Sockeye salmon crop far worse than 2004

SEATTLE – Last year, about 200,000 thousand Lake Washington sockeye salmon, about half the run, failed to return to their spawning grounds.

This year it’s even worse. Scientists say they’ll be lucky if 100,000 sockeye make it back from the ocean out of a run previously estimated at 398,000 fish.

“We should be getting 10,000, 20,000 fish a day, and we’re getting 1,000 to 2,000,” said Mike Mahovlich, a fish biologist with the Muckleshoot Tribe. “We’ve lost 90 percent of our fish in the marine area.”

A return of 100,000 fish would be the lowest ocean survival rate ever recorded for Lake Washington sockeye, said Jim Ames, sockeye program manager for the state Fish and Wildlife Department.

The poor return means no sockeye season on the lake this year. The Muckleshoots, one of three tribes with rights to the fish, are even forgoing their usual catch of about a thousand sockeye for ceremonial events and needy tribal members, “a huge sacrifice for the tribe,” Mahovlich said.

Scientists believe unusually warm water in the Lake Washington Ship Canal above the Ballard locks contributed to last year’s decline. The canal connects the lake to Puget Sound.

This year, the salmon are not even returning from the Pacific Ocean, where most have been for the past two years.

“We got slammed on one end one year and we got slammed on another end the other year,” Mahovlich said.

Biologists expected a bumper crop this year, based on counts of young sockeye that left for the ocean in early 2003.

“The ocean’s kind of a mysterious entity,” Ames said. “It’s really a black box out there. First of all, we don’t know where these fish go out in the ocean.”

Two years of low spawning numbers are not necessarily a disaster, Ames said. A hatchery helps prop up fish populations, and even a small number of spawning fish can produce a lot of juveniles if conditions are good.

But scientists worry that rising temperatures in Lake Washington could pose long-term problems.

“It’s a big disappointment, so I think there’s a lot of pressure on the state and others in the scientific community to figure out what’s going on,” said Frank Urabeck, a spokesman for the conservation and recreational fishing group Trout Unlimited.

A similar problem developed this year on the Columbia River as less than half the expected spring chinook returned to spawn and a fishing season was canceled.

Salmon can be affected by many factors in the ocean, including shifts in currents, a decline in a major food source or a spread of animals that eat salmon, said Pete Lawson, a Newport, Ore., fisheries biologist for the Northwest Fisheries Science Center.

“We’re trying to cast some light on it,” Lawson said, “but it’s a big place, and it’s not easy to know what’s going on.”

Scientists did note more warm water flowing north to Canada and Alaska, bringing with it tuna and mackerel that may have gobbled up young salmon before they could mature to return for spawning, a shift of currents that may spring from climate changes.

Trying to unravel the mystery, tribal and state scientists are catching a few of the returning sockeye at the locks in a new research project that is intended to be incorporated into the annual monitoring of the run.

Each fish is measured, a hole punch of fin is taken from the tail for DNA testing, a couple of scales are saved and the otoliths, ear bones which grow in rings like a tree, are removed to determine the fish’s age and origin.