 4: towards recovery. There's no requirements to recover species so it's
Speaker 4: just the minimal amount possible that you could do to
Speaker 4: keep this from this species from going extinct. And you
Speaker 4: know that's not acceptable, you know as society, not just
Speaker 4: with tribes, of allowing species to go extinct or you know,
Speaker 4: we don't want museum relics that in the river that
Speaker 4: we look at. You know, we want to be able
Speaker 4: to enjoy the bounty and continue our way alife, you know,
Speaker 4: kind of getting what we signed up for in the treaties.
Speaker 4: And that's where the really you know, sustainable, healthy and
Speaker 4: sustainable populations that were able to harvest because you know,
Speaker 4: we've talked about treaty rights and our ability to harvest,
Speaker 4: but that's a shared right that we have with you know,
Speaker 4: with the public right the treaties. There's been two big
Speaker 4: court cases that kind of led to the formation of
Speaker 4: our organization and really the formation of the tribes taking
Speaker 4: a leading role. First was usb Oregon, and that was
Speaker 4: really the tribes being established as a co manager of
Speaker 4: the resource because it was a treaty right, so it's
Speaker 4: our you know, we have the obligation to ensure that
Speaker 4: it persists for future generations. And then several years later
Speaker 4: we had usv. Washington that made the determination that the
Speaker 4: tribes were entitled to fifty percent of the harvestable run,
Speaker 4: not just fifty percent of the total, the fifty percent
Speaker 4: of the harvestable run. And so we have the you
Speaker 4: know that unfortunately, you know, I've heard others. You know,
Speaker 4: what I've learned is unfortunately we operate operate in gavel
Speaker 4: the gavel fish management because you talk about gravel, the
Speaker 4: gravel like right, you're inclusive of the entire life cycle.
Speaker 4: But unfortunately we work in gavel the gavel because it's
Speaker 4: the real Yeah, and that's I saw that. You have
Speaker 4: a show out that talks about the recent litigation on
Speaker 4: the hydro operations of the on the Snake River dam,
Speaker 4: and that's kind of been pulled in really kind of
Speaker 4: unfortunately became just a breach campaign. But it's to us,
Speaker 4: it's a lot more than that. Because with our with
Speaker 4: our culture, everything the importance, everything has a purpose, a
Speaker 4: place and a purpose. And so we really have that
Speaker 4: holistic management aspect, and you know, we don't really have
Speaker 4: the silos that a lot of the state and federal
Speaker 4: agencies work under. That's why you know, we have people
Speaker 4: that want to work for tribes that really care about,
Speaker 4: you know, the resource and things like that, because everything
Speaker 4: that we do is so broad, and you know, like
Speaker 4: I'm wearing the sturgeon hat, and you know, like all
Speaker 4: species are important to us, not just the salmon, but sturgeon,
Speaker 4: lam prey, even you know, trout and bridge lip suckers
Speaker 4: and all of those things that are a part of nature.
Speaker 4: But you know, we hold all of those things sacred
Speaker 4: as our first foods. And so that's the way we
Speaker 4: what we bring to the table in our management aspect,
Speaker 4: because you know, we're not about esa level. We don't
Speaker 4: want museum real li likes. We went healthy and sustainable,
Speaker 4: and we would love more than to have work ourselves
Speaker 4: out of a job. That's what I've heard one of
Speaker 4: my other bosses say. But just you know, the tools
Speaker 4: that we have to work with along the way, like
Speaker 4: you know, hatch reproduction. I know there's a big a
Speaker 4: lot of issues between hatchy versus wild and the tribes
Speaker 4: do do a lot of supplementation hatter reproduction, but we
Speaker 4: try to bring in non conventional methods. It's not just
Speaker 4: fitch factories pumping out numbers. We're you know, using we
Speaker 4: have a genetics lab, a state of the art genetics
Speaker 4: lab that we have in cooperation with the University of
Speaker 4: Idaho that's located in southern Idaho and Hagerman. So we're
Speaker 4: kind of leading the way on the genetics side. And
Speaker 4: then also the way we implement our hatcheries is not
Speaker 4: just releasing them all directly from the hatchery, but taking
Speaker 4: them out to acclamation sites so they could return to
Speaker 4: areas that have suitable spawning habitat and things like that.
Speaker 4: And as Doug mentioned, we do all the monitoring at
Speaker 4: Bonneville Dam of all the stocks that are coming through.
Speaker 4: We're able to take that information and which also aids
Speaker 4: in harvest management, and just our work is so broad
Speaker 4: and diverse.
Speaker 2: We have.
Speaker 4: Ocean you know, estuary program that we've acquired about five
Speaker 4: years ago now, so we're really looking, you know, like
Speaker 4: I said, gravel to gravel and bringing in all aspects,
Speaker 4: and you know the tribes have I'd say we're a
Speaker 4: lot less risk averse, I think because we take that
Speaker 4: approach to be careful to do things. It's like we
Speaker 4: don't want to study things to death. You know, things
Speaker 4: get wrapped up in ten ten plus year studies before
Speaker 4: you could actually even do anything. It's like, and you know, myself,
Speaker 4: being the fish science manager, that was kind of I
Speaker 4: kind of thought twice about taking this job. It's like,
Speaker 4: I don't want to be just a research scientist. But
Speaker 4: the approach that the tribes have been taking is like
Speaker 4: applied research. You're taking actionable measures and measuring the success
Speaker 4: of those actions, and you know, you use what's working
Speaker 4: and advance that. And yeah, I think that's the biggest thing.
Speaker 4: And you know, we've really grown a lot. Like I
Speaker 4: mentioned those two court cases usv. Washington, usv. Oregon where
Speaker 4: you know, the tribes sued the states over harvest and
Speaker 4: you know, co management and things like that. But we've
Speaker 4: came a lot a long ways, and even just recently
Speaker 4: during that litigation on the Snake River, the hydro Operations
Speaker 4: litigation and form the six Sovereigns that's with our four
Speaker 4: tribes and the states of Washington and Oregon and come together,
Speaker 4: and that's how we entered into a stay in litigation.
Speaker 4: It was meant to be a ten year stay with
Speaker 4: a set of commitments over the first five years. Then
Speaker 4: there was a check in and then it could have
Speaker 4: rolled over to another five years and we were just
Speaker 4: getting started rolling in that and it was bringing commitments
Speaker 4: to the basin and also giving us a voice to
Speaker 4: look for appropriations. It's not like we weren't trying to
Speaker 4: upend energy prices or anything like that. It's just like, Okay,
Speaker 4: can you pay the true cost of the cheap electricity
Speaker 4: that you're benefiting from? And it's not really grandma's electricity
Speaker 4: or the common person, it's corporate, right. It's industrial customers
Speaker 4: that have really the huge benefit of our cheap power
Speaker 4: in the region. And that's why we're talking about fish
Speaker 4: in the Columbia Basin, but really a global global thing, right,
Speaker 4: because of all of the industry that our region attracts
Speaker 4: because of the cheap power. Like back in the eighties
Speaker 4: and whatnot, we had the all of the big aluminum
Speaker 4: smelters where we have none of the natural resources to
Speaker 4: make aluminum, but they were all there because it was
Speaker 4: so cheap to process because of that cheap power. And
Speaker 4: then now we're seeing the new onslaught of that is
Speaker 4: data centers. We have data centers a.
Speaker 2: Lot all that electricity.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and water. That's the bad thing is like there's
Speaker 4: always extraction and then we're already like operating in a deficit,
Speaker 4: but yet we're planning for a future that we don't
Speaker 4: even have the resources for. And that's why the tribes
Speaker 4: really bring that to the table of like who's looking
Speaker 4: out for the resource and what's best for the environment.
Speaker 4: And that's why we talk about salmon being a keystone
Speaker 4: species because it's it's good for everyone. What's good for
Speaker 4: the salmon is good for the environment and for the
Speaker 4: people and us looking out for that in that holistic manner.
Speaker 1: I got three observations I want to hit you with.
Speaker 1: One is you don't need to take the sound. But
Speaker 1: you know, like people like to look at sort of
Speaker 1: singular things that had global impacts. And there's this argument
Speaker 1: that the reason we won World War two is because
Speaker 1: the dams on the Columbia system, because we could out
Speaker 1: we could produce aircraft, we had enough power to smelt
Speaker 1: enough aluminum and we out aircraft the Germans. And so
Speaker 1: you know, whether that's true or not, it always like
Speaker 1: sticks in my head, like thinking about what a mistake
Speaker 1: those ultimately, what a mistake those dams were, And I
Speaker 1: think about that question and always like it's just a
Speaker 1: complication in there. We had on second observations we had
Speaker 1: on RFK Junior when he was running for president, and
Speaker 1: he went and took over Health and Human Services under
Speaker 1: the Trump administration.
Speaker 2: But when he was he.
Speaker 1: Was on he's talking about his career and litigate environmental litigation,
Speaker 1: and he said, when you look at these big, these
Speaker 1: big corporations, and they think there are these like free
Speaker 1: enterprise organizations, he says, they never ever pay the cost.
Speaker 1: They don't acknowledge that they don't pay the cost. But
Speaker 1: in producing that electricity or producing those metals, they never
Speaker 1: had to account to the American people of what they
Speaker 1: took from you to make those things. Like, no one's
Speaker 1: ever build them for the cost of an annual run
Speaker 1: of twelve million salmon. No one's paid that, you know.
Speaker 1: He's like, they don't admit it, but they're subsidized. They're
Speaker 1: subsidized by what they take from everybody in terms of
Speaker 1: fish or in terms of anything clean water, Like, has
Speaker 1: anyone ever.
Speaker 2: Build them for do you know what I mean? Does
Speaker 2: anyone build them for what the clean water should be worth?
Speaker 2: They'll never pay that shit.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we have mitigation goals of the impacts of the
Speaker 4: hydrosystem that have never been met. Fifty sixty years and
Speaker 4: they've never met them. By millions. I think we're barely
Speaker 4: even at half of what we should have been getting
Speaker 4: sixty years ago. Imagine how much that would add up
Speaker 4: to what the tab is. The way that gets wipe
Speaker 4: clean is they're working toward interim goals. Fifty years later,
Speaker 4: we're still just working towards interim goals. And even today,
Speaker 4: the interim goals that we're working towards towards restoration that
Speaker 4: we actually have the teeth to push on is five
Speaker 4: to eight million, and that was determined by the Northwest
Speaker 4: Power and Planning Council. Of that is the direct impacts
Speaker 4: of this hydrosystem is the five to eight million, and
Speaker 4: then that's when then the other the other losses are
Speaker 4: due to irrigation and the tributaries and other types of
Speaker 4: urbanization and things like that. So we're we'll never get
Speaker 4: fully get back what we had, but you know, I
Speaker 4: know we could do better because and a lot of
Speaker 4: that too is just people's resistance to change, and you
Speaker 4: know that that's the way we've always done things, and
Speaker 4: the status quo continues and until they I don't know,
Speaker 4: it's hard, and like you said, you will never get back.
Speaker 4: We don't pay the truth cost for power, and a
Speaker 4: lot of this stuff is for export foreign companies that
Speaker 4: come in and exploit our resources. And you still have
Speaker 4: communities that you know, they were promised jobs, but that's
Speaker 4: only during the construction and what's ongoing is minimal. Like
Speaker 4: even with Google and the City of the Dallas. You know,
Speaker 4: they came in and updated their their waste waste treatment plant,
Speaker 4: but then they built a data center and then two
Speaker 4: more data centers, and now they're overwhelming that infrastructure that
Speaker 4: they promised, and they were taking groundwater and so they
Speaker 4: have communities just south of town that are coming up
Speaker 4: with dry wells and things like that. And now they
Speaker 4: want to buy land in the National Forest to be
Speaker 4: able to create a reservoir to extract more water.
Speaker 1: And then, like Sam Altman and Elon Musk, they'll never
Speaker 1: they'll you know, he'll emerge as the world's first trillionaire
Speaker 1: and there will never be a reckoning. There will never
Speaker 1: be a reckoning for the cost of what they did.
Speaker 2: Never.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was funny. We applied for a grant from
Speaker 4: Google because they have this they want to be green
Speaker 4: by twenty thirty or something, and then we have a
Speaker 4: delta project where the Clicktet River comes into the Columbia
Speaker 4: that needs some major work. It's never had any maintenance,
Speaker 4: Like you could practically walk halfway across the Columbia because
Speaker 4: that sandbar is so big because you don't have the
Speaker 4: freshets that that flush it out. And that's one of
Speaker 4: our big issues that we'll work on. It's predation, hot
Speaker 4: spots and warm water and things like that. But we
Speaker 4: applied for that Google grant. It's just downstream, just across
Speaker 4: the river. We didn't even make it past the pre
Speaker 4: proposal phase. And when we asked why, like why wouldn't
Speaker 4: this qualify it has good merit and everything, they gave
Speaker 4: us AI response, Yeah.
Speaker 2: So you paid for your own response.
Speaker 1: I want to get in like one of the things
Speaker 1: that I want to talk about, what we want to
Speaker 1: talk about. I was like, what can like what are
Speaker 1: things that can be done?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 1: And I want to get into that, like like sea
Speaker 1: lions and all that. But there's a thing I want
Speaker 1: to there's a third thing I wanted to bring up.
Speaker 1: And I'm almost I'm embarrassed to tell you this, but
Speaker 1: all these guys here can vouch me on this.
Speaker 2: It's like.
Speaker 1: I was raised in the Great Lakes, Okay, and I
Speaker 1: was raised to know that like the real villains in
Speaker 1: fisheries management, it's always the natives.
Speaker 2: Because people can't reconcile. They're like, they're like, how could
Speaker 2: it be that.
Speaker 1: They're conducting commercial fishing, you know, so they run Like
Speaker 1: in the Great Lakes, natals will run fish traps for whitefish,
Speaker 1: which white people don't. I mean, like generally speaking, white
Speaker 1: people don't fish whitefish. Generally some do, but it's not
Speaker 1: like a top tier fish. People don't travel like to
Speaker 1: go there to fish whitefish. People want the non native
Speaker 1: shut or they like large miles of native fish all
Speaker 1: the salmon.
Speaker 2: Introduce salmon.
Speaker 1: But you'll go and be like, the reason you didn't
Speaker 1: catch anything today is because of natives, right, And you'll
Speaker 1: hear it so much from guys in the Pacific Northwest,
Speaker 1: where they'll be, like you mentioned earlier, having a gillnet.
Speaker 1: They'll be like, that's the problem with the fishery, and
Speaker 1: it's like, but that's what you're raised to believe that
Speaker 1: because it's always like a blame game and you look
Speaker 1: at but bahom it, they fished here for twenty thousand,
Speaker 1: ten thousand, sixteen, like thousands of years supported to people
Speaker 1: on the fishery. Then European culture, like euro American culture,
Speaker 1: came in and destroyed the fishery. The things we did
Speaker 1: destroy the fishery. But now you look and there's some
Speaker 1: native people catching some fishing and that, and that's who's like,
Speaker 1: that's who's the blame. It's pervas I don't even know
Speaker 1: if you realize how pervasive that thinking is, because it's
Speaker 1: like they it can't click, like how could they be
Speaker 1: commercial fishing when I can only keep one fish or
Speaker 1: I can't keep any fish, but they can commercial fish.
Speaker 1: That's who killed all the fish. It's out there, like
Speaker 1: that perspective is just out there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I've lived it, you know, like growing up
Speaker 4: fishing on the Columbia, you do get a lot of
Speaker 4: a lot of hate. People come out and yell at
Speaker 4: you and and things like that. And we've been shot
Speaker 4: at at night in the dark. We were out and
Speaker 4: I called the cops. The cops didn't even show up.
Speaker 4: You could see the muzzle flash. It sounded like a
Speaker 4: twenty two and we were like, what the he We're
Speaker 4: a good thing. We were a ways from shore in
Speaker 4: that kind of like a bay area in the nine
Speaker 4: to one to one operator, well, can you see what
Speaker 4: they're wearing? And I'm like, no, it's dark. I see
Speaker 4: a muzzle flash and can you let us know? And
Speaker 4: it's like we got down and had to drive out
Speaker 4: of there. And another time I always remember there was
Speaker 4: an older gentleman. He followed us because you know, we're
Speaker 4: tied off of the bank. It was two and a
Speaker 4: half hours. He stood on the shore and yelled and
Speaker 4: cussed at us, like I called the cops, like I
Speaker 4: think he might need to.
Speaker 2: I don't want this.
Speaker 4: Guy to have a heart attack. Yeah, that's how it
Speaker 4: worked up. He was and you know, like chucking rocks
Speaker 4: at us and things like that.
Speaker 1: Because people can't picture the long history. They like they
Speaker 1: looked through the dam. They looked through the dam or
Speaker 1: past the dam, and they see you. And that's the problem,
Speaker 1: do you know what I mean? They're like they can't picture.
Speaker 2: What happened.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, yeah, I guess we're so visible. Right.
Speaker 4: There's there's there's plenty of non native gillnet fisheries that
Speaker 4: are happening in the Lower River and a lot in
Speaker 4: the ocean. But it's just we're visible.
Speaker 1: And that's like, if it wasn't for that little handful
Speaker 1: of fish, everything can be better. It's like, no, dude,
Speaker 1: it wouldn't be better if you're not talking about the problem.
Speaker 2: You don't want to talk about the real problem. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you don't want to talk about the real problem.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: The glass half full thing is I think it's awesome
Speaker 4: that people are starting to realize, like, you know, the
Speaker 4: work that we do, it benefits everybody, not just the tribes.
