2024 saw some good news for Pacific Northwest salmon

SAMMAMISH, Wash. – Zombie kokanee tumbled downstream as new waves of crimson fish dashed through the riffles making the journey to their spawning grounds.

The creek was alive with hundreds of these landlocked sockeye amid the biggest return of the salmon in the Lake Sammamish watershed in a decade.

Just a few years ago the fish almost blinked out. But efforts by King County, the Snoqualmie Tribe and others to restore and conserve habitat and a conservation hatchery program appear to have helped pull them from the brink.

In addition to these little red freshwater fish, some oceangoing salmon have returned in big numbers.

It started with a record run of sockeye on the Columbia River, then a record number of threatened Hood Canal Summer chum returned to the Union River, and now fall chum to Pipers Creek in Seattle.

Orca researchers observed salmon leaping from Puget Sound, possibly fueling a feeding frenzy for the endangered southern resident orcas.

It looks like it’s shaping up to be the biggest Puget Sound fall chum return in 15 or 20 years, said Kyle Adicks, intergovernmental salmon manager with the state Department of Fish and Wildlife. The state has also seen strong catches and hatchery returns for coho in Puget Sound, which saw near all-time lows about a decade ago.

“It’s great to see that the salmon are still here and if things line up they can do well,” Adicks said.

But climate change affects stream flows and temperatures that can support healthy salmon runs, and it’s hard to gauge whether habitat restoration is keeping pace or being outpaced by habitat loss, Adicks said.

“It’s a success story, but doesn’t mean we’ve reached the goal line,” Adicks said. “There’s still a lot of work to do.”

‘The perfect combination’

The needs of salmon really vary by species.

The parents of the coho returning this year would have spawned in 2021, and the young fry would have come out of the gravel in spring 2022 to spend a year in the freshwater. Coho need good freshwater rearing habitat – cold water, and enough of it to survive the summer months.

Chum are completely different. Those returning this year are a mix of 3- to 5-year-olds, and it looks like the 3-year-olds did well, Adicks said. The parents would have spawned in 2021, with the fry darting out into the saltwater shortly after they hatched in spring 2022.

“They need the perfect combination of good freshwater conditions for spawning and for rearing, and then couple that with a good marine survival year, and you get the surprise returns we’re having this year,” Adicks said.

Despite a marine heat wave parked offshore, the area within 10 to 15 miles from the shore (and sometimes up to 30 miles) has remained productive.

This is because of upwelling, when cool nutrient-rich water from the ocean depths rises to the surface. Strong northerly winds that blow from spring to early fall drive upwelling along the Oregon and Washington coasts, fueling high productivity at the base of the food web.

“I think that has been really serving as a buffer for a lot of species that kind of hang out on our coast once they get out into the ocean,” said Laurie Weitkamp, research fisheries biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This largely benefits fall chinook, coho and chum, as well as sockeye and spring chinook, Weitkamp said, which stay close to shore when they first head to the ocean.

Northern copepods, little crustaceans in the crab family, are nutritious and high energy because they have a little lipid (or fat) sack. They engorge themselves and hibernate in the winter, sort of like bears, and provide a nutritious snack.

“We say those are the cheeseburgers,” Weitkamp said. “If the base of the food wave web is built on these northern copepods, then it’s a really good food web.”

Chum salmon actually eat some copepods. Coho don’t, but they eat the things that eat the copepods, like larval fish and larger crustaceans.

Generally, the ratio of these cheeseburgers to other less nutritious foods has been good, Weitkamp said, likely because of the upwelling. This was especially true in 2020 through 2023.

But head 20 miles more offshore and it looks like a warm food desert, Weitkamp said. The upwelling generally doesn’t reach that far out, and the nutrients become depleted quickly.

This is hurting steelhead the most, which head straight offshore into those marine heat waves that lack nutrients.

One of the big concerns is how climate change could affect the timing and strength of the upwelling. There are concerns it could start later, and it could push food too far off the shore, leaving fish without anything to eat.

In recent years, habitat restoration has helped provide a bit of a buffer for when ocean conditions are poor. These efforts, the result of partnerships largely led by Indigenous nations, span from removing dams, culverts and other barriers to fish passage to restoring estuaries and other historical habitat.

“When you give them a chance, do the right things habitat wise, you can get these huge returns,” Weitkamp said. “It is really inspiring, and shows that habitat restoration really does work.”

If more fish can make it out to the ocean from their natal rivers, that many more fish can take advantage of good ocean conditions to come back and create future generations.

Little red fish

Decomposing kokanee, alder and maple leaves dappled the banks of Ebright Creek Thanksgiving week.

Toothy males with their dorsal fins poking above the water’s surface jockeyed up the creek, vying to fertilize a female’s eggs.

“Isn’t that something?” Wally Pereyra asked.

The creek winds along his property, below the chattery red-winged blackbirds and thrum of a pileated woodpecker’s work and through a naturally regenerated forest flush with sword fern and thorny devil’s club.

At least 6,800 of these kokanee have so far returned to creeks along Lake Sammamish following an eight-year period when an average of fewer than 400 kokanee returned to these creeks to spawn. About a third of those fish are spawning in Ebright Creek.

