Déjà Vu for Salmon?

In 1715, King George I of England passed laws to protect salmon spawning grounds in more than a dozen rivers. The attempt to halt the decline in salmon populations proved to be largely fruitless. Today few salmon ply British waters.
Strikingly, much the same scenario began playing out 100 years later in the rivers of northeastern North America. A century after that it began again in the Pacific Northwest.

Dave Montgomery

David Montgomery, professor of earth and space sciences, details these parallels in his new book, King of Fish: The Thousand- Year Run of Salmon. Montgomery also outlines protections, different from those that have failed in the past, that he believes might save the remaining Northwest salmon runs. These include establishing independent riverkeepers, creating salmon sanctuaries in river bottoms and flood plains, and stopping fishing for at-risk species for five to ten years, then restricting fishing to no more than half of any run.

“It’s not too late in this region to apply the lessons of past experiments, but it’s getting close to too late,” he says. “Relative to Maine, we still have a ton of fish.”

It was Montgomery’s participation in a Washington state salmon recovery panel that led to this perspective. Montgomery noticed many local plans for protecting salmon but no comprehensive regional strategy. He began to explore accounts of salmon protection in earlier times and concluded that history was being repeated in the Northwest, and that the region’s salmon were on a perilous course.

His book quotes a variety of historic documents, starting before the decline of European salmon. As early as the 1400s, Europeans understood that “to keep a river full of salmon, enough adult salmon had to reach their spawning grounds, and enough juvenile salmon had to reach the sea,” says Montgomery. But time and again that simple strategy has been thwarted.

In some places nets were stretched across streams to capture virtually all adults returning to spawn. Dams were erected to operate mills or to generate electricity, blocking many salmon from reaching their spawning ground and hampering young fish trying to reach the ocean. Timber was harvested along riverbanks and impervious paved surfaces were installed, turning gentle runoff into torrents that scoured the gravel from spawning beds. Residential development brought flood-control measures that straightened river channels and changed them from quiet salmon nurseries into fast-flowing highways.

Even a well-intentioned tactic—using hatcheries to bolster troubled salmon runs—has backfired, Montgomery believes. Washington state hatcheries turned out 4.5 million juvenile Chinook salmon in 1896 and nearly a century later, in the early 1990s, exceeded 100 million. Yet Chinook salmon are a threatened species in the Puget Sound region of Washington.

One reason, Montgomery says, is that hatchery fish, fed a special diet to promote fast growth, are larger than wild salmon by the time they are released but not as well adapted for life in both rivers and the ocean. Nonetheless, hatchery fish compete with wild fish for the limited food available in rivers and streams before they run down to the ocean. So while hatchery fish don’t fare well, they also harm endangered wild salmon.

Salmon were not always scarce. The book tells of a time when salmon were so plentiful that the English gentry was barred from forcing servants to eat it more than three times a week. But as the human population grew and rivers changed, salmon stocks began to dwindle. As the fish became scarcer they also became more valuable and so were caught in ever-increasing numbers. That scenario has played out time after time.

Montgomery believes that protecting salmon may, in some cases, require undoing past actions. He suggests, for example, removing homes from the flood plain on some stretches of river to allow the stream to meander back and forth, flooding naturally and maintaining salmon habitat. A decision on how to proceed should come from weighing all of the options, he says, not by waiting until there are no options left.

“It’s pretty hard to drive salmon to extinction because they’re resilient,” says Montomery. “But the question is whether we want to have viable commercial fisheries rather than just remnant runs, a few fish that you can look at but not touch.”

[Winter/Spring 2004 - Table of Contents]