Speaker 4: It's everybody. And so like I've been at places like
Speaker 4: like a trade show or whatever, and then you know,
Speaker 4: somebody will come up look at my tag, like I
Speaker 4: want to shake your hand. You know, they're you know,
Speaker 4: part of the they're a fishing guide or something like that,
Speaker 4: and they'll say, we wouldn't have salmon if it weren't
Speaker 4: for the Indians, And you.
Speaker 2: Know, people see that connection.
Speaker 4: Yeah, a little bit of that. So there, you know,
Speaker 4: we're starting to realize and and you know, just the
Speaker 4: outreach and the partnerships that we have and that the
Speaker 4: benefits that we bring is for all and not just us.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So it's crazy. I mean we have commissioners that had
Speaker 3: spent time in federal prison for fishing, exercising their right
Speaker 3: to their treaty reserved right to fish and they were arrested, sentenced,
Speaker 3: spent time in prison for fishing. So it's it's a
Speaker 3: crazy deal. I'm from Idaho. I saw this the same
Speaker 3: thing you're talking about, Steve with the salmon what happened
Speaker 3: in the salmon fisheries in the Columbia. But you know
Speaker 3: that led to those court decisions and then that formed,
Speaker 3: you know, out of that the tribal co management that
Speaker 3: formed the Columbia River Inner Tribal Fish Commission in nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy seven, and so this the tribe started building staff
Speaker 3: from then and now we're like at one hundred and
Speaker 3: fifty to one hundred and seventy people at Critic in Portland.
Speaker 3: Each of the four member tribes, the the the Yakama,
Speaker 3: Warm Springs, You, Matila, and Nesperse combined, we have like
Speaker 3: seven hundred and fifty people working on fish recovery.
Speaker 2: And I think that's.
Speaker 3: Where we get our the tribes get their power is
Speaker 3: that they're co managers and they got a singular focus
Speaker 3: on it's the fish Commission, right, It's not the it's
Speaker 3: not the fish and Irrigation Commission. It's not we don't
Speaker 3: have the things that the states are. You know, they've
Speaker 3: got to look after all these other interests and this
Speaker 3: is singularly focused on fish recovery. So we're not what
Speaker 3: we want to do. We'll provide more fish to our constituents.
Speaker 3: Are you know the tribal fishermen that are out there
Speaker 3: exercising their treaty right and they're entitled to half of
Speaker 3: that harvestable fish, and however they take them. They they
Speaker 3: decide how they're going to take them, and states decide
Speaker 3: how much they're going to split their fifty percent into
Speaker 3: sport fishing versus commercial fishing, however they want to divide it,
Speaker 3: and the tribes don't you know, they're party to that,
Speaker 3: but they don't tell the states how they're going to
Speaker 3: allocate their fisheries. And you know, kind of should go
Speaker 3: the same way for the tribes. This is this is
Speaker 3: a big conservation effort and they run hatcheries about ten
Speaker 3: hatches that are run by the tribes to get the
Speaker 3: money for it. And they don't catch all those fish.
Speaker 3: I mean, those fish are going out to the public.
Speaker 3: Everybody's catching them from here to the Gulf of Alaska.
Speaker 4: Well, we're kind of end users on some of that.
Speaker 4: There's some stocks of fish like the klick Atat, the
Speaker 4: majority of those are caught in Alaska and by you know,
Speaker 4: the other ocean fisheries along the West coast, and you know,
Speaker 4: we have a pie chart and then it shows all
Speaker 4: of the take and the tribal harvest is just this
Speaker 4: little bitty sliver.
Speaker 2: That's the people putting them in and doing all the.
Speaker 4: Work to the habitat restoration, because the work that we
Speaker 4: do goes beyond just fish and that's what you know,
Speaker 4: like being in management now of like getting people to
Speaker 4: understand like the things that we do, like you know,
Speaker 4: energy production is fish issues because of the hydrosystem, and
Speaker 4: habitat restoration and even roads like we have our habitat
Speaker 4: staff that they've worked with the DOT to like move
Speaker 4: a highway and and you know, putting in better fish
Speaker 4: passage and just you know, reconnecting rivers which helps you know,
Speaker 4: floods and flood management, flood risk and then also especially
Speaker 4: in the face of climate change and how things are changing,
Speaker 4: like you were just talking about the weather here, you know,
Speaker 4: we're seeing that we're you know potentially in our three
Speaker 4: years of drought and this year isn't isn't looking much better,
Speaker 4: and so we had definitely have our work cut out
Speaker 4: for And it goes a long ways, and like Doug
Speaker 4: was saying about how the tribes choose to allocate the
Speaker 4: other thing that our jobs are so great to me,
Speaker 4: and why it means so much is on the cultural side.
Speaker 4: You know how much that that these things are natural
Speaker 4: resources and salmon we refer to ourselves as salmon people,
Speaker 4: you know, and it's cultural preservation and that that's really
Speaker 4: what because I grew up in a traditional home with
Speaker 4: you know, like my mother and my grandparents and practicing
Speaker 4: our you know, hunting, fishing, gathering, and you know, our
Speaker 4: tribal religion and all of the things that go along
Speaker 4: with that. All of our ceremonies are centered around our
Speaker 4: natural resources, around the salmon and things like that, and
Speaker 4: you know, sadly we're losing that. And then that's how
Speaker 4: you know, people get led astray. You know, you have
Speaker 4: you know the effects of drugs and alcohol and stuff.
Speaker 4: But if we really had those things that for us
Speaker 4: to be able to continue, I think would be better off.
Speaker 4: And well I know we would because you know, living
Speaker 4: in those communities and it's like we're lost. We're still
Speaker 4: lost because we were displaced by the construction of the
Speaker 4: dams on the river. We weren't relocated or subsidized or anything.
Speaker 4: It's just they came and spray painted on the on
Speaker 4: the houses like at Slilo Falls, took an inventory and
Speaker 4: that was it. We've never we've never received our Columbia
Speaker 4: River housing. And you know, for the villages that were flooded,
Speaker 4: it's just like your house is gone, you have.
Speaker 2: They've painted the ones that were going to be underwater.
Speaker 4: Yeah, just took an inventory and then people had no
Speaker 4: choice but to move to the reservation or drown.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah. And it's funny even me realizing that now,
Speaker 4: Like you know, I was born on the reservation and
Speaker 4: Topish and I lived at my grandparents house. But I
Speaker 4: was even as just as an adult a couple of
Speaker 4: years ago, I realized, like that wasn't my grandpa's home.
Speaker 4: My grandpa was born, born and raised in at Salilo
Speaker 4: and he went to the war. It's so funny. Like
Speaker 4: my grandpa's older sister, she used to tell us this story,
Speaker 4: and even as an older lady, she would cry about
Speaker 4: it. It still gets to me. She was born with cataracts,
Speaker 4: so she was legally blind and so she couldn't help
Speaker 4: do all the work. So she took care of my grandpa.
Speaker 4: And she said, one day, Salilo, the government, the military, police, everything,
Speaker 4: they just pulled in with cattle trucks and they took
Speaker 4: the children by force and took them to a boarding school.
Speaker 4: And she said people were beaten, arrested, And she said
Speaker 4: that she held on to him and was dragged across
Speaker 4: the ground, crying, no, don't take him as just a baby,
Speaker 4: and she cried as an adult that she said, if
Speaker 4: I could have just held them a little longer, maybe
Speaker 4: they would have gave up.
Speaker 2: Then he went on to fight in the war.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he was four years old, taken to the boarding
Speaker 4: school in Warm Springs, Oregon. He didn't get to come
Speaker 4: home for two years, and that was only because they
Speaker 4: were moving them to the boarding school at Fort Simcoe,
Speaker 4: which is on the Yakama Reservation. And then he was
Speaker 4: there through like elementary school, and then he got shipped
Speaker 4: to Chamaua, which is in Oregon. That's a high school,
Speaker 4: you know, boarding school, high school. He graduated from there
Speaker 4: when he was seventeen and then he enlisted in the
Speaker 4: Navy and fought in World War Two.
Speaker 2: You kidding me? Yeah, and his home now sits underwater.
Speaker 4: That's the home that he came back to from the war.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know what I was talking about, the con
Speaker 1: inflicks between like white dudes at fish and the perspective
Speaker 1: that native people's are taking fish. It's like everybody's fighting
Speaker 1: over crumbs. In some regions, everybody's fighting over crumbs and
Speaker 1: they don't even know what happened. Like if it's bread crumbs,
Speaker 1: they don't know what happened.
Speaker 2: To the loaf of bread.
Speaker 1: There's you know what I mean, it's just gone and
Speaker 1: now they're going to like fight for crumbs. And one
Speaker 1: of the ways that that like fighting for crumbs and
Speaker 1: it's it's I guess it's important because if once those
Speaker 1: crumbs are gone, everything's gone. You know, to think about
Speaker 1: like in terms of fish, right they if we lose
Speaker 1: the fish, if you lose all the memory of the
Speaker 1: fish and all the runs and all the historic areas,
Speaker 1: it's less that you can build up someday when you
Speaker 1: get it back together. But what turned me on to
Speaker 1: even wanting to talk to you guys is this idea
Speaker 1: and Heather, my friend Heather Duville sent me some links
Speaker 1: about it was was like the sea lion issue, and
Speaker 1: I want to talk about that for a minute, or
Speaker 1: have you guys explained the sea line issue for a
Speaker 1: minute just to sort of demonstrate this idea of that
Speaker 1: to fix the problem is like impossible, seemingly impossible damn removal.
Speaker 2: It's so hard, and so you.
Speaker 1: Got to look like, well, that's what would really like
Speaker 1: there's these huge things that would occur and you could
Speaker 1: slowly rebuild the whole thing, but in the meantime you
Speaker 1: got to like fight for crumbs. And it's even gotten
Speaker 1: what we're fighting for crumbs with sea lions. Can you
Speaker 1: talk about that issue a bit, like how sea lions
Speaker 1: play into this thing?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Sure, So sea lions were heavily managed in the
Speaker 3: late eighteen hundreds and then from like nineteen fifteen or
Speaker 3: so to nineteen seventy into Columbia. There's a bounty on
Speaker 3: sea lions bounty and a sea lion hunter. So the
Speaker 3: Oregon Fish Commission hired a guy that would shoot sea
Speaker 3: lions and cut their ears off and then get paid
Speaker 3: by how many sea lions he took care of.
Speaker 6: And that was specifically to protect the salmon room.
Speaker 3: Protect the salmon exactly. So that was the management that
Speaker 3: went on. And in that era of the early seventies
Speaker 3: when all of the environmental laws got passed, you know,
Speaker 3: you had the Environmental Protection Act, the Clean Air Act,
Speaker 3: Marine Mammal Protection Act is passed in seventy two, and
Speaker 3: marine mammals were in terrible shape. I mean it was
Speaker 3: really necessary. California sea lions were around twenty twenty five
Speaker 3: thousand coastwide, so it's managed as a single stock. It
Speaker 3: ranges from Baja California up to Lower BC. So that
Speaker 3: stock was twenty or twenty five thousand animals. Now there's
Speaker 3: close to three hundred thousand animals and it's at caring capacity.
Speaker 3: So the Marine Mammal Protection Act protected marine mammals. If
Speaker 3: you were a marine mammals.
Speaker 2: That can't protect effectively man.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and super successful, right, But what wasn't part of
Speaker 3: the all in and you know you had uh, sea otters, whales,
Speaker 3: all kinds of polar bears, all kinds of things that
Speaker 3: are super depressed, and there wasn't any thought put into management.
Speaker 3: You know, it's like we're going to lose them. We
Speaker 3: need to protect them. And it worked really really well
Speaker 3: on some populations like California sea lions. I mean they're
Speaker 3: way past recovered. They're at carrying capacity. It's the classic
Speaker 3: S curve. It's plateaued. We're at at carraning capacity for
Speaker 3: sea lions coast wide.
Speaker 2: Is there is there any talk a dlisting?
Speaker 3: Oh, they're not well. See, it's different exactly. So if
Speaker 3: you're a marine, mamma, you're protected. Period.
Speaker 2: We've talked. We've talked about there's no management.
Speaker 3: There's no management provision at all.
Speaker 1: We've talked about this a bunch of times in different
Speaker 1: management things. We're talking about the other day. I can't
Speaker 1: remember what and what context, but ways in which something
Speaker 1: gets so bad you can't picture it getting better, and
Speaker 1: then you draft regulation like that like the wild hoor
Speaker 1: always point out the Wildhorse and Borrow Protection Act. Things
Speaker 1: get so bad you draft regulation because you can't picture
Speaker 1: the future ramifications, and then you wind up laying and
Speaker 1: you're like, damn man, we should have thought of that.
Speaker 8: Yeah. It's like it's like the sea otters up on
Speaker 8: Pow you know that have exploded.
Speaker 1: People like, well, they'll never be abundant, why even make
Speaker 1: a provision for abundance.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I mean it's just hard to see over
Speaker 3: the horizon, right, I mean you see what's there and
Speaker 3: it's like it couldn't happen. It gives you hope though
Speaker 3: for salmon, Right, maybe maybe we can do this.
Speaker 2: But then, what's a good point. Man? With the Ballard
Speaker 2: locks up.
Speaker 3: You know, the the inlet or the outlet of Lake
Speaker 3: Washington in the in the eighties, all of a sudden,
Speaker 3: sea lions started showing up at the Ballard locks there
Speaker 3: in Herschel if you remember that, there's these particular California
Speaker 3: sea lions started praying on the steel Head run going
Speaker 3: into the Ballard locks.
Speaker 2: But they figured it out.
Speaker 3: They figured it out. Yeah, and you've got this growing population.
Speaker 3: They're expanding right to different places where they where they
Speaker 3: really haven't been in years and years because there's no management,
Speaker 3: and they they're decimating the winter steel Heead run in
Speaker 3: Lake Washington.
Speaker 2: Well, that triggered legislation.
Speaker 3: Then to finally amend the Marine Mental Protection Act, and
Speaker 3: they finally got that done in ninety four and it
Speaker 3: was Section one twenty that they put into the act.
Speaker 3: So this was management it's only on sea lions, and
Speaker 3: it's that they have to be individually identifiable and they
Speaker 3: have to be shown to have a significant negative impact
Speaker 3: on listed salmon populations. And if you can meet that
Speaker 3: criteria and you have a permit, you can remove that
Speaker 3: sea lion.
Speaker 8: So it was like, we know this one's a bad egg.
Speaker 3: We got to get rid of him, right, and how
Speaker 3: do you know, how do you know what that sea
Speaker 3: line is? Well, you got to catch him, and you
Speaker 3: got to put a brand on him, and you've got
Speaker 3: to have an observer there that sees him eating a fish.
Speaker 3: Then you got to get then you got to trap
Speaker 3: him again and euthanize him, you know. And so it's
Speaker 3: very tough. And that was the one was not successful.
Speaker 3: At the Ballard Locks. The still a population when extinct
Speaker 3: before really before the legislation was passed extinct, Yeah they're gone.
Speaker 3: So then Bonneville Dams could put yeah, yeah it's gone.
Speaker 3: And now there's actually a current problem another problem which
Speaker 3: is soak run in Lake Washington and it's going down
Speaker 3: that same that same round, and the only thing to
Speaker 3: manage there is this section one twenty. So they would
Speaker 3: have to to get you know, uh, they'd have to
Speaker 3: submit an application to to National Marine Fishery Service to
Speaker 3: get a permit through this one twenty.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's all to do with the ballard locks.
Speaker 2: That's best, not even the Columbia.
Speaker 3: That's not the Columbia.
Speaker 1: Because in the Columbia system, I don't know this is true.
Speaker 1: I was reading the sea lions take more fish than humans. Yeah,
Speaker 1: where are they doing that? Because I mean they're not
Speaker 1: getting past dams, right.
Speaker 3: So what happened in about two thousand, Uh, we started
Speaker 3: seeing sea lions at Bonnville Dam, at the tail race
Speaker 3: of Bonville Dam, and it was just a few how
Speaker 3: far up the river is that? One hundred and forty
Speaker 3: five miles?
Speaker 2: Wow, those suns of bitches swim that far the ocean.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I've got all kinds of stories. We've trapped,
Speaker 3: we've radio tracked them, and they will they'll go back
Speaker 3: to Astoria and back upstream two or three times in
Speaker 3: a year. It takes them just a couple of days.
Speaker 2: Are you serious?
Speaker 3: There they are?
Speaker 2: They're they're pretty remarkable animals. One hundred and forty miles
Speaker 2: up the river. Yeah, dude, anymal lick of salt?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: No, no, Well then this problem. Once these animals.
Speaker 3: Saw, hey, this is this is the buffet, right, Because
Speaker 3: you've got this concentration of fish at the tail race.
Speaker 3: They're trying to find the sea ladder or the fish
Speaker 3: ladder entrances, and so they're congregating. You get a collection
Speaker 3: of fish, and the sea lions find that and it's
Speaker 3: like this is great. They come back every year, they
Speaker 3: bring their buddies. They become habituated with it, and they
Speaker 3: start taking out a whole bunch of fish. So then
Speaker 3: the corp of engineers who runs.
Speaker 2: The dam, I gotta I gotta back up on that.
Speaker 2: This is an unanswerable question.
Speaker 1: A sea lion, like a sea lion, goes way to
Speaker 1: hel up the river, like a pioneer sea lion, because
Speaker 1: way up the river he's like, holy smokes, this is
Speaker 1: the promised land, right, and he goes back down at
Speaker 1: some point.
Speaker 2: No one will know.
Speaker 1: No one can answer this. How how is it conveyed?
Speaker 1: Like how does it convey to another sea lion?
Speaker 2: You know what I mean? Where Billy was. Honey bees
Speaker 2: have that deal. Honey bees have that deal. When they
Speaker 2: come back and they have they have like a thing
Speaker 2: they do. People call it a dance and they don't,
Speaker 2: you know, they don't perceive it as a dance. I'm sure, but.