It’s efforts like those by Pereyra that could support the continued survival of the kokanee. He invested $300,000 of his money to replace a pipe culvert on his property with a 15-foot box culvert, and built an extended rearing facility to raise juvenile kokanee. Pereyra has also provided funding to support studies evaluating other habitat projects.

A total of seven passage barriers have been removed from tributaries to Lake Sammamish, according to King County.

Kokanee used to be widespread across the greater Lake Washington basin. And over time, as has been seen with other salmon, habitat loss and pollution associated with human development, climate change and other impacts have restricted the range and even led to the extinction of some runs.

In the Lake Washington and Sammamish basin there were at least three distinct “runs” or spawning times for the kokanee. Typically, the early and late runs were found in Lake Sammamish and the middle run was found in the Sammamish River and Lake Washington.

The “late run” that typically occurs in November and December is the only remaining native run, according to King County. The “early run” was declared extinct in the early 2000s.

At least 6,800 of these kokanee have so far returned to creeks along Lake Sammamish following an eight-year period when an average of fewer than 400 kokanee returned to these creeks to spawn. About a third of those fish are spawning in Ebright Creek.

It’s efforts like those by Pereyra that could support the continued survival of the kokanee. He invested $300,000 of his own money to replace a pipe culvert on his property with a 15-foot box culvert, and built an extended rearing facility to raise juvenile kokanee. Pereyra has also provided funding to support studies evaluating other habitat projects.

A total of seven passage barriers have been removed from tributaries to Lake Sammamish, according to King County.

Kokanee used to be widespread across the greater Lake Washington basin. Over time, as has been seen with other salmon, habitat loss and pollution associated with human development, climate change and other impacts have restricted the range and even led to the extinction of some runs.

In the Lake Washington and Sammamish basin there were at least three distinct “runs” or spawning times for the kokanee. Typically the early and late runs were found in Lake Sammamish and the middle run was found in the Sammamish River and Lake Washington.

The “late run” that typically occurs in November and December is the only remaining native run, according to King County. The “early run” was declared extinct in the early 2000s.

Since 2007, the Lake Sammamish Kokanee Work Group, made up of tribal, federal, state, nonprofit and local representatives, has been chipping away at ways to save the “little red fish.”

In 2016, the work group conducted an ecological survey of the population that included recommended management actions and identified research needs.

In late 2017 and early 2018, fewer than two dozen fish returned to spawn in the streams of the Lake Sammamish watershed. King County Executive Dow Constantine declared an emergency to save kokanee.

Today, many kokanee spawn naturally in the Lake Sammamish watershed. Some wild adult kokanee are corralled at weirs on Lewis, Laughing Jacobs and Ebright creeks, spawned at the state Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Issaquah hatchery and their offspring are released by humans.

To increase chances of survival, kokanee are released when they’re a little bit older and bigger.

Some of the eggs fertilized in the Issaquah hatchery also go to Long Live the Kings’ Orcas Island hatchery to grow outside of the watershed in a captive broodstock program. These kokanee live their entire lives in the hatchery then they are spawned. When the eggs are sturdy enough to transport, they come to the state’s hatchery in Issaquah to complete their incubation, hatch, and then the fry get released into the lake.

Fertilized eggs from the Issaquah hatchery are also placed in small metal boxes, and the hatched salmon wriggle their way down a pipe when they are ready to head into the stream. The hope is they will return as adults to those creeks.

The kokanee work group evaluated several potential scenarios for the fish.

If they did nothing, the population would go extinct, King County kokanee recovery manager Alison Agness said. If they continue to implement habitat projects and a conservation hatchery program, in 50 years the population appears to stabilize, Agness said. If they addressed lake conditions, the population would recover more quickly.

In the lake, non-native predatory fish – which make up 70% of the fish in the lake – snack on juvenile kokanee. In the summer months, there’s a small band of the lake water column that is hospitable for kokanee because of high temperatures and low dissolved oxygen.

Long journey

The fish were an important winter food for the Snoqualmie people who historically had village sites along the shores of Lake Sammamish, said Sabeqwa de los Angeles, a Snoqualmie tribal member.

The Snoqualmie Tribe has been central to efforts to bring back the fish, including buying back some ancestral land along Zackuse Creek and working with local landowners to remove culverts and replant stream banks.

Blocked from their historical spawning habitat for more than 40 years, the first kokanee returned to Zackuse Creek in 2021.

“We’re doing our best to buy back a lot of the land, some land has been donated, but also it’s just been a long journey, which is unfortunate, but this scenario that we’re in, and it’s also an opportunity,” de los Angeles said, “not only just to let land kind of do its thing, but also try to experiment with restoration a bit, find out what works; and an opportunity to work with wildlife. Are the beavers going to take down all the effort that we put in, or the elk? And how do we work with them?”

Bobcats, bears and birds appear to have been checking out the return of the kokanee, too.

“Freshwater sockeye have been living in lakes for thousands of years,” de los Angeles said.

“Seeing the kokanee every year and doing this work, it’s something that I know a lot of tribal members look forward to. It’s really a bright spot in the work that we do.”