Hooray!!!

YAKIMA — Fisheries biologists are cheering a record return of coho
salmon this year to the upper and middle Columbia River basin, where
the fish were virtually wiped out 20 years ago.

Biologists began working in the 1990s to restore coho by introducing
hatchery fish from the lower Columbia River and improving dam passage
and habitat in tributaries where the fish would spawn. Prospects were
uncertain, largely because the lower-river fish would basically have
to be trained to swim to upriver tributaries.

Those efforts, combined with improved ocean conditions, are credited
with higher returns this year.

Twelve adult coho returned past Rock Island Dam near Wenatchee 10
years ago. This year, 19,805 returned past the dam.

Though most of the returning fish are hatchery fish, returns exceeded
all expectations, said Tom Scribner, project leader for the Yakama
Nation Indian tribe. An increasing number of returns came from natural
spawning, Scribner said, which biologists hope will resurrect
self-sustaining wild-coho stocks in the future.

Coho in the lower Columbia River are a threatened species, but upriver
coho never received protection under the Endangered Species Act
because there were no fish left to protect.

In the 1990s, the Yakama Nation, with support from other tribes,
Washington state, Bonneville Power Administration and other groups,
decided to try to resurrect the fish runs.

About $2 million has been spent specifically on coho restoration each
year since 2005. Before then, coho restoration was part of a larger
hatchery program that included many species.

In Central Washington's Yakima River basin, coho were extinct by 1985.

In 2002, only about 800 adult coho returned to the Yakima River. This
year, roughly 10,000 adult coho returned, with 1,800 of them wild
fish, said Todd Newsome, biologist for the Yakima-Klickitat Fisheries
Project, a joint project of the Yakama Nation and the Washington state
Department of Fish and Wildlife.


That's a lot of $ per fish but hopefully a higher rate of wild to
hatchery will start to lower the cost.