Speaker 1: Honey bees come back and they have a movement pattern
Speaker 1: that says, I'm into it, heavy duty piling that way.
Speaker 8: Couldn't it just be like a generation Like it's like
Speaker 8: generational learning, like.
Speaker 2: Your kids offspring, Yeah, you bring offspring.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you bring your mate. Yeah, then you bring your offspring.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because your mate's like, what are they doing?
Speaker 1: I a film follow them just like it's so hard
Speaker 1: to like imagine by the mechanism by which you come
Speaker 1: back and then there's more. But yeah, like you just
Speaker 1: bring your offspring than some generations down the road. Everybody
Speaker 1: knows what's the honey pot.
Speaker 3: These these sea lions that go to Bonneville Dam are
Speaker 3: like the big sea lions that have been recorded, so
Speaker 3: a California sea lione. And it's only males. So the
Speaker 3: biology really is the female state. They stay down in
Speaker 3: the rookeries that are mainly in the in the Channel
Speaker 3: islands in California, so the off Santa Barbara. So that's
Speaker 3: where the females stay and they don't venture out of there.
Speaker 3: They stay very close to those islands.
Speaker 1: The males that are going one hundred and forty miles
Speaker 1: up the Columbia are breeding with females in the Channel Islands.
Speaker 2: Amazing.
Speaker 3: Huh yeah, wow, yeah, So what it is.
Speaker 8: It's like me telling I found this really good hunting spot.
Speaker 8: You want to come and check it out with me?
Speaker 2: You can't, but you can't talk though, but.
Speaker 8: Obviously they talk.
Speaker 3: So there's photos of them at the rookeries, like on
Speaker 3: sam Miguill Island where there's a male sea lion, male
Speaker 3: sea lion, and then all of a sudden there's this
Speaker 3: gigantic male sea lion. Oh the brand on him. He
Speaker 3: was a monoville. Really. Oh yeah, we have animals that
Speaker 3: we had captured, branded and then recaptured two months I
Speaker 3: think it was two months later, a month and a
Speaker 3: half later, and it gained four hundred pounds.
Speaker 7: Whoa, that's a lot of salmon.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a lot of fish, and they do have
Speaker 3: So this is the spring of the year. California sea
Speaker 3: lions arrive at Bonneville early April, and then by the
Speaker 3: end of May they leave and they go because then
Speaker 3: it's it's time to go to the breeding grounds. So
Speaker 3: they leave the system and the stellar sea lions that
Speaker 3: are there now, which is a newer story. They also
Speaker 3: leave the system by the end of May, and then
Speaker 3: the California sea lions show up back up the next
Speaker 3: the next April.
Speaker 2: Okay, what are they feeding on specifically when they get
Speaker 2: there that time of year.
Speaker 3: At Bonneville Spring Chinook? Yeah, spring Chinook is the big
Speaker 3: that's the big one, and a little bit of There's
Speaker 3: probably some steel head around as well, but it's primarily
Speaker 3: primarily spring Chinook. They also eat sturgeon that lower the
Speaker 3: Columbia River. The lower Columbia sturgeon population has really gone
Speaker 3: down and a lot of those would come up in
Speaker 3: a big congregating area would be the tail race of Bonneville,
Speaker 3: and they just got decimated by sea lions.
Speaker 8: So they don't No, this is like a two part question.
Speaker 8: Those sea lions don't have any impact on like non
Speaker 8: native game fish that are in there now, like walleye
Speaker 8: and small mouth And then what kind of impact are
Speaker 8: the walleye and small mouth bass having on salmon as well?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so.
Speaker 3: They're opportunistic feeders, right, So whatever is the most about it,
Speaker 3: that's what they're gonna eat. And a sea lion that's
Speaker 3: at the ocean is going to have a really diverse diet,
Speaker 3: and then the further up river they go, the more
Speaker 3: salmon centric their diet is. And when they get to Bonneville,
Speaker 3: it's they're eating depending on time, they're eating salmon, steelhead primarily,
Speaker 3: they're eating sturgeon now and then, and then they're eating
Speaker 3: some lamprey as well. And that's really it. We we
Speaker 3: see a few other things. You'll see sucker, maybe an
Speaker 3: occasional walleye or whatever.
Speaker 8: But do you that you guys view that like walleye
Speaker 8: and smallmouth as a big problem for salmon or is.
Speaker 9: It more like larger predators like sea lions, way and
Speaker 9: smallmouth or a problem for sure, and it's probably a
Speaker 9: bigger problem upstream of Bonneville.
Speaker 4: Cut in the reservoirs.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The thing with the sea lion issue that I hadn't
Speaker 1: really put the thought of before, But I mean, that's
Speaker 1: almost that's almost a dam problem, Like the dam is
Speaker 1: creating the fishery for the sea lions, yep, because it's
Speaker 1: creating a holding pen form where they can't get.
Speaker 3: Past right right. And and like you brought up Lewis
Speaker 3: and Clark when they went through Salilo they they talk
Speaker 3: about seeing foca. Well they'd never seen a sea lion,
Speaker 3: so they thought it was a seal. That was what
Speaker 3: they called seals. Oh, so they were okay, they ran
Speaker 3: into the way up the hell so they ran into
Speaker 3: them there and they were in October, right late September,
Speaker 3: early October at Soalilo.
Speaker 2: And.
Speaker 3: They shot one but they were but they weren't able
Speaker 3: to collect it. So they were trying to document it
Speaker 3: and stuff.
Speaker 2: But so they had historically used the resource.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so our tribal members are certain that they came
Speaker 3: up there in the fishery. They took care of the
Speaker 3: of the problem. The sea lions didn't stay long as
Speaker 3: a competitor there.
Speaker 2: Through the archaeological stuff.
Speaker 3: That they've done, they do find sea lion bones, but
Speaker 3: not in huge numbers. So they probably had hunts that
Speaker 3: would go down to get sea lions occasionally or trade
Speaker 3: or something. But there isn't It isn't like salmon bones
Speaker 3: that you just see everywhere.
Speaker 2: So it wasn't a.
Speaker 3: Nowhere near as important as like salmon or something.
Speaker 8: Like the competition factor when you've got fifteen million salmon,
Speaker 8: like there's room for the sea lions to take exactly yeah,
Speaker 8: you know, yeah.
Speaker 2: You say the stellars are coming up there too, They're
Speaker 2: coming from the north. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So, so as the plot thickens and the story goes on,
Speaker 3: by the states of Oregon and Washington put in for
Speaker 3: this one to twenty permit to remove animals at Bonneville.
Speaker 2: About the animal rights people love that shit.
Speaker 3: It was it was a challenge, yeah, and they got it.
Speaker 3: They got to permit in eight and that was after
Speaker 3: documenting the presence of these animals for a long time,
Speaker 3: and they're how many animals are there, how many fish
Speaker 3: are they eating, how many days are they staying there,
Speaker 3: all of that stuff. All that information was necessary to
Speaker 3: get the permit. As soon as they got the permit,
Speaker 3: then Stellar seed so they got to permit to remove
Speaker 3: California Sea lions. And then two years later Stellar sea
Speaker 3: lions are in bigger numbers at Bonneville than California Sea lions.
Speaker 3: And what had happened. Stellars are gigantic, Stellar male and
Speaker 3: again it's males only, and they'll go they'll go a ton.
Speaker 8: Can you for people who don't know the difference, can
Speaker 8: you explain, like where the stellars are coming from and
Speaker 8: versus the California.
Speaker 5: Want.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So California sea lions range from British Columbia to
Speaker 3: southern part of Baja and the rookeries are primarily in
Speaker 3: Baja and along California. And then you got a couple
Speaker 3: of little places at California or along Oregon coast, but
Speaker 3: that's it. Stellar sea lions are more northern, so they
Speaker 3: will range down into California, but they'll go up into
Speaker 3: British Columbia, probably up into Alaska. And you have them,
Speaker 3: and you haven't broke into two stocks. This is the
Speaker 3: Eastern stock, which is like the one hundred and forty
Speaker 3: fourth latitude. Anything that's east of the one hundred and
Speaker 3: forty fourth degree latitude is the Eastern stock is stellar
Speaker 3: sea lions. Those are the ones that we're getting at Bonneville.
Speaker 3: To the west of that are the ones that are.
Speaker 2: Up in.
Speaker 3: Southeast Alaska off the Illusions and then further up.
Speaker 2: So those dudes aren't calling all the way down to
Speaker 2: the Columbia.
Speaker 3: No, they're not, and they're not in very good shape.
Speaker 3: They're they're listed at they're a listed species. Those Western
Speaker 3: stock the Eastern rock that the Eastern stock, I'll just
Speaker 3: think of that rock the Eastern stock was listed as
Speaker 3: threatened and then we're delisted by twenty thirteen, twenty twelve thirteen.
Speaker 3: So that was why they You couldn't even if even
Speaker 3: if they'd have been showing up at Bonneville, that would
Speaker 3: have been on the permit. We never states never would
Speaker 3: have got a permit to remove them because they were listed.
Speaker 3: Now they're now they're unlisted and they are part of
Speaker 3: the removal program.
Speaker 2: Now, oh, I want to get to that program.
Speaker 1: I got one that little technical question you mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: catching them and branding them yep, he explaining that catching
Speaker 1: them how and branding them how?
Speaker 3: Yeah, So the way we catch them is a trap.
Speaker 3: That's a dock. It's like a sixteen by sixteen square
Speaker 3: foot dock with chain link fence around it, a big
Speaker 3: chain link fan, and then like a gate that's on
Speaker 3: a guillotine type thing and you can hold it up
Speaker 3: with an electronic device to trigger so we can remotely
Speaker 3: drop that gate. You wait for sea lions to get
Speaker 3: on that track. No, so they just haul out, so
Speaker 3: they want a place to rest, and so you're looking
Speaker 3: for places for them to haul out, and so that's
Speaker 3: the that's part of the trap. Is you gotta you
Speaker 3: gotta set these traps where they've been hauling out where
Speaker 3: you think you can get them to use, and then
Speaker 3: they get accustomed to it and they'll haul out and
Speaker 3: then you'll drop the drop the trap, and then we
Speaker 3: have a barge with these transfer cages. You go up
Speaker 3: against it, against that trap, open the doors, run them
Speaker 3: into that transfer cage.
Speaker 2: He probably, Yeah, how do they react when you walk
Speaker 2: up to him?
Speaker 5: So?
Speaker 3: Stellar sea lions can be pretty ornery. They don't, Yeah,
Speaker 3: they don't take to it real well. California sea lions
Speaker 3: are pretty pretty docile. They will, they'll move around. You
Speaker 3: could get in there with a piece of plywood in
Speaker 3: front and you could kind of hurt them, but nobody
Speaker 3: would do that with a Stellar sea lion right there.
Speaker 3: They're big. I mean, it's a two thousand pound animal
Speaker 3: that's pissed. In fact, we're taught now we put these arrays.
Speaker 3: So we take these sixteen by sixteen traps and we
Speaker 3: put three of them together. A couple of times we
Speaker 3: had single traps and you'd get three or four or
Speaker 3: five Stellar sea lions in there, and then they'd start
Speaker 3: doing the WWF and they'd roll the trap over so, yeah,
Speaker 3: they're they're big.
Speaker 2: And then you branded them with a cattle brand. Yeah
Speaker 2: what's the brand?
Speaker 3: Uh so a ladder up there at c and then
Speaker 3: a number different locations. There's branding programs at different places.
Speaker 3: And the states used the state of Oregon used to
Speaker 3: brand at Astoria. So there's there's animals from there, there's
Speaker 3: you know, all these different places where studies have been done.
Speaker 3: They have kind of a coding system. Where do you
Speaker 3: hit them on the hip, right on the back, across
Speaker 3: the back? How long do they live?
Speaker 8: Like are you seeing the same ones.
Speaker 3: Year after year after year after right? So adult these
Speaker 3: are these are mature adults that we see primarily. We
Speaker 3: do see occasionally a few smaller sea lions now, but
Speaker 3: they'll live. They can live, you know, like in captivity
Speaker 3: they might live to be in their twenties, but they'll
Speaker 3: probably in the wild maybe fifteen.
Speaker 1: And how many like at peak spring Chinook run, how
Speaker 1: many are in that dam or at the foot of
Speaker 1: that dam?
Speaker 2: How many sea lions?
Speaker 3: So from the observation program that the corp of Engineers does,
Speaker 3: the highest observed consumption was ten thousand fish that they
Speaker 3: saw that they documented being eaten.
Speaker 2: There in a tail race, and what does that mean
Speaker 2: over how much time.
Speaker 3: That's over the spring, So that's April through mid.
Speaker 2: Mid May to little they'll see ten thousand.
Speaker 3: And that's cherry pick and that's the top that's the
Speaker 3: top number. But that were represented almost five percent of
Speaker 3: the spring chinook run that was going over the dam.
Speaker 2: Okay, so you're losing five percent to sea lions.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well that's within this quarter of a mile that
Speaker 3: you can see from the face of the dam and
Speaker 3: do the observations.
Speaker 5: UH.
Speaker 3: National Marine Fishery Service has done studies in the Lower
Speaker 3: River where they put pit tags in them, so that's
Speaker 3: you know, that's the way we track salmon in the
Speaker 3: Columbia and it's basically the same things that you getting
Speaker 3: your dog UH to track them. And there's a huge
Speaker 3: program in the Columbia where they these pit tags go
Speaker 3: over antennas. It activates the antenna and records the numbers,
Speaker 3: so they're all individually numbered, so we know any any
Speaker 3: salmon that we've put a tag and we know by
Speaker 3: by individual and at all of the dam ladders, like
Speaker 3: at Bonneville, we get have pit tag detectors, so when
Speaker 3: they crossed the dam, we we know it. So they
Speaker 3: captured these by gilmetting in the lower river down by Astoria.
Speaker 3: National Maune Fishery Service would capture these fish, put pit
Speaker 3: tags in them this is spring chinook, and then release
Speaker 3: those fish and also took genetic samples and with the
Speaker 3: genetic samples, we could figure out what their origin was,
Speaker 3: so you could subtract off any fish that were going
Speaker 3: to lower river tributaries. Also, harvest is highly regulated and
Speaker 3: we know what the harvest estimates are for each week,
Speaker 3: so subtract off harvest, and then you have the number
Speaker 3: of fish that you tag that should go over Bonneville.
Speaker 3: And in the biggest year, which was twenty fifteen, the
Speaker 3: biggest loss, fifty percent of the spring chinook run was
Speaker 3: lost between Astoria and Bonneville. And that's peer reviewed publication.
Speaker 3: Fifty percent attributed to sea lions. And so we had
Speaker 3: a two hundred thousand fish were eaten by sea lions.
Speaker 3: Two hundred thousand fish cross Bona. That's the largest springs
Speaker 3: nook run we've seen in decades.
Speaker 8: Going back to what Steve said, how many sea lions
Speaker 8: are consuming two hundred thousand salmon?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's crazy. It's ballpark it's not that many, right,
Speaker 3: you know that are at Bonneville. It's like I think
Speaker 3: a couple of years we've maybe seen two hundred a
Speaker 3: little over two hundred individuals, so it isn't huge. And
Speaker 3: the animals that have been from this group of branded animals,
Speaker 3: there's a big haul outside at Astoria called the East
Speaker 3: Morning Basin and will cite animals there, and then the
Speaker 3: ones that you'll see at Bonneville or at Wi Land
Speaker 3: at Falls another place where they congregate similar situation with
Speaker 3: sea lions. It's only about seven percent of that branded
Speaker 3: population go that far up, but that seven come back
Speaker 3: every year just like you're talking.
Speaker 2: But they habituate. There's faithful as the salmon man.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, once they've locked into it, they come back
Speaker 3: and we'll see them multiple years, three, four or five years.
Speaker 7: But so the tribal rights, because it seems like sometimes
Speaker 7: they can trump other laws and rules and rags. But
Speaker 7: I'm guessing that doesn't work in this case, to trump
Speaker 7: the Marine Protect Mammal Protection Act.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because of the Act. And that's what I've been
Speaker 4: talking about, is all.
Speaker 2: You guys don't have harvest rights on sea lions.
Speaker 4: No, because historically they didn't come back in those those numbers,
Speaker 4: and they're not coming above Well, we have a few
Speaker 4: that come above Bonneville Dam that where our gilnet fisheries
Speaker 4: are only above Bonneville Dam in the Zone six fishing area,
Speaker 4: and so we don't we don't harvest them. Like the
Speaker 4: big numbers are the Lower River and how you said
Speaker 4: the sea lions are a down problem, Well it goes
Speaker 4: beyond just the problem when they're using that entire stretch
Speaker 4: of the Lower River from Astoria. One year at Astoria,
Speaker 4: what he was talking about that east mooring basin, I
Speaker 4: think there were was it ten thousand, eight thousand, It
Speaker 4: was a.
Speaker 3: Right around four thousand, Yeah, at the East Morning Basin.
Speaker 3: In the East Morning Basin, it's not very big, you know,
Speaker 3: it went from the early two thousands. There would be
Speaker 3: a couple of hundred a year and they do counts
Speaker 3: every day on these and they'd haul out on the docks.
Speaker 3: The East Morning Basin is not used anymore. Used to
Speaker 3: be commercial vessels there as well as recreational, and it
Speaker 3: was taken over by sea lions basically.
Speaker 1: Well, but I think what Yanni's asking is like picture that, Like,
Speaker 1: for instance, I have more familiarity with regulatory structure in Alaska.
Speaker 1: But there are cases where you have NOAH administered species.
Speaker 1: You have like US and Fish Wildlife Service administered species,
Speaker 1: whatever you have like tribal harvest rights where like you
Speaker 1: know they can harvest, they can harvest walrus, they can
Speaker 1: harvest whale species.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 2: The things that would be off often is everybody else.
Speaker 1: If if you're if the inner tribal group on the Columbia,
Speaker 1: like if you wanted to, you wouldn't have the authority
Speaker 1: of just saying we're going to do sea lion control
Speaker 1: on our own because we're not beholden to we're not
Speaker 1: beholden to EESA, or we're not behold in the marine
Speaker 1: mammal Protection actly, you don't have that ability that you
Speaker 1: don't have that legal ability just to take it into
Speaker 1: your own hands.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we actually have. You know, Yakma has written their
Speaker 4: own resolution right, which is a tribal law that the
Speaker 4: taking of sea lions to protect life and property. And
Speaker 4: it was funny I actually ended up in that situation
Speaker 4: where I fish by the city of the Dalls. There
Speaker 4: was an animal. There was a boat basin right where
Speaker 4: people have houseboats and whatnot. Well, there was one that
Speaker 4: was actually living on a dock in there and those
Speaker 4: people were feeding it. It was there for a couple
Speaker 4: of years, right, it wouldn't leave, and it was I'd
Speaker 4: be running my nets and it would be swimming back
Speaker 4: and forth right next to me. And you know, they
Speaker 4: had passed that resolution and my supervisor at the time
Speaker 4: was like, you could shoot it, and I was like, yeah,
Speaker 4: that would be real good optics yacumanation fish biologists, and
Speaker 4: I don't want to end up in court for the
Speaker 4: next ten years. I didn't want to be the test
Speaker 4: case on it. But in hindsight, maybe I should have. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I could have. But those types of things are happening.
Speaker 4: But like I said, the animals aren't up where we gillnet.
Speaker 4: They're down below, so it would be hard for us
Speaker 4: to and we still have those laws in place. But
Speaker 4: you know, and a lot of it is just being
Speaker 4: good co managers. Right, we don't want to you know,
Speaker 4: we want to.
Speaker 2: Work together with you don't want to, yeah, on that
Speaker 2: kind of thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because there's so many other issues, like we talked
Speaker 4: about death by a thou and cuts. Right, this predation
Speaker 4: the sea lion is a huge impact, but there's tons
Speaker 4: of other things that we work together on. Yeah, so
Speaker 4: just pushing it.
Speaker 1: If you make too much smoke around the sea lion
Speaker 1: issue and you create like a bad optic situation, it
Speaker 1: could impact you addressing.
Speaker 2: All of the other issues that are making the problem.
Speaker 4: In funding as well. Just because you get the permit
Speaker 4: doesn't mean that you're getting any funding that comes from
Speaker 4: appropriations and things like that. Is so this the program
Speaker 4: that we have, like how Doug's explaining the trapping and
Speaker 4: it has to be chemically euthanized by a licensed veterinarian
Speaker 4: and things like that, So it's really inefficient, like because
Speaker 4: there's that's in the act right that it has to
Speaker 4: be chemically euthanized by a licensed veterinarian. Like it would
Speaker 4: be so much easier if you had it and you
Speaker 4: could just shoot it. You know, that's humane as well,
Speaker 4: like rather than dragging them through all of that, yeah,
Speaker 4: like torture before leading them to their death. And you know,
Speaker 4: it's really inefficient the laws that are put upon us
Speaker 4: to be able to do this work, Like we could
Speaker 4: be doing a lot more like darting. You could dart
Speaker 4: to euthanize, but then you have to be able to
Speaker 4: recover the animal as well. So it's like you have
Speaker 4: no choice put to trap. And you know, like you said,
Speaker 4: you see the same animals and as I was mentioning too,
Speaker 4: like it's not just a dawn problem anymore. That's why
Speaker 4: I brought up how many come to the mouth astoria.
Speaker 4: There are thousands there, but they're learning traits, like when
Speaker 4: we have smelt runs returning, when we have sizeable smelt
Speaker 4: runs coming up, and you know, historically they were in
Speaker 4: the lower tributaries and a lot come back to the
Speaker 4: Cowlitz River. Well, the sea lions follow the smelt up
Speaker 4: to the Cowlitz River, and they'll be hundreds, like five
Speaker 4: hundred plus sea lions at the mouth of the Cowlitz
Speaker 4: beating on the smell, which are also threatened as well.
Speaker 2: And there is a zilt narrow down on something that's small.
Speaker 4: I don't know that, and so they follow up the smell.
Speaker 4: They hang around there. When the smelt run trickles off,
Speaker 4: then they can move upstream, like to the Lewis River
Speaker 4: and eat you know, juvenile celmonids leaving the system. And
Speaker 4: then by then it's time to head up to Bonneville
Speaker 4: because you have spring schnook coming, so they're exploiting that
Speaker 4: whole stretch of the Lower River and the removal program
Speaker 4: starts at the I two five bridge up to McNary Dam,
Speaker 4: so it's really site specific. We don't have the ability
Speaker 4: or the flexibility to address to these changing needs. For one,
Speaker 4: we don't have funding. It's largely underfunded. There's so much
Speaker 4: red tape and how you do things it's inefficient, and
Speaker 4: we don't have the ability to react and take action
Speaker 4: where it's necessary. Like Doug said about that that still
Speaker 4: had population and ballard locks going extinct. You know, the
Speaker 4: same thing could happen with their sake, same thing could
Speaker 4: happen with ours, and there's no hierarchy. There's no act
Speaker 4: amongst the Act about how the MMPA plays into the ESA.
Speaker 4: And another whole can of worms is the Migratory Bird
Speaker 4: Treaty Act. Right, you have huge avian impacts of goals
Speaker 4: and things like that that are eating like up to
Speaker 4: seventy percent of juveniles still had leaving the system.
Speaker 3: Are goals yeah, yeah, goals, cormorants yeah.
Speaker 4: And then now we have pelicans too that are feeding
Speaker 4: on adult sake. Like I mentioned that year that we
Speaker 4: had the eight hundred thousand returning past Bonneville, the majority
Speaker 4: going to like Okanagant. Half of them died because that
Speaker 4: year there was also a heat dome, warm lethal temperatures.
Speaker 4: There were swimming zombies and pelicans just eating them like crazy.
Speaker 4: We have pelicans that are resident in the Columbia there,
Speaker 4: it's like a couple thousand breeding pairs. Right, It's it's
Speaker 4: a ton. They don't leave the system anymore, and you.
Speaker 1: Can't just go out and start doing control measures. I know,
Speaker 1: I guess cormorants are delisted at least some times.
Speaker 3: They're all protected.
Speaker 4: They're all protected under the microprograt.
Speaker 2: But there's places where there are form rant like there's
Speaker 2: squished your nasts and shit.
Speaker 4: You know, yeah, it takes so much to get that
Speaker 4: to that, Like you wouldn't even think the seagulls you
Speaker 4: see everywhere at dumps and at places eating French fries, right,
Speaker 4: how protected they are. There's rocks like by Island in
Speaker 4: the mid Columbia, right, it's called Miller Island, and it's
Speaker 4: just the outcropping of rocks where there's this goal colony
Speaker 4: that I think it was like they were attributed to
Speaker 4: eating Mid Columbia Steelhead thirty one percent of the juveniles
Speaker 4: out migrating from that one colony. And we are still
Speaker 4: working in that process, Like you have to do so
Speaker 4: much effort of non lethal hazing where we're using like
Speaker 4: boom cannons and the next year we used the falcon
Speaker 4: and then finally we were able to do some lethal
Speaker 4: take and able to oil like some eggs and things
Speaker 4: like that. But when you do those things, you're just
Speaker 4: playing whackable. You're just moving, yeah, somewhere else. So there's
Speaker 4: really are no ability to manage even on that.
Speaker 2: And so yeah, that river would flow with blood. Man
Speaker 2: if you just needed to get rid of everything there
Speaker 2: was eating, but everything that was eating sane.
Speaker 8: Well's the thing is fish always kind of get the
Speaker 8: short straw when like you can't be shooting birds that
Speaker 8: people like to watch or sea lions that people liked,
Speaker 8: you know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so that's the the biggest thing. There's no act
Speaker 4: amongst the acts. There's no hierarchy. How do we we
Speaker 4: have these species, these fish that are on the brink
Speaker 4: of extinction and these sea lions that are exceeding carrying capacity.
Speaker 4: That's why they're moving to find other food sources and
Speaker 4: like looking at the future with sea level rise and
Speaker 4: change and everything. That was what Doug's been working on
Speaker 4: with Noah National Marine Fishery Service as well, looking at
Speaker 4: impacts to the juvenile out migration. That's what he says.
Speaker 4: They eat a lot more French fries than we ever imagined.
Speaker 2: Hm. So are you guys involved in the my I
Speaker 2: have an older brother, he's in his early eighties.
Speaker 1: He's been turning in. He fishes the Columbia every day
Speaker 1: in the summer. He's been turning in. You know, he's
Speaker 1: been doing a lot of boy hunting on northern on
Speaker 1: the Pike mentals. Right, what's the story with that? Are
Speaker 1: you guys involved in that?
Speaker 3: We're We're not peripherally, but I mean Washington State of
Speaker 3: Washington is the one that runs that program.
Speaker 1: Is that Is that like productive that just like Tidley
Speaker 1: winks like, is that you think it's just pissing in
Speaker 1: the wind or.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because when you have a bounty like that, you
Speaker 4: have people exploiting it, right, And I think there was
Speaker 4: somebody that was growing some you.
Speaker 1: Know, and some dudes you're clearing one hundred thousand bucks
Speaker 1: a year. He's not he was telling me he recently
Speaker 1: had a check for seventy.
Speaker 3: Some dollars.
Speaker 8: Covered his gas.
Speaker 2: It's just primarily a small mouth fisherman, but he likes
Speaker 2: to make a little side. Yeah, Northern Pikes.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and with that being an actual native species, just
Speaker 4: the you know, the change in the reservoir system. But
Speaker 4: I think we're getting a lot bigger issue on the
Speaker 4: predation from the warm water fish, the bass and walleye.
Speaker 2: Oh, like there's more that's doing more damage in northern
Speaker 2: Pike mentals.
Speaker 3: Probably.
Speaker 1: And then I got buddies, like, God bless them. I
Speaker 1: got buddies that like to fish. Those like to fish.
Speaker 1: Small mom out there.
Speaker 2: They're all up in arms about people pointing the finger
Speaker 2: at small mouth.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's because it's like the crumb fight, dude. The
Speaker 1: crumb fight is a complex crumb fight.
Speaker 8: Why would you want to get rid of this beautiful game?
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: And then you have these gigantic walleye that they're catching
Speaker 3: up there around you Matilla area, right, And so it's
Speaker 3: attracting people to come there to catch these big walleye. Well,
Speaker 3: a big walleye eats a lot of smolts.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's probably some group like walleye fishermen in the
Speaker 1: Columbia know it's like fighting to like preserve the walleye or.
Speaker 4: Whatever, you know, up and down it is and that's
Speaker 4: a big issue. Like and then you have the fishing guides,
Speaker 4: right they say, well, that's our that's our off season
Speaker 4: from salmon. Is like restore the salmon. Then you'd have
Speaker 4: a lot more salmon openings. Like they show those big
Speaker 4: walleye and they cut them open and there's like tons
Speaker 4: of smolts in them, and multiply that this guy.
Speaker 2: Your big walleye got, you can have them get. You
Speaker 2: know what shows that mind frame is like totally different
Speaker 2: water system, but you're familiar here. We have the Yellowstone Park.
Speaker 2: You know, Yellowstone Lake had a.
Speaker 1: At some point in time they put lake trout in there,
Speaker 1: which real detrimental to the cutthroats.
Speaker 3: And so.
Speaker 1: At one point they like made it that I think
Speaker 1: it was mandatory retention. You know, if you caught it,
Speaker 1: you had to kill it. I had a buddy he
Speaker 1: lived here in town years ago. He would love that
Speaker 1: go up there and fish, and I remember I was
Speaker 1: asking about it and he's like, yeah, I like to
Speaker 1: hit it, but I'm always conscious to not damage the
Speaker 1: resource of the lake trout because like people just get
Speaker 1: that's just how people's minds work, you know, And you
Speaker 1: go out and you catch some big old small mouth
Speaker 1: and then it's just.
Speaker 2: You know, there's like a certain human adaptability. I guess
Speaker 2: man like people, maybe you.
Speaker 1: Get where you get where you get fatalistic or pessimistic
Speaker 1: or something, and you get where, we're not gonna the salmon.
Speaker 1: Things not going to get fixed. And I love the
Speaker 1: fish and they're not going to fix that. So I'm
Speaker 1: here for small mouth. I'm here for walleye and that'll
Speaker 1: have to That'll do. That'll do for me.
Speaker 6: I much try to see the one hundred pounds chinooks
Speaker 6: I'm saying.
Speaker 1: I'm just trying to get into the like you know
Speaker 1: what I mean, Like that's probably without thinking about it,
Speaker 1: that's where people ride.
Speaker 8: Plus you're like you've created a recreational fishery that never
Speaker 8: existed before, so people jump on it.
Speaker 7: You know, you do we know how and stop me
Speaker 7: if I'm going to jump ahead too much. But I
Speaker 7: gotta get this question.
Speaker 2: You can ask, why can't we just get rid of
Speaker 2: all the damnsus?
Speaker 7: No, it is damn related, But do we know how
Speaker 7: now with all of our knowledge to do hydro electric
Speaker 7: power and salmon simultaneously.
Speaker 6: Oh, it is there.
Speaker 7: It's technologically yeah, has someone figured out how to do it,
Speaker 7: but we just don't have the funds to do it. Like,
Speaker 7: is there a way to make these things not be
Speaker 7: part of the central you know system of the river
Speaker 7: where like the nature could still do its thing, but
Speaker 7: offset from that you'd have hydroelectric power.
Speaker 3: We keep it.
Speaker 4: It's ever changing goalposts, right, there's no limit or there's
Speaker 4: no oversight of carrying capacity. It's always more like we
Speaker 4: could be we could have there's room for salmon and
Speaker 4: the Northwest, you know, in the environment with this amount
Speaker 4: of electricity and that spill, right, having spill keeping the
Speaker 4: river or river and not just you know, the way
Speaker 4: they want to operate it for the grid stability is
Speaker 4: to turn it off and on like a like a
Speaker 4: battery like a light switch, and which is unnatural. You know,
Speaker 4: like you have you know, your peak loading and things
Speaker 4: like that for to support industry and and things like that,
Speaker 4: so that that's what's really damaging. You don't have the
Speaker 4: spill to flush out the the juvenile salmon because that's.
Speaker 2: Just when spring runoff.
Speaker 4: Ok and then even in the even in the summertime,
Speaker 4: right like late spring when when fish are moving out,
Speaker 4: like the journey that used to take two weeks now
Speaker 4: takes two months and they've expended so many of their
Speaker 4: resources before they even get to the ocean that survival decreases.
Speaker 4: And the same thing when adults are returning. You have
Speaker 4: you know, the temperature the Columbia is warming earlier and
Speaker 4: earlier every year, so that you know you have it's
Speaker 4: reaching sixty eight degrees like days earlier. We have a
Speaker 4: chart that I could share with you over time of
Speaker 4: when you're reaching these lethal temperatures. And that's why we
Speaker 4: have dying sokki now. Before we used to be seeing
Speaker 4: those getting up to the lethal temperatures in the fall,
Speaker 4: but then you'd get fall rains that would cool it
Speaker 4: back down. But you're not seeing that anymore. So it's
Speaker 4: just a lot. That's why the litigation has been there
Speaker 4: for so many years is because it's hydro operations is
Speaker 4: the huge factor in survival.
Speaker 1: But is there a like however, you measure the amount
Speaker 1: of electricity Okay, like take any particular dam and you
Speaker 1: measure how much what are they measured as what is
Speaker 1: a dam measured as it puts off blank megawatts?
Speaker 2: Okay?
Speaker 1: To Tiani's point, be like, if you take a dam
Speaker 1: and it produces one hundred megawatts, I don't know what
Speaker 1: tell one hundred megawatts?
Speaker 2: Would you know?
Speaker 1: Would an engineer now look and go like, oh man,
Speaker 1: nowadays I could give you one hundred megawatts without all that,
Speaker 1: or I could give you one hundred megawatts with a
Speaker 1: much better fish passage system were we to start from scratch, you,
Speaker 1: I mean, like, is there ways of which there's an
Speaker 1: engineering solution? And I always saying like that that were
Speaker 1: they're constantly asking for more and more and more megawatts.
Speaker 1: But if there weren't, just theoretically, if they weren't asking
Speaker 1: for more megawatts, could you get it all in a
Speaker 1: way that wasn't so damaging to the fish?
Speaker 2: Now that we have.
Speaker 1: All these technological advancements that have occurred since nineteen fifty.
Speaker 3: You know, yeah, that's tough to do so and all
Speaker 3: of them are different, right. Wells Dam, which is one
Speaker 3: of the the highest passable dam on the Columbia, has
Speaker 3: what they call a hydro combined so the spillway it
Speaker 3: sits and then underneath it is the pin stocks for
Speaker 3: the powerhouse, Well, they're the attraction flow for the pins
Speaker 3: is all in one place and you can kind of
Speaker 3: direct your fish up into the spillway and get them
Speaker 3: over other places. You've got the spillway a quarter of
Speaker 3: a mile away from where the powerhouse is. Some of
Speaker 3: them are built at and Eld, you know, I mean
Speaker 3: they're every one of them is a different place because
Speaker 3: they had to be to put them in those locations.
Speaker 3: And so I think it would be like the complete
Speaker 3: tear down and rebuild. So the infrastructure cost would be huge.
Speaker 3: And unless unless Nerve starts making turbines, there isn't really
Speaker 3: a way to do it, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So there's not like retro fitting and things. It's
Speaker 1: just they build them and that's what they are.
Speaker 3: They're better and better, they're updating.
Speaker 4: We just visited. I toured John Day Dam recently, which
Speaker 4: is I think the lere third largest power producer. They
Speaker 4: have Grand Cooley, Bonnaville and then John Day. And the
Speaker 4: size of the turbans are huge. Like you go in there,
Speaker 4: like the dam doesn't look that big when you're driving,
Speaker 4: but the width of it those turbans in there, I
Speaker 4: think they're like sixty or ninety foot diameter, Like that's
Speaker 4: how big, and they're like thirty feet tall. Like there's
Speaker 4: one that's needed repairs. They had it lifted, you could
Speaker 4: see it. They've been doing repairs on it for ten years.
Speaker 4: And they were saying that that one's the next one
Speaker 4: schedule to be updated with this newer turbine that they
Speaker 4: have at Bonneville, and that's supposed to be you know,
Speaker 4: more fish safe and.
Speaker 2: Fish cause these are literally killed. They're they're literally hitting
Speaker 2: fish and killing them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, what but that but just going on the scale
Speaker 4: is like I had to physically see it to understand,
Speaker 4: Like my god, these things are massive in the amount
Speaker 4: of money. Like there sed that project schedules to start
Speaker 4: in I think he said twenty thirty cost several billion
Speaker 4: dollars and take twenty years to complete.
Speaker 2: So that's fixing existing stuff.
Speaker 6: M hmm.
Speaker 8: There's like has to be These power companies are like
Speaker 8: have to be under some pressure to at least on
Speaker 8: the face of things, show that they're doing things to
Speaker 8: help these runs. Like what kind of partners are they.
Speaker 3: To work with?
Speaker 8: Like is it just like do you feel like it's
Speaker 8: just lip service or is there like like a bona
Speaker 8: fide effort to help out or like what's the what's
Speaker 8: the relationship with these power companies.
Speaker 4: Well, the hardest thing is because it's not a power company,
Speaker 4: it's the federal government. Right, so they could more or
Speaker 4: less do what they want on the timescale that they
Speaker 4: want and how things get done with you know, ten
Speaker 4: years of studies and appropriations five years out and it's
Speaker 4: not even sufficient for today's dollar, let alone in five years.
Speaker 8: So the dams are managed by the federal government.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they're operating corp of engineers and the business end,
Speaker 4: the marketing end of the power is Boneville Power Administration,
Speaker 4: And that's one hundred percent of business focused on money,
Speaker 4: not looking at mitigation. They have the Fish and Wildlife program,
Speaker 4: Like there's been years of like unanticipated revenues, Like they've
Speaker 4: made like millions and millions more than they anticipated. Okay,
Speaker 4: so the Fish and Wildlife program is X amount. They
Speaker 4: have all this unanticipated revenue, there's a cap on how
Speaker 4: much goes to the fish and Wildlife program. The rest
Speaker 4: of it they go back to pay down their debt
Speaker 4: with the Feds, and they also give breaks. They give
Speaker 4: money back to their industrial users, like what what company.
Speaker 8: Do they just kind of view you guys as like
Speaker 8: a fly buzzing in their ear.
Speaker 2: Yeah, sadly.
Speaker 3: Yeah. The solutions are aren't new. I mean basically it's
Speaker 3: running a river more like a natural river. The more
Speaker 3: you could do that, the better it is for fish.
Speaker 2: But I mean it's like.
Speaker 1: Even with the dams. Yeah, they're like even with the
Speaker 1: dams in place. I guess that's kind of like I
Speaker 1: guess I'll jump to what would be sort of version
Speaker 1: of my last My last question would be years ago,
Speaker 1: we had Mike Simpson on and and Idaho representative House Representatives.
Speaker 1: He came on and he was at the time, I
Speaker 1: don't think it went anywhere. He was pitching a plan
Speaker 1: on a damn removal plan which had so many facets
Speaker 1: around agricultural production, shipping and all that, and it.
Speaker 2: Came with this.
Speaker 1: It came with this stipulation that were they to do
Speaker 1: this this removal project, all the litigants, all the environmental
Speaker 1: groups imagine tribes would agree to sort of this this
Speaker 1: like cease. They would they would stop lawsuits for some
Speaker 1: period of time on on fisheries that dam is still standing, right,
Speaker 1: So like a sort of like broad ultimate question would
Speaker 1: be what are the odds that dams come out? Like
Speaker 1: if you had the crystal ball a century into the future,
Speaker 1: do we have fewer dams then? And then the offshoot
Speaker 1: of the question is if is if no, the dams
Speaker 1: will never It's not really the major dams will never
Speaker 1: go away. Then it's it's what could be done differently?
Speaker 1: And you're kind of getting at I guess like you
Speaker 1: could the dams could still be there, but there are
Speaker 1: other things that are plausible that could help.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you got to run it as close to a
Speaker 3: natural river as you can. It's priorities, right, if you
Speaker 3: prioritize fish passage higher than you do now, it's prioritized
Speaker 3: for dam or for power production, right, and so it's
Speaker 3: maximize or optimized power production. And then whatever's left it's
Speaker 3: the crumbs. Whatever's left. We could do what we can
Speaker 3: around the edges for fish, but if you raise that
Speaker 3: and made the fish more important, you know, you can
Speaker 3: look at papers from the fifties, they knew some of
Speaker 3: the solutions. These aren't new, but it's it's always been
Speaker 3: that the money is from the dams and the power production,
Speaker 3: and that's that's run the whole system. And it's all
Speaker 3: it all operates and revolves around that.
Speaker 2: Did they when they were conceptualizing those dams?
Speaker 1: I've has a lot of pep this question. I've ever
Speaker 1: got a great answer to it. But like when they
Speaker 1: were pitching the dams, the engineers, right, everybody's getting together
Speaker 1: on these dams. Did was did they realize? Do you
Speaker 1: think they knew? Do you think their discussions included conversations
Speaker 1: about how catastrophic this would be for fish?
Speaker 5: Like?
Speaker 2: Did they they knew?
Speaker 4: There was actually the the memos were discovered by opb
Speaker 4: Oregan Public broadcasting. Recently, you did a Tony Chick did
Speaker 4: a series Salmon War's podcast. But yeah, he had the
Speaker 4: memos that talked about the kind of the cost benefit
Speaker 4: of analysis. Like I said, the salmon became a problem
Speaker 4: because then they'd have to put in fish passage, and
Speaker 4: they also labeled it as an Indian problem. We get
Speaker 4: rid of the salmon, we don't have to deal with
Speaker 4: the Indian problem on on the Mansteam River anymore. So
Speaker 4: that was in all of it was a choice, even
Speaker 4: on the upper it because they looked at building Bonneville
Speaker 4: without passage with or without and thankfully with and but
Speaker 4: you know, you look up in Hill's Canyon, Hills Canyon
Speaker 4: down there's no passage, but there could be. They could
Speaker 4: bore through the the mountain too for their their turbines,
Speaker 4: you know, to make the turbines more efficient, but they
Speaker 4: couldn't provide passage. So all of those things you visit them,
Speaker 4: it's it's it was a choice and all based on
Speaker 4: cost and also looking at long term maintenance. And he
Speaker 4: talked about like will these be here forever? No, because
Speaker 4: there's there's lack of maintenance. Like Doug said, like okay,
Speaker 4: every all the all the the money and the emphasis
Speaker 4: is put on power production and things get fixed really fast.
Speaker 4: But when there's an issue with the passage thing or
Speaker 4: especially monitoring, that's the first thing to get sliced off
Speaker 4: of the budget. And and you were talking about, you know, litigation.
Speaker 4: We had that stay in litigation which was going good.
Speaker 4: We were just getting started, but in June of twenty
Speaker 4: five it was canceled terminated by the current administration. So
Speaker 4: we lost all of that headway that we had made
Speaker 4: over those those couple of years with the Biden administration.
Speaker 4: So we're back to we still have the six sovereigns
Speaker 4: working together pushing to advance those efforts and looking for appropriations.
Speaker 4: But we don't have the commitments from the agencies of
Speaker 4: the federal government, the Bureau Reclamation, Army Corps, and everything
Speaker 4: like that to address these problems. And you know, when
Speaker 4: we started our advocacy, we were talking about the billion
Speaker 4: dollar backlog, the billion dollar backlog in needs in the
Speaker 4: Columbia Basin. Well, once we started writing it down on paper,
Speaker 4: it actually came out to be like two billion dollars,
Speaker 4: Like a billion dollars in passage at the dams, and
Speaker 4: then like another billion and hatchery maintenance because they built
Speaker 4: these hatcheries, they're so outdated and never reach full production.
Speaker 4: They have failing intakes, crumbling raceways, they're not efficient. And
Speaker 4: so the things that we advocate for isn't just for us,
Speaker 4: it's actually, can you appropriate the money for you to
Speaker 4: fund yourself to do the things that you should be doing.
Speaker 4: And then even you know, looking at habitat restoration and
Speaker 4: you know, the roads and culverts and irrigation intakes and everything.
Speaker 4: We're just like out there looking for everybody to do
Speaker 4: the right thing of what we all should be doing
Speaker 4: for our environment. And you know, it's like a shared
Speaker 4: responsibility from all of us, and like the accumination. We
Speaker 4: were involved with a damn removal project that didn't get
Speaker 4: as much media attention as like Elwa dam but it's
Speaker 4: actually it was actually a bigger project, and it took
Speaker 4: like nineteen years for that damn removal and the only
Speaker 4: reason that got done it was because it was with
Speaker 4: the private company. It was Pacific Core, And then it
Speaker 4: came down to the license for them to update the license,
Speaker 4: they had to either provide passage or take it down,
Speaker 4: and then they drug that out for five years. The tribes,
Speaker 4: Yakima and Cryptic actually pitched in money together to fund
Speaker 4: the study, the cost benefit analysis that showed that removal
Speaker 4: would be cheaper, and then Pacific Corps finally breached it.
Speaker 4: But it's like we have to hold their hand and
Speaker 4: walk them through everything and keep pushing all the time.
Speaker 4: It's just more like pushing and paying to hold them
Speaker 4: accountable of things that they should be doing and funding
Speaker 4: things appropriately. We could have these acts and permits and everything,
Speaker 4: but unless we have the resources to enact them, it's meaningless.
Speaker 2: So I'm going to go out on a limb on
Speaker 2: this one.
Speaker 1: But I mean the way the Trump administration's playing out
Speaker 1: with their life conservation record, I can't imagine there have
Speaker 1: any help on salmon issues.
Speaker 2: It's got to be low priority to them.
Speaker 4: It was actually the Trump administration that signed the permit
Speaker 4: for the the removal h really yeah. But the thing
Speaker 4: that we get from congressionals and actually our our supervisor,
Speaker 4: our executive director actually just testified in Congress last month
Speaker 4: on this pinniped issue. And we're a Republican witness because and.
Speaker 5: We have our.
Speaker 1: I was saying that being like an interesting trade off
Speaker 1: is what the administration is going to give you is
Speaker 1: probably greater latitude because like like of a like of
Speaker 1: a general suspicion of some of these acts that were passed,
Speaker 1: greater latitude for some things like removal of species, but
Speaker 1: sort of just like generally less sympathy about river flows
Speaker 1: and things.
Speaker 3: I would imagine, Yeah, that's what we're after is that
Speaker 3: you know, there's no management provision in a Marie Mental
Speaker 3: Protection Act. We'd like an amendment to add management provisions
Speaker 3: and so a way that you could analyze the problem.
Speaker 3: And if it's river otters somewhere, if it's California sea
Speaker 3: lions or sellars, or whatever the problem is, there would
Speaker 3: be a process you could go through to get some
Speaker 3: management in place and be able to do that. The
Speaker 3: I guess I get quickly back to the sea lion thing.
Speaker 3: What we talked about earlier was the one to twenty removals,
Speaker 3: and then there was an amendment that was passed in
Speaker 3: twenty eighteen. It was signed by Trump and his first
Speaker 3: administration that did recognize the co management of the tribes,
Speaker 3: so tribes, our four treaty tribes were able to be
Speaker 3: party two permits along with the states, and then our
Speaker 3: tribes could delegate to critfic to do that and we've
Speaker 3: been doing that since. But it's you know, red tape
Speaker 3: is a killer. Because that was passed in December of
Speaker 3: twenty eighteen, we immediately applied for a permit and our
Speaker 3: joint permit was finally issued in August of twenty so
Speaker 3: two years, two years, and then we start implementing it.
Speaker 3: And then that provision and it's one twenty f it
Speaker 3: allows area management.
Speaker 2: So that was the above the two five bridge.
Speaker 3: If an animal's up there, he's individually identifiable and he's
Speaker 3: having a significant negative impact. So if you can collect
Speaker 3: that animal, you can euthanize it, but it's very restrictive.
Speaker 3: You can't go out and specifically you can't shoot them.
Speaker 3: You have to trap chemically euthanize. So there's still some
Speaker 3: burden to it, but it isn't the level that we
Speaker 3: used to do when it was individual sea lion management.
Speaker 3: So it's a little better, but it only applies to
Speaker 3: the Columbia.
Speaker 1: So yeah, on the question about the different administrations, I
Speaker 1: don't want to put you in a rough spot. Maybe
Speaker 1: maybe my assumption is wrong, but like I smember years ago,
Speaker 1: I can't remember, it was the first time Trump was running.
Speaker 1: He was kind of he was in California. He was
Speaker 1: like RIDI and the delta smelt, you know, like, why
Speaker 1: would you ever sacrifice anything for some little fish? And
Speaker 1: I think there's just in that way, like sort of
Speaker 1: a dismissiveness about some fisheries issues. But have you guys
Speaker 1: found that, like, have you gotten more done in during
Speaker 1: the Trump administrations than you do during the Bien administrations?
Speaker 2: Or is it not that simple?
Speaker 4: No, it's not that simple. A lot has to do
Speaker 4: with funding that's coming into the federal agencies. The federal
Speaker 4: agencies now that we work with have been gutted, right,
Speaker 4: So there's less less people to do the same amount
Speaker 4: of work and with less money, which which is.
Speaker 1: A problem in so you felt the impact some of
Speaker 1: the cuts of land management agencies, Yeah, and that and
Speaker 1: like but like also a red tape reduction, so less
Speaker 1: money and less red tape.
Speaker 4: No, it's still there, it's just the processes just take
Speaker 4: longer now, you know, or you don't have somebody there
Speaker 4: to you don't have that human there to process us.
Speaker 4: This permit which we ran into last year on a
Speaker 4: tagging project, like we couldn't access that area because there
Speaker 4: was no the person was Doze that did wrote that
Speaker 4: permit for us, and just things like that. I think
Speaker 4: the around this predation thing is like the one crumb
Speaker 4: that we could actually get done during this time. And
Speaker 4: because like I said, we were a Republican witness and
Speaker 4: resistance to change and we're mindful of you know, egg
Speaker 4: and transportation and things like that, but we're looking for
Speaker 4: responsible ways to do things. There's beyond the status quo.
Speaker 4: And you know, there's a lot of interest in just
Speaker 4: protecting the dams. So they're quick to point at sea lions.
Speaker 4: They are a huge impact, but that's not the only impact.
Speaker 4: But if that's the only thing we could get right now,
Speaker 4: then we need to maximize our effort and jump on
Speaker 4: that and get these things done now while we have
Speaker 4: the chance while the focus is.
Speaker 2: On on that.
Speaker 1: That's a conservation gamble that just in the conservation movement
Speaker 1: at large. That is a gamble that causes for people
Speaker 1: that like things simple. That's a gamble people have to
Speaker 1: live in that makes people uncomfortable, especially people that want
Speaker 1: things to be very cut and dried, good.
Speaker 2: Guy, bad guy, really simple. But that an organization yourselves,
Speaker 2: or any number of conservation organizations with a new administration
Speaker 2: comes in and you're like, here's all the things we're
Speaker 2: not going to get, but there's this, you know, and
Speaker 2: we can be friendly and try to get this one thing,
Speaker 2: or we can dig in our heels and spend four
Speaker 2: years with nothing, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean, and a lot of people want you just
Speaker 1: to dig in your heels and get nothing rather than
Speaker 1: look like you're cooperating, you know, And then it flips.
Speaker 2: Then four years later it flips the other way around.
Speaker 1: You're like, you know, killing sea lines is out, yeah, right,
Speaker 1: but we might get some sympathy on this other issue.
Speaker 4: You know, it was really hard. We're kind of a
Speaker 4: perfect storm we ran into. Was right.
Speaker 3: We had that.
Speaker 4: We've had this accords agreement since two thousand and eight.
Speaker 4: It's the Bonneville Fish Accords, where it was a ten
Speaker 4: year agreement twenty and eight to twenty eighteen where there
Speaker 4: was a set program We said we won't sue you,
Speaker 4: and you fund these programs. And the benefit in that
Speaker 4: is we weren't having to justify and fight every year
Speaker 4: for funding to do this or that. We're really micromanaged.
Speaker 4: Even now today, we're still really micromanaged as Phish managers,
Speaker 4: the expert micromanaged by the funding agencies of course, because
Speaker 4: they control the purse strings, and that's still a frustration
Speaker 4: for us. But the accords gave us the ability to
Speaker 4: do non eesa work and work on things like sturgeon
Speaker 4: and lamprey and things like that kind of ban what
Speaker 4: we were doing, and we made a lot of progress
Speaker 4: and since then we never signed another long term agreement.
Speaker 4: We went through two three year extensions in eighteen and
Speaker 4: so we were just starting to negotiate that a new
Speaker 4: long term agreement. Bonneville rolled the dice on the election
Speaker 4: and they won. We didn't get another agreement, and they
Speaker 4: gave us another extension. But in that and I mentioned
Speaker 4: the litigation on the hydro operations Arounda, the EESA litigation,
Speaker 4: And so we were in that stay. We were living good,
Speaker 4: looking forward to a new another you know, favorable administration,
Speaker 4: and it flipped the opposite way. We lost that agreement.
Speaker 4: It was terminated. And then this Bonneville piece, they have
Speaker 4: no the accords ended, they have no written, legal binding
Speaker 4: commitment to accept this really hard, long process of you know,
Speaker 4: the Power Council, the Northwest Power Act, their commitments to
Speaker 4: the fish and wildlife program, their responsibilities that it's really tough.
Speaker 4: The so the accords ending, and then there was money
Speaker 4: left over from that that was tied up in their
Speaker 4: years of red tape to build facilities or do certain projects. Well,
Speaker 4: when the tribes signed to take the litigation back into court,
Speaker 4: the state was ended, Okay, let's reinitiate this litigation. Bonneville
Speaker 4: viewed that as a negative action towards them, and they said,
Speaker 4: we don't owe you that money anymore. You violated the
Speaker 4: Of course, it was fifty million dollars to the tribes.
Speaker 4: That there's still our tribes are having to go to
Speaker 4: DC to lobby to get that money back too. Like,
Speaker 4: we have projects we've been working on for fifteen years
Speaker 4: and that.
Speaker 1: Would have been fifty million bucks towards salmon. Yeah, not
Speaker 1: like for people to walk home and put in their
Speaker 1: bank accounts.
Speaker 4: No, it was all earmarked for projects that we weren't
Speaker 4: able to get done on the ground because of their
Speaker 4: red tape.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 8: So I got a question about the Klamath, Like the
Speaker 8: dams aren't coming down on the Columbia right at least
Speaker 8: not anytime soon. But you know, a year or two
Speaker 8: ago when they took out the four dams on the Klamate,
Speaker 8: it's like now seen as a success for salmon. Is Like,
Speaker 8: I know you guys are focused on the Columbia, but
Speaker 8: is there like opportunities like the Klamath on other rivers
Speaker 8: besides the Columbia.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that one I mentioned on the on the White Salmon,
Speaker 4: the one that we did with Pacific Corp. Which is
Speaker 4: funny that was the same company that owned the Klamath
Speaker 4: dams that removed them, and it was a lot because
Speaker 4: of you know, reservoir succession and things were so bad
Speaker 4: in that system, they had no choice, which we're seeing
Speaker 4: in the Columbia every year by a degradation of water
Speaker 4: quality set them in accumulation and things like that. We're
Speaker 4: not keeping up in the Columbia either. And like, like
Speaker 4: I mentioned that the dam on the Little White Salmon
Speaker 4: that was removed, but it took nineteen years.
Speaker 3: To do that.
Speaker 8: On the Klamath pretty quick.
Speaker 4: No, they were in the fight for decades as well.
Speaker 4: You just don't hear about it until until like things
Speaker 4: are happening. Yeah, and then always, like I mentioned, the
Speaker 4: only reason we got that dam removed is because of
Speaker 4: the licensing process that required fish passage. It was the
Speaker 4: same thing on the Klamath. They could have done fixes
Speaker 4: to maintain the dams, but it was cheaper for them
Speaker 4: to take them out. Like how you were saying, it's
Speaker 4: like things get costed out and it's never it's not like, yay,
Speaker 4: we won, they did the right thing. It's like they
Speaker 4: did what was cheapest for their pocket. Yeah, that that's
Speaker 4: always the trade off.
Speaker 1: So I think, how quickly do you see how quickly
Speaker 1: when when a dam comes down like that, like in
Speaker 1: the clam or whatever, how quickly do you see results in.
Speaker 2: Terms of fish passage.
Speaker 4: The next year? It was it was like that in
Speaker 4: the White Salmon when we removed that dam. Actually, a
Speaker 4: few years ago I hosted the we had a ten
Speaker 4: year Returning Salmon celebration there because they thought it would
Speaker 4: take like several years to rebuild. But those fish have
Speaker 4: been coming back, like you open the door, they're they're gonna.
Speaker 8: Yeah, run past fall I think.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, so it was that very next year. Yeah,
Speaker 4: this was the place my grandma was talking about. But yeah,
Speaker 4: it's just when you when you reconnect, you know, have
Speaker 4: those openings, then they're going to find the resources and
Speaker 4: return to those those areas they find their niche m yeah,
Speaker 4: I see. Doug has some pretty cool pictures of sea
Speaker 4: lions at Estoria.
Speaker 3: I was.
Speaker 2: Bringing it out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I want to show you those things. We
Speaker 3: don't have a great media for for that.
Speaker 6: But yeah, oh we can share with Phil and he
Speaker 6: can put them.
Speaker 3: On okay, yeah, yeah, pretty And these were from twenty
Speaker 3: fifteen when that kind of been the peak of the
Speaker 3: sea lan issue. But they're just like all the docks
Speaker 3: in the East Morning Basin and History are completely covered
Speaker 3: with sea lions and then patrolling in the water trying
Speaker 3: to find a spot to get out.
Speaker 2: I keep sort of asking this, and I think Brody
Speaker 2: asked too. But that's wy I'll be clear on it.
Speaker 1: In a century, the big like in one hundred years,
Speaker 1: the big Columbia dams will still be there.
Speaker 4: It's hard to say because things are getting so bad now,
Speaker 4: Like you're starting to have closures of parks and boat
Speaker 4: ramps and areas because of toxic algo blooms in the
Speaker 4: summer because of heat. And I know right there in
Speaker 4: the Tri Cities there's been dogs that are dying people.
Speaker 4: You know, the dogs are running around in the water.
Speaker 4: And so I think when it starts, it's gonna start
Speaker 4: impacting people and those types of resources because of the
Speaker 4: degradation of water quality.
Speaker 2: And we didn't do it for sam and might do
Speaker 2: it for dogs.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but cattle the wrong.
Speaker 2: Suburbanites dog and they're gonna be like this cannot stand. Yeah.
Speaker 4: And then you know, like when cattle end up in
Speaker 4: those toxic algo bloom situations, it's like, well, if you
Speaker 4: would have just had this buffer from the stream to
Speaker 4: protect the nutrient loading in your creek, then your cattle
Speaker 4: wouldn't have died. But there's still up in arms of
Speaker 4: about their cattle dying because of it.
Speaker 2: So it could be like a broader.
Speaker 1: Like a broader litany of environmental degradations could bring up
Speaker 1: in the future more serious discussions about like doing something
Speaker 1: really radical.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and that's the thing, you know, Like I mentioned
Speaker 4: the Six Sovereigns and then we had that Resilient Columbia
Speaker 4: Basin Agreement. But our negotiating piece was the creation of
Speaker 4: the Columbia Basin Restoration Initiative. That's an initiative that's created
Speaker 4: and vetted by the Six Sovereigns. It's the tribes because
Speaker 4: our tribes we've had with crypt Fik, we've had the
Speaker 4: waikanashmu wa Kishwit, you know for twenty years, you know
Speaker 4: that set these these recovery plans and recovery goals. Well,
Speaker 4: this was taking that to the next step and coming
Speaker 4: together with our co manager. It's our guiding north star
Speaker 4: that we're still working towards. And so that's what we're
Speaker 4: looking at today about you know, habitat restoration in the
Speaker 4: mid Columbia. And also, like I mentioned, the it's cold
Speaker 4: water Refusia, the the through the migration corridor the Columbia
Speaker 4: where you have the tributary mouths, the deltas that are
Speaker 4: all full of sediment and you know, have all the
Speaker 4: predation and water quality issues and things like that. So
Speaker 4: we're able to like have this input of cold water
Speaker 4: to corral so that returning adults they have respite as
Speaker 4: they travel these hundreds of miles upstream. And that's something
Speaker 4: that's doable today. You know, we just got to break
Speaker 4: through the red tape and get the funding to actually
Speaker 4: do it, and that would be a huge benefit for salmon.
Speaker 4: Like we have all these recovery plans for the basins
Speaker 4: and you know habitat projects just waiting to be funded
Speaker 4: and then addressing these things. You know, predation have been
Speaker 4: this wiki wheel about predation over the past few years,
Speaker 4: like the pinniped predation, but also the avian predation and
Speaker 4: the piscine the warm water predators. But there's also invasives
Speaker 4: that are heavily impacting our river system and that's American shad.
Speaker 4: Those were introduced in the eighteen hundreds and there was
Speaker 4: a very problematic I saw article from the Seattle Times
Speaker 4: on the shad issue that they're just becoming accepted. That
Speaker 4: was the title, There's a new top fish in the
Speaker 4: Columbia and it doesn't mine the warm water where you
Speaker 4: have we've had years of eight million shad returning road
Speaker 4: and so that's totally unnatural. And that's that that feeds
Speaker 4: the predators when you know, because their life cycle is opposite.
Speaker 4: So when these warm water predators there, the salmonids are
Speaker 4: out there eating juvenile shad, and then you have all
Speaker 4: the pelicans that are feasting on shad and they're spawning
Speaker 4: in the main stem. So it's a huge nutrient load.
Speaker 4: And so you have all this aquatic vegetation and algae
Speaker 4: growth because it's it's not meant to be there, right,
Speaker 4: you have barren tributaries that don't get those marine nutrients,
Speaker 4: but they're all piled in the main stem, and why
Speaker 4: the main stam's green now?
Speaker 2: But dude, go ahead one more.
Speaker 8: You hinted at how far the sam will go earlier
Speaker 8: if those dams weren't there, Like what would be the
Speaker 8: terminal point for these these chanook Like how far would
Speaker 8: they go and where would they end up?
Speaker 4: I know, like distance wise in the Snake basin would
Speaker 4: be at Twin Falls because you have the falls that
Speaker 4: was it's huge. And then they went all the way
Speaker 4: up into the tributaries and the headwaters. And in Canada,
Speaker 4: you know that little piece of Montana where the Cootney
Speaker 4: is and and you know, like you have the win
Speaker 4: actually the Metau, the Antaia and the Yakama Basin, so
Speaker 4: all up into the Cascades up into Canada around in Montana.
Speaker 4: How far it stretches Idaho and even Nevada right too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's incredible, man.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Steell, had they'd go all the way up the
Speaker 3: Yhi River there in the Nevada, you'd get them up
Speaker 3: the Salmon River up past Stanley almost a glean of
Speaker 3: Summit right at the headwaters the Salmon which is like
Speaker 3: forty miles north of sun Valley, so like twice as
Speaker 3: far as where you you were seeing them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and even like the other species, Like I always said,
Speaker 4: we're you know, comprehensive and holistic in our salmon recovery efforts,
Speaker 4: like lamprey, I think, you know, we put you know,
Speaker 4: their sacred food source to us. And they were also medicinal,
Speaker 4: you know, like because there's so oily that that was
Speaker 4: your skin salve and your ear drops and stuff when
Speaker 4: you know, before you could go to the drug store.
Speaker 4: And but the the benefit that they brought to the
Speaker 4: system and all of the nutrients in the forests and
Speaker 4: the animals, and you know, like forest habitat, like they're
Speaker 4: lacking those marine driven nutrients for the standing forests. And
Speaker 4: then also like management. I think back to I watched
Speaker 4: your hunting show Blue Mountain, Blue Mountain Bulls, and it
Speaker 4: was on fire, right there was forest fire. We're seeing
Speaker 4: that more and more. It's forest management practices. But also
Speaker 4: you know, like we don't have the same nutrients coming
Speaker 4: into the forest to grow, but you know those that's
Speaker 4: the other side of the aspects. We will touch all
Speaker 4: aspects of it, and I think lamprey is a huge
Speaker 4: part of that. Doug showed me a picture. It's the
Speaker 4: Bruno River that flows into Nevada. It's they do watered
Speaker 4: this this dam or whatever they're standing on the cement.
Speaker 4: There's like thousands and thousands of lamprey and that's hundreds
Speaker 4: of miles from the ocean in this one little tributary.
Speaker 4: Imagine how many there were all throughout the basin, millions
Speaker 4: and millions, and all of that's gone now and there's
Speaker 4: an effect. It's a ripple effect through the entire ecosystem
Speaker 4: and so us just to try to put all these
Speaker 4: building blocks back together to create that better tomorrow, because
Speaker 4: we can't restore the salmon back to barren streams even
Speaker 4: looking at you know, benthic organisms and things like that,
Speaker 4: so you know, working with beavers and all of that stuff.
Speaker 4: So we're coming at it from all angles.
Speaker 3: And to bring it back to your simile parous fish. See,
Speaker 3: these fish died, right, they go up and they die,
Speaker 3: and they brought all those nutrients from the ocean back
Speaker 3: to the forest and they get hauled out by bears
Speaker 3: and otters and everything else and brought in and so
Speaker 3: it's the whole thing has been cut off. Those forests
Speaker 3: have lost all of that nutrient input for one hundred years,
Speaker 3: in fifty years.
Speaker 1: My brother's a fisheries biologists in Alaska and they've been
Speaker 1: tracking that by with marine isotopes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so you have all these these like traceable elements.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Strontium is one that.
Speaker 2: That you know came from the ocean yep.
Speaker 1: And the way it got from the ocean into the
Speaker 1: mountains was on a fish, right, And then you look
Speaker 1: at how that stuff is used by vegetation and animals
Speaker 1: and it's like marine just a picture of like that
Speaker 1: fish are a way of like wheel barrowing in.
Speaker 2: Nutrients into nutrient poor regions.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you pluck that out and it's like you're
Speaker 2: not fertilizing it anymore.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean you get up like I said, in
Speaker 3: that upper part of the salmon, it's just granitic soil.
Speaker 3: There's no nutrients to speak of up there. Ultra clear water.
Speaker 3: It's gin clear, but the nutrients aren't coming from what's running.
Speaker 2: So it used to get millions of pounds of natural fertilized.
Speaker 3: Exactly, you know, exactly.
Speaker 4: And the other thing you were, like you honestly you
Speaker 4: were asking is there a way to operate the hydrosystem
Speaker 4: and still have salmon? But like I said, the ever
Speaker 4: changing goalposts and maybe things that would help would be
Speaker 4: like you know, bringing on renewables and also battery storage
Speaker 4: so you're not depending on the river to be your
Speaker 4: battery that you turn off and on. But then there's impacts,
Speaker 4: there's trade offs and everything you do. But that's where
Speaker 4: the tribes come in and advocate to do things in
Speaker 4: a responsible manner. Like all of our tribes have their own,
Speaker 4: you know, utilities. We're looking at different types of energy
Speaker 4: production and that was part of the agreement, and the
Speaker 4: litigation was funding for energy projects, you know, administered by
Speaker 4: the tribes like the Yakmination. They're working on a solar
Speaker 4: over irrigation project and also a dry pump storage project
Speaker 4: using rail railroad cars that you lift up and down
Speaker 4: the hill. And they're working at pump storage at several places.
Speaker 4: One is a really big issue for our tribes and
Speaker 4: especially the Acmination is a golden al pump storage project.
Speaker 4: It's they want to withdraw withdraw water from the Columbia,
Speaker 4: build a reservoir up on the hill, and then you know,
Speaker 4: they just pump it in a loop. You know, they
Speaker 4: generate power when they need it and then pump it
Speaker 4: back up off peak when it's cheap. And then so
Speaker 4: you have all these For one, they're boring through the
Speaker 4: mountain and then they want to tap into the John
Speaker 4: Day power line system to export that power. And then
Speaker 4: there's also a super fun site blow from an abandoned
Speaker 4: aluminum smelter that's never been cleaned up, and it's one
Speaker 4: of our sacred sites. It's like a push pump. It's
Speaker 4: like the mother of all roots. It's a place where
Speaker 4: we still go and gather and they just like, okay, yeah,
Speaker 4: you move aside, and we're going to do this here now.
Speaker 4: And it's literally drilling a thirty diameter tunnel through the
Speaker 4: mountain and you'll see that also all in the surrounding
Speaker 4: area of the windmills, the wind generation, which like why
Speaker 4: does it have to be all on our you know,
Speaker 4: native lands, open lands, Like isn't there like low value
Speaker 4: agriculture that they could incorporate, agra, voltaics and things like that.
Speaker 4: It's always looking at what's cheapest and easiest, and that's
Speaker 4: like these public lands that they get a thirty year
Speaker 4: lease from and you know, once they go in and
Speaker 4: alter it, it's you know, it's never the same. And
Speaker 4: it impacts the withdrawals from the river for these things.
Speaker 4: And even the solar has huge impacts to the water
Speaker 4: table because they need water to clean the solar panels,
Speaker 4: so there's a huge water usage even with solar production.
Speaker 4: So what we're saying is we're not against all of
Speaker 4: these things, but like, let's not be in a rush
Speaker 4: to do it, and let's do things right, and we
Speaker 4: can't put all of these burdens on the backs of
Speaker 4: the salmon and all the users who depend on them,
Speaker 4: the tribal people and the community members, because we're the
Speaker 4: ones that these resources are extracted and all the burdens
Speaker 4: placed on us, and it's all goes outside. It's all
Speaker 4: international companies exporting power to California into these industrial users
Speaker 4: and data centers and things like that. It's like again
Speaker 4: and again the same story. So let's do things slow down,
Speaker 4: do things better, Like, yeah we can, we need to
Speaker 4: do better, find renewables, but let's do it right. So
Speaker 4: not just what's cheapest. What's cheapest today may not be
Speaker 4: in the long run because even if they maybe they
Speaker 4: if they would have put more maintenance into the hydrosystem,
Speaker 4: now we wouldn't be we wouldn't have these billion dollar
Speaker 4: backlogs and and things like that.
Speaker 2: So yeah, man, you guys aren me. Something's going to
Speaker 2: put on a good mood.
Speaker 8: They got some success stories we could go over.
Speaker 2: Yeah, pulls out too.
Speaker 6: There's like speaking of Boogeyman, Like I feel like we
Speaker 6: grew up in the lamprey was the devil of all.
Speaker 7: Devil was non native, right, Yeah, I know, but still,
Speaker 7: you know, like I've never heard of a good lamprey.
Speaker 6: And here you guys are trying to like promote it.
Speaker 7: So can we just touch on that a little bit, Yeah,
Speaker 7: because when we grew up in Michigan, it was like
Speaker 7: when you went to the hatchery we had, I can't
Speaker 7: remember the name of the hit hatchery. Now they're in
Speaker 7: Kalama Zoo, but like every year you'd go on a
Speaker 7: field trip there and like it would just be nothing
Speaker 7: but placards on the walls about how the lamp wege
Speaker 7: is killing off everything.
Speaker 1: It's like a system that a system. It's like any
Speaker 1: any invasive species story. It's a system that hadn't adapted
Speaker 1: with it, and then all of a sudden, tada, here's
Speaker 1: a bunch of lampreys and like every non native species story,
Speaker 1: it just explodes at great expense to native fish.
Speaker 2: And so then you hear like, oh, you know where
Speaker 2: they are from.
Speaker 6: But in your neck of the woods they co exist, Yeah, and.
Speaker 4: They're they have that relationship. Right. They're parasitic but not lethal.
Speaker 4: You could see sometimes you catch salmon it has a
Speaker 4: little round mark with the teeth.
Speaker 1: Lake trout, yeah, but in the Great Lakes system they
Speaker 1: were killing Yeah, because again, as a fish that was
Speaker 1: hadn't adapted with the.
Speaker 2: Risk, you know, yeah, so they do.
Speaker 4: They are parasitic, they but they don't kill their hosts
Speaker 4: like they drop off, and they can swim and migrate
Speaker 4: and everything. And then the benefit that they serve to
Speaker 4: the salmon is, you know, they're spawning in these tributaries
Speaker 4: as well, and then they're breaking down all the the
Speaker 4: detritus and things like that. So they're the filters and
Speaker 4: the cleaners of in the tributaries.
Speaker 3: And so yeah, it's and these are Pacific lamprey that
Speaker 3: we have. Those are sea lamprey in the Great Lakes, Okay.
Speaker 3: And you know that's like you said, that's an an
Speaker 3: invasive in the Great Lakes. These are these are native fish.
Speaker 6: And so where is the sea lamprey?
Speaker 3: Originally from East coast and.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and what happened was sea lamp rays couldn't get
Speaker 1: past Niagara Falls and so then when they got moved
Speaker 1: eventually like that was a natural barrier and so the
Speaker 1: upper systems never had them. And then eventually on ship
Speaker 1: ballast or whatever, lampreys got moved above a natural barrier
Speaker 1: and then and just decimated lake trout, you know, and
Speaker 1: they started all those different programs of poisoning spawning beds
Speaker 1: and it still goes on. Why, Like you're talking about
Speaker 1: like another Doge cut was there was a big dough
Speaker 1: there was a big Doge cut around like all this
Speaker 1: work to try to get lampreys under control in the
Speaker 1: Great Lakes system, and then they were acting the people
Speaker 1: that run the program, and that was when that.
Speaker 2: Was going on.
Speaker 1: I pointed out, like on the show, I pointed out
Speaker 1: that there's a little bit of a like you said,
Speaker 1: like paying attention to what the ramifications are. We've spent
Speaker 1: millions and millions and millions of dollars getting them under control,
Speaker 1: and then you and then you go to save a
Speaker 1: couple of bucks by ditching some dudes, you know, and
Speaker 1: then all of a sudden, the whole investment goes out
Speaker 1: the window, you know, because you're trying to save a
Speaker 1: couple of dollars. Right, Yeah, but that's different watershed, different problems.
Speaker 6: Do people ever eat these pacific Yeah?
Speaker 4: Yeah, Actually I meant to bring some today, but I
Speaker 4: didn't get to meet up with my with my friend
Speaker 4: that she had some that she had put away that
Speaker 4: it was we dried them, you know, you eat them fresh,
Speaker 4: roast them, and they're really really rich. I'd say, it's
Speaker 4: an acquired taste. I'll send some to you guys. You
Speaker 4: can taste it some dried lamprey. But yeah, it's really
Speaker 4: oily fish. And you know, like that was highly sought after, right,
Speaker 4: you need those calories to.
Speaker 1: They're in a Scofia's cook But one of the things
Speaker 1: that when I was doing Scavenger's Guide to Oat Cuisine,
Speaker 1: one of the things I bombed out on was getting lamprey.
Speaker 1: But that was in the Scofias cookbooks like French French Preparation,
Speaker 1: French Lamprey Preparation, a.
Speaker 6: Bit like ru orl.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like, yeah, you head, you think you're looking
Speaker 2: at it.
Speaker 3: Eel and they're crazy. Just the biology of them is
Speaker 3: pretty crazy. They're carlaginous fish. They're an ancient fish.
Speaker 2: Jallis.
Speaker 3: They're four hundred million years old, I mean, and they
Speaker 3: were here that long ago. I mean when that was
Speaker 3: when you know, the continents were all connected, and they've
Speaker 3: been able to figure out how to survive until man
Speaker 3: put enough dams on the river that we've you know,
Speaker 3: they went down to critically low numbers in the Columbia,
Speaker 3: probably down to twenty thousand or so. It's we've had
Speaker 3: lamprey programs going for a while. Now it's the tribes
Speaker 3: and it is coming back, and we've got lamprey that
Speaker 3: we've got coming back to Idaho and other higher tributaries.
Speaker 3: They're really they're a weak swimmer, so getting over dams
Speaker 3: is a difficult thing. There's been a lot of technology
Speaker 3: stuff to try and figure out how to get a
Speaker 3: move but it's getting.
Speaker 1: You go to like the Yukon costco quem Colbac River
Speaker 1: that's like an indigenous subsistence fishery still with lampreys.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was fifty percent at each mainstem project that
Speaker 4: you'd lose of adult lamprey returning. So that's why it
Speaker 4: was the tribes that took the initiative to start the
Speaker 4: lamprey translocation so collect that Jonnaville dam and then take
Speaker 4: them up to the tributaries and that's how we're starting
Speaker 4: to see fish returning. So we want to do more
Speaker 4: of that and also installing passage for lamprey, like a
Speaker 4: wetted wall, you know, for them to work their way
Speaker 4: up because they can't go up the fish ladders because
Speaker 4: there's you know, perpendicular surfaces there. Yeah, so they're trying
Speaker 4: to swim up. They can't make it, but they could
Speaker 4: go all the way up that wetted wall, and so
Speaker 4: we're looking at adult passage at the dam's translocation. Another
Speaker 4: hard thing is a lot of the juveniles get sucked
Speaker 4: out into ear because you know, it's like a little
Speaker 4: worm in the slats on a screen. You know, they
Speaker 4: would have to be outrageously small to keep the lamprey out.
Speaker 2: So they wound up going through sprinkler systems.
Speaker 4: End up in all the irrigation canals and whatnot, and
Speaker 4: we do salvages when they shut down the canal, we'll
Speaker 4: go in there and try to salvage as many of
Speaker 4: the jus.
Speaker 3: And they're super complicated, so the life history of them
Speaker 3: and so everything you learned about salmon doesn't really apply.
Speaker 3: So it's trying to relearn all these things. They don't
Speaker 3: home like a salmon. If you get it in a
Speaker 3: particular area, they're going to come back to that spot
Speaker 3: to spawn, and lamprey don't.
Speaker 2: So it's well, they don't have like their site fidelity
Speaker 2: that just go wherever they go.
Speaker 8: They're just distributed by currents.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so a degree there is some that come back
Speaker 3: and they do have a pheromone that they give off,
Speaker 3: and if there's juveniles there, they'll come back to that location.
Speaker 3: But it wasn't necessary where they were born, so it's
Speaker 3: complicated to try and restor them, and really it needs
Speaker 3: a broader coast wide effort then if you need to
Speaker 3: improve it in a lot of streams, not just You
Speaker 3: can't just do a stream like you do with salmon
Speaker 3: and expect that that homing is going to help you
Speaker 3: out and they'll come back. Isn't going to happen.
Speaker 2: And they're anagronous, but not the word I was saying earlier.
Speaker 3: They're not similar Paris. They're inter ol Paris. Yeah, they
Speaker 3: can repeat spawn, although not that much. And we don't
Speaker 3: know so much of it. We just don't know about
Speaker 3: it because it hasn't been a sexy fish to study.
Speaker 4: No, right, yeah, well there's a lot going on with
Speaker 4: them now. And what's crazy. It's funny, but it's not.
Speaker 4: We were at the dam right Bonneville down where they
Speaker 4: have the fish bewing windows and that's where they count
Speaker 4: right back in the nineties, the core actually used to
Speaker 4: have an air blast system. Those damn lamprey getting in
Speaker 4: the way. They would air blast them off.
Speaker 3: Oh really yeah, yeah, looked like a series of moss,
Speaker 3: you know. Or they'd be attached to the window and
Speaker 3: it would obstruct the view to count salm. And so
Speaker 3: they blast them off every ten or fifteen minutes, and
Speaker 3: they push him down the ladder.
Speaker 2: Yea.
Speaker 1: My brother Danny is a salmon biologist in Alaska. He
Speaker 1: works on that stable isotope issues and a bunch of
Speaker 1: other stuff, a lot of like warm water issues and
Speaker 1: other things, but impacts warm water. One of his first,
Speaker 1: I think his first paid fisheries gig was he was
Speaker 1: in walla wall of Washington and he was paid to
Speaker 1: sit there looking out that window.
Speaker 2: Count fish. This is one of his first paid gigs. Man. Yeah,
Speaker 2: living like living in basically living inside the damn counting
Speaker 2: fish in the window and writing it down.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, man, I feel like we could go.
Speaker 5: On all day, but we didn't even hit success stories
Speaker 5: or more success stories.
Speaker 2: Well yeah, who can conveniently give us some success stories?
Speaker 4: Uh?
Speaker 8: Well, we can just read them off from them, will
Speaker 8: have them give us the short version. Steel had reconditioning.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so that's a thing I've been working on for
Speaker 3: twenty five years, along with a really good group of people.
Speaker 3: But basically so Steell had our ittero Paris. They repeat spawn.
Speaker 3: There's they're rainbow trout, so they can spawn and they
Speaker 3: can spawn again. They'll go up to whatever river they're
Speaker 3: in and then they spawn and they try to go
Speaker 3: back downstream and go back to the ocean. And in
Speaker 3: a totally natural system, the number of repeat spawners that
Speaker 3: you have in your population will range anywhere from you know,
Speaker 3: five to six percent up to maybe thirty or forty percent.
Speaker 3: It's kind of dependent on how close you are to
Speaker 3: the ocean. Closer to the ocean, the higher you get
Speaker 3: of these repeat spawners through the hydrosystem. They don't don't
Speaker 3: make it. I mean, it is definitely not set up
Speaker 3: for a large fished pass downstream. And a lot of
Speaker 3: them will go through the bypasses, the juvenile bypass system,
Speaker 3: and they're they get screened off and we collect those fish,
Speaker 3: collect them at lower Granite other places. We take those
Speaker 3: fish then into a hatchery, put them in tanks. We've
Speaker 3: got specialized fish culture, fish care, and well we'll feed
Speaker 3: them to where they survive and then they'll remature. And
Speaker 3: this has been concentrated on wild fish, so there's a
Speaker 3: fish that successfully spawned. There were no eggs in it
Speaker 3: when we collected them in that damn they go up.
Speaker 3: We've reconditioned them, release them either that fall or some
Speaker 3: of them will skip and they won't spawn again until
Speaker 3: the following fall. Will hold them for eighteen months, keep
Speaker 3: feeding them. We let them go downstream of where we
Speaker 3: had collected them, and then they go back upstream and
Speaker 3: spawn and.
Speaker 2: They skip their whole return to the ocean.
Speaker 3: Right, So we circumvented that. Yeah, yeah, so.
Speaker 1: You've cut out whatever mortality happens out on the open
Speaker 1: ocean exactly.
Speaker 4: Our communications director he made it a little pamphlet and
Speaker 4: it shows like the steelhead spa where he's kicked.
Speaker 1: Bag No kid really yeah, and you'll say like, we'll
Speaker 1: take care of everything, brother, Yeah, and then when you're
Speaker 1: ready to go again, we'll let you go.
Speaker 3: And they home back to the same stream and we have.
Speaker 2: How many fish? Can you actually do that?
Speaker 3: Well, it's a it's a it's a safety net thing, right.
Speaker 3: I Mean, you got these low number numbers of fish
Speaker 3: in certain populations and you can target it to those
Speaker 3: streams by having a weird some way of collecting to
Speaker 3: that stream, and especially in a place where you're really
Speaker 3: worried about them blinking out, or you get bigger collections,
Speaker 3: more generalized, like Lower Granite has the whole Snake River.
Speaker 3: We release them though in the fish one hundred maybe
Speaker 3: or one hundred and fifty, we've been concentrated. We've been
Speaker 3: doing it at a research scale. This is now I'm
Speaker 3: trying to do It's finally now we're gearing up to
Speaker 3: do this as a production scale. It's in those first
Speaker 3: tried project at a production scale. But there's fish that
Speaker 3: go back to the Imnaha, the upper sand and remember
Speaker 3: the Grand drawn, the clear water, the sea sash, everywhere
Speaker 3: this is.
Speaker 1: But it'll like, it's great, it's great wildfish, and I
Speaker 1: know we're looking for positives. It's great, but it's like
Speaker 1: that is sort of like definite, you know, the term
Speaker 1: conservation dependent. That is like like the poster child of
Speaker 1: conservation dependence, right, you know, I mean we have the
Speaker 1: fish because we literally handle it and care for it.
Speaker 1: You know, Yeah, it's it's great, but but I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't want to be Debbie Downer. It's great,
Speaker 1: but it's like, holy shit, has it come to that?
Speaker 3: Do you know what I mean, that's the problem is
Speaker 3: that wild steelhead recovery nothing's really worked.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you do supplementation.
Speaker 3: Some things that have worked we've been able to pull
Speaker 3: off with Simon hasn't worked for steel hell. We get
Speaker 3: hatchery fish, but getting more wild.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: All this conversation about how do you get these big
Speaker 1: ass fish out of the ocean to their spawning grounds,
Speaker 1: and with steelhead, it's like, Okay, let's get these big
Speaker 1: ass fish out of the ocean up to their spawning grounds,
Speaker 1: back to the ocean, right yep.
Speaker 2: And you're like, oh, that's tricky.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 2: Right, they're not going back down yep.
Speaker 8: What about like Snake River, fall Chanook and then Sake
Speaker 8: and Cooho. We've got those on the list for your
Speaker 8: success stories.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So in about the early nineties, Snake River fall Chanook
Speaker 3: were under one hundred fish at Lower Granite and Nesper's
Speaker 3: tribe had a patchy program for fall Chinook, and that
Speaker 3: stock has rebounded to where the peak was about ninety
Speaker 3: thousand fish in the Snake River. I think it's hovering
Speaker 3: now around anywhere from thirty to fifty thousand with.
Speaker 2: Some natural reproduction.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah, so you get some natural So the
Speaker 3: idea there is to collect the fish and then out
Speaker 3: outplant those juveniles so that they'll return to the So.
Speaker 2: There you're helping them. You're helping them get back to
Speaker 2: the ocean.
Speaker 3: Yeah, kind of that. It's integrated hatchery program. So you're
Speaker 3: taking in wildfish as well as the hatchery fish trained
Speaker 3: to maintain the genetic you know, your genetic integrity.
Speaker 1: And and those are getting back home on their own fins.
Speaker 1: I mean they're going back up to Yeah, they'll later
Speaker 1: make it up on their own.
Speaker 3: Now there's fisheries. Now, there wasn't a false when I
Speaker 3: was in college. There wasn't falseho fisheries in the in
Speaker 3: the Snake River.
Speaker 6: There are how big as a fall chinook there on
Speaker 6: that river.
Speaker 3: Twenty five twenty twenty five pounds twenty to thirty Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and it's fisheries all the way down as well as
Speaker 3: off the coast.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, dudes are catching those fish, catching them everywhere.
Speaker 8: What about Soke and Coho, It says I you had
Speaker 8: some reintroductions.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and that was a tribally led effort. Like how
Speaker 4: I had mentioned a lot of the hatchery production being
Speaker 4: in the lower River, which was unnatural. You're just feeding
Speaker 4: your your sport and commercial harvest and totally excluding the
Speaker 4: tribes and everybody inland. So it was we started the
Speaker 4: coho reintroductions back in the nineties and taking juveniles from
Speaker 4: the lower River and taking them back into their tributaries
Speaker 4: like in the Metau and the Wenatchee, the Yakma, and
Speaker 4: that was highly successful and so that was replicated by
Speaker 4: the Nez Perce tribe and it was actually the state
Speaker 4: of Idaho has a law against reintroduction programs, and it
Speaker 4: was by by night that Actually it's our tribal chairman now,
Speaker 4: Gerald Lewis, he worked in fisheries for a number of
Speaker 4: years and it was back when he was in fisheries,
Speaker 4: he drove the truck in the middle of the night
Speaker 4: of taking those coho up to the Nez Perce tribe
Speaker 4: so that they could reintroduce them. It was illegally, yeah,
Speaker 4: so under thread of arrest by.
Speaker 2: The state.
Speaker 1: And because because they don't want to then create like
Speaker 1: new e s a issues for themselves.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we're responsibilities for maintaining and and all that type
Speaker 4: of thing.
Speaker 1: So I don't know, the leveless cynicism unbelievable. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: like don't put some there because then will be obligated
Speaker 1: to like do something to allow them to live.
Speaker 4: So that the cohen reintroductions were highly successful. We brought
Speaker 4: we started out bringing in juveniles and we'd hold them
Speaker 4: in acclamation ponds for a month or so and then
Speaker 4: release them from there. And then as they started returning,
Speaker 4: then we started building things out into a full supplementation
Speaker 4: program where we're getting getting our own brood to spawn
Speaker 4: and all these generations and and then we're still incorporating
Speaker 4: some of the lower river like as needed. But yeah,
Speaker 4: it's almost becoming a self sufficient program. And but also
Speaker 4: you have the the anti hatchery group, but we're leading
Speaker 4: on the genetics side where we're incorporating, you know, trying
Speaker 4: to have that genetic diversity, and we use stocks that
Speaker 4: were like similar to this area and distance and things
Speaker 4: like that. But you know, we're just being mindful of
Speaker 4: the work that we do. So there wouldn't be there
Speaker 4: wouldn't be Coho above Bonneville Dam if it wasn't for
Speaker 4: the efforts of the tribes. And I always credit our
Speaker 4: senior most biologist, Tom Scribner with Yakuma, and he hates
Speaker 4: that I call him out all the time. But that
Speaker 4: was his life's work. He did years and years of
Speaker 4: advocacy and then also fighting with our state co managers
Speaker 4: because they were against it because there was worries because
Speaker 4: you know, coho are more voracious eaters and they were
Speaker 4: worried about them eating the spring chinook. It's like these
Speaker 4: things coexisted for millions of years. It's like we just
Speaker 4: need to get them back and they'll work out their
Speaker 4: areas and where they live and you know, like it
Speaker 4: took us to mess them up, let's help them cover.
Speaker 4: And the same thing with the Sakai reintroduction. You know,
Speaker 4: we were working with the Okanagan Nation Alliance in Canada
Speaker 4: collecting fish at Wanapum Dam, which is just upstream of
Speaker 4: the Snake River because the Snake River Sakai are listed,
Speaker 4: so that's what that has all the ESA restrictions and concerns.
Speaker 4: So we're collecting above the snake and then so we're
Speaker 4: did reintroduction programs into the Yakoma into Lake klee Elam
Speaker 4: and we just completed a passage project at Lake cole
Speaker 4: Elam because that was used as an irrigation reservoir. You know,
Speaker 4: it was checked up and so there was no passage
Speaker 4: and that's how that's how the sakai were extrapated, and
Speaker 4: the tributaries was from irrigation error reclamation. You know, these dams,
Speaker 4: these diversions without passage, no fish screens and dewatering events
Speaker 4: and things like that. So you know, the tribes have
Speaker 4: really been working together with bo R and the local
Speaker 4: irrigation districts to be able to get fish, like how
Speaker 4: can we work together. The Akama Basin Integrated Plan is
Speaker 4: a great success story of that. They got this like
Speaker 4: thirty million dollar fish passage structure at Lake Leelam for
Speaker 4: juveniles to out migrate. They'll still have to truck the
Speaker 4: adults over the dam, but they could go up into
Speaker 4: the tributaries and Spahan, we're in the lake and have
Speaker 4: access to get out. So that's been a huge success story.
Speaker 4: And we've been talking working with the Nez Presh tribe.
Speaker 4: They want to do reintroductions into Lake Wallawa for skei
Speaker 4: as all awesome, Yeah, but that's really complicated because you know,
Speaker 4: like with the ESA listings and what poor shape the
Speaker 4: Snake River Sakai are in. So they're collecting at Bonnaville
Speaker 4: Dam and they actually utilize our genetic technology they collect
Speaker 4: at Bonnaville Dam and then they screen out and you know,
Speaker 4: they could.
Speaker 1: See the kidney. You can screen out the EESA ones
Speaker 1: from the nun Yeah. So like you we can move
Speaker 1: you buddy, you got to stay put, no kid Yeah.
Speaker 3: And I think that's one of the big success stories too,
Speaker 3: is collaboration. I mean through the six sovereigns stuff that
Speaker 3: that Danella was talking about with the other with states
Speaker 3: of Oregon, Washington, the Treaty tribes we work great with
Speaker 3: and at Bonneville. Dan that's an integrated crew that we
Speaker 3: have with the Sea Lion project. It's got people from
Speaker 3: State of Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and Critfic that we have
Speaker 3: the all working together. It's under the same permit and
Speaker 3: it's all jointly done. So from the dark times that
Speaker 3: you talked about earlier, it's it's we're not all the
Speaker 3: way there, but it's better. It's looking it's a lot
Speaker 3: better than when I started. It's it's it's it's improving,
Speaker 3: and it gives you hope that I think, you know,
Speaker 3: it can get better.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that man.
Speaker 1: One of the things I appreciate about the conversation is
Speaker 1: I've always looked at the whole issue being that be
Speaker 1: like I always looked at it like binary be that
Speaker 1: the dam stay and the fish go, or the dams
Speaker 1: go and the fish stay. And it's encouraging to think
Speaker 1: that there could be I mean, as much as it
Speaker 1: is like becomes a very conservation dependent, very expensive, but
Speaker 1: you could see some level of progress, you know, and
Speaker 1: like at least hang on and wait for like a
Speaker 1: better day, you know, like just to have something to save.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 1: I don't know I've mentioned a couple times ready, but
Speaker 1: my brother was the fisheries guy in Alaska. He had
Speaker 1: this really interesting perspective about Alaska versus Alaska versus the
Speaker 1: Lower forty eight. You said that conservation the Lower forty
Speaker 1: eight is it's all recovery. I mean, we're like we're
Speaker 1: in recovery mode.
Speaker 2: Up there.
Speaker 1: They're still in almost like a classification mode. They're still
Speaker 1: trying to go like what's here, right, Like what is here?
Speaker 1: Trying to count things, describe things, get a sense of
Speaker 1: what's there. And down here it's like we just look
Speaker 1: at like what's gone, you know what I mean, how
Speaker 1: we try to fix our mistakes.
Speaker 4: So hard because it's salmon our international issue, right, even
Speaker 4: the harvest of salmon, because that's why we have the
Speaker 4: Pacific Salmon Commission Pacific Salmon Treaty and looking. You know,
Speaker 4: when things really tanked back in the eighties and the
Speaker 4: numbers were in dire straits and in the Columbia Basin,
Speaker 4: and that's when you know, those court cases were happening,
Speaker 4: and our tribal fisheries programs were really being established and
Speaker 4: the tribes started their supplementation efforts. That's when you could
Speaker 4: see the rebound in the in the the curve on
Speaker 4: the graph of when our tribes started doing that that
Speaker 4: way to get us here.
Speaker 1: We haven't even gotten into all that stuff with like
Speaker 1: high seas drift nets and dudes out in almost an
Speaker 1: international waters peeling off American salmon.
Speaker 2: Man like, we need to get.
Speaker 4: Into that stuff in the bycatch of salmon and other
Speaker 4: fisheries is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And then they go digging into kans of salmon
Speaker 1: and it's full of canned steelhead that they're catching out
Speaker 1: on the high seas.
Speaker 2: You know, it's just like unbelievable.
Speaker 3: Man, big the year the odd years with the high
Speaker 3: pink numbers that's being seen, we're seeing decreased signal in
Speaker 3: chinook and other lower forty eight fish. And you know
Speaker 3: those are Alaska as well as as Japan and some
Speaker 3: of those Asian countries that are putting out a lot
Speaker 3: of pinks.
Speaker 2: So it's into those nets, man, And.
Speaker 4: That's all it's done, just for corporate interest, right. That's
Speaker 4: not anything natural, it's not a natural population, it's not
Speaker 4: a public service. It's these groups putting out all this
Speaker 4: pink catchery production just for this commercial fishery, low value
Speaker 4: commercial fishery in comparison to what they could be having
Speaker 4: in sake.
Speaker 1: I sent Yanni the other day. Do you have that
Speaker 1: text message? Pull up that text message I sent Yannie.
Speaker 1: Some fish price stuff will close out, almost close out
Speaker 1: with this.
Speaker 5: And we can't forget about where to go if you
Speaker 5: want to donate.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but we're talking about just relative value here when
Speaker 1: you're talking about like the pink, like the pink industry.
Speaker 2: Yeah that mm hmm nickel. This is paid at the dock.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Steve and I exchanged at times a lot of texts,
Speaker 7: so it's.
Speaker 2: Taking just a second. I think it was six cents
Speaker 2: six and then compared to like a sake or king.
Speaker 2: Hopefully Yannie can find it.
Speaker 4: There's there's been years that when I grew up fishing,
Speaker 4: we were getting two and a half cents a pound
Speaker 4: for Tooley's on the on the Toby. It's the it's
Speaker 4: a different stock of fish like that runs in the
Speaker 4: lower river. You have upriver brights that farther upstream or
Speaker 4: like th hu Eliott. Yeah, yeah, but two and a
Speaker 4: half cents a pound.
Speaker 7: Yeah, these were overall average prices paid the fisherman in
Speaker 7: twenty twenty five. This is the Alaska Fishing Game Department.
Speaker 7: Chinook took six forty a pound.
Speaker 2: Next down this was paid the fisherman at the docks six.
Speaker 7: Next down the line was Coho at one, Sakka at
Speaker 7: one seventeen. Surprisingly to me, chumps were eighty cents, and
Speaker 7: then the pinks came in.
Speaker 2: At thirty well thirty cents, okay, But like just a
Speaker 2: relative picture the way that the values on these fish
Speaker 2: are perceived, you know, and then like the amount of
Speaker 2: like yeah, the other thing about the man, this is
Speaker 2: such a rich subject. Do you go on and on?
Speaker 1: But like the hat the pink hatchery stuff is you
Speaker 1: think like you think when you're running cattle, when you're
Speaker 1: running cattle and you want to run graze cattle on
Speaker 1: public land, you pay a grazing fee. You have a
Speaker 1: contract and pay raising fee. A cannery runs a pink hatch,
Speaker 1: they're grazing for free. That stuff goes out in the
Speaker 1: open ocean and grazes for free, and then it comes
Speaker 1: back and you sell it for thirty cent you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, you sell it for thirty cents a pound, dude.
Speaker 1: It's competing with wildfish.
Speaker 5: And then compared to the market, I was looking at
Speaker 5: just Pike Place fish prices as of yesterday, and of
Speaker 5: course it's probably be more expensive, but thirty to forty
Speaker 5: pounds for wild dollars chinook.
Speaker 2: Thirty to forty bucks for wild pound pound of wild chinook.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and then that's that was an average. Then Pike
Speaker 5: Place was fifty five for full as Sacy is about
Speaker 5: fifty dollars a pound for full ats and coho is twenty.
Speaker 2: Eight or pink's on her uh.
Speaker 5: No, ste white sturgeon was like average ten to thirty,
Speaker 5: depending upon you know, you.
Speaker 2: Know who else we didn't get to.
Speaker 1: We didn't get the bitching about killer whales, who I
Speaker 1: guess could go into a school of pinks. If there's
Speaker 1: a king in there. They going to that school. It
Speaker 1: could be thousands of pinks and they're gonna grab the king.
Speaker 2: Dude, they know they know the price, Like, yeah, isn't
Speaker 2: that wild.
Speaker 1: They'll they could, they'll sort through, They'll sort through and
Speaker 1: find kings because like that's the good one, that's the
Speaker 1: bad one right there.
Speaker 4: Well, that's like with sea lions, right Doug was talking
Speaker 4: about the stellars that eat a sturgeon. They were primarily
Speaker 4: going after the big females and eating out the bellies.
Speaker 4: Roll yeah, yeah, animals.
Speaker 7: Well, it gives me hope, Like you're your aha moment
Speaker 7: story of seeing those giant fish in that pool. I
Speaker 7: feel like the stuff you guys are doing, if at
Speaker 7: the minimum, you're giving the opportunity for future generations to
Speaker 7: have that moment. Hopefully we can keep the whole thing going.
Speaker 7: And then to think that we could have like what
Speaker 7: Alaska has like literally right here or within a half
Speaker 7: a day's drive where we're sitting right now, and that
Speaker 7: we don't, and that we're not putting more effort into doing.
Speaker 2: It because I've walked across the river around them.
Speaker 6: It's kind of crazy.
Speaker 4: It's the resistance to change and moving beyond the status
Speaker 4: quo of that's the way we've always done things. Like
Speaker 4: you have this old car that's all beat up and
Speaker 4: I'm barely keeping it running, but I refuse to to
Speaker 4: trade it in.
Speaker 7: Well, it's the baseline syndrome too, right. None of us
Speaker 7: here in this room have ever would ever know see,
Speaker 7: have seen or would know what it was like to
Speaker 7: have those kind of fisheries right here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like my little kids, like if if we don't
Speaker 1: turn things around on Sam, and my little kids would
Speaker 1: be like.
Speaker 2: Man, twenty twenty five is bitch, and dude, we got
Speaker 2: three kings. Yeah, you never see that now.
Speaker 4: Well, there's a lot of misca.
Speaker 2: That was the good old days, dude.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of misconceptions too. People don't understand that,
Speaker 4: Like what are they complaining about. Like they see those
Speaker 4: reels and those videos of all those fish coming back
Speaker 4: to those pink catcheries, you know, and that's what they're showing.
Speaker 4: That's not what's going on in the in reality and
Speaker 4: having fish coming back to the rivers and the spawning
Speaker 4: grounds and things like that, that's more natural. But they
Speaker 4: see these these outrageous things and think that's not a
Speaker 4: big deal. And there's also a lot of misconception. And
Speaker 4: call it the numbers game, right, they're looking at the
Speaker 4: total number of salmon that passed Bonnaville down. That's kind
Speaker 4: of what the outsiders view is success of the health
Speaker 4: of the river. Like you know, we're around two million now,
Speaker 4: but a lot of that is still lower river hatcheries.
Speaker 4: You have a little white salmon and spring chinook catcheries,
Speaker 4: but where they're not whereas wild wild chinook, wild spring
Speaker 4: chinook in the Upper and mid Columbia, you're only getting
Speaker 4: like a thousand.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I gotcha of that. So you make them. You
Speaker 2: can show what you want to show with the numbers.
Speaker 4: And then also understanding that harvest is limited by those
Speaker 4: weaker stocks because you have ESA restrictions on spring chinook
Speaker 4: all throughout the basin, so you have very little access
Speaker 4: to harvest spring chinook. And you know the numbers are slow, well,
Speaker 4: sea lions are eating most of them before they get
Speaker 4: to us. And then we fight over the what seventeen
Speaker 4: percent harvests that shared between the states and the tribes.
Speaker 4: And then also in the summer, because of the ESA
Speaker 4: listed Sokai concerns and we can't access we can't fish
Speaker 4: those on the successful Okanagan fish or you know Upper
Speaker 4: Columbia fish because of ESA restrictions, and the same thing
Speaker 4: happens in our fall fisheries. We have mesh restriction sizes
Speaker 4: because of b run steelhead limitations. So it's like things
Speaker 4: are great, but like, no, it's not. You have to
Speaker 4: look at the real picture of what's going on throughout
Speaker 4: the basin.
Speaker 2: Well, well that's that, man, We go on all day.
Speaker 2: But this has been great talking to you guys about
Speaker 2: I've learned a ton and I'm just one person.
Speaker 4: We have a ton of great experts on any subject
Speaker 4: you want to touch on, and it would be really
Speaker 4: awesome to you know, like focus more on the CBRI,
Speaker 4: the Columbia Basin Restoration Initiative, and you know, that's what
Speaker 4: we're continuing to work for towards and advocate for to
Speaker 4: get these actions done to continue the success and also
Speaker 4: you know, looking for partnerships of you know, how we
Speaker 4: could work together because you know, the only time we
Speaker 4: make actionable change is when we set aside our differences
Speaker 4: to focus on our commonalities and that's when we connect
Speaker 4: and also connecting as people like how I said about
Speaker 4: you know, salmon. It's the heart of our culture. It's cultural,
Speaker 4: it's spiritual, you know, like and even things don't have
Speaker 4: to be religious to be spiritual. It could be that
Speaker 4: way for you or anybody else. Like I talked to
Speaker 4: a lot of our staff. I shared my aha moment
Speaker 4: of that seeing that fish eight hundred miles away, and
Speaker 4: they've talked about sitting alongside the stream bank and seeing
Speaker 4: that fish jumping to get over this barrier or things
Speaker 4: like that. Like we can all feel that connection if
Speaker 4: we get out there and it's there's you can't put
Speaker 4: a value on that.
Speaker 5: So take a first step. Audience members, if you want
Speaker 5: to donate, can you guys plug your website. I know
Speaker 5: there's a donate tab therea.
Speaker 4: Yeah on our on our web page, the Columbia River
Speaker 4: Inner Tribal Fish Commission.
Speaker 3: It's at.
Speaker 4: Www dot CRYTF dot org. So ce R I t
Speaker 4: e FC dot org.
Speaker 2: All you non Indian fellers out here, these are the fish,
Speaker 2: same old fish. Thanks for coming on, guys, Thank thanks,
Speaker 2: thank you,