Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis

7. Remaking Salmon

7/ Remaking Salmon Fish culturists and fishery scientists have debated hatchery practices since the 1870s. They have argued over the effect ofpredators on survival, whether to protectfry by retaining them in ponds, what to feed ponded fish, andwhen to release them. The language and conduct ofthese debates reveal much about the politics of hatchery policy. Convinced that ponds were a logical step in protecting young fish and increasing runs, fish culturists lobbied strenuously to change state and federal hatchery practices. Academically trained fishery scientists were more skeptical. Many of these boosterish claims seemed poorly documented at best, and a few ideas were downright absurd. Eventually their own studies disproved some of the original justifications for hatcheries, and fish culturists lost much oftheir prestige as practical scientists. The debunking of many of fish culture's central tenets sparked a secondary debate over the relative merits of book knowledge versus practical experience in understanding and saving salmon. These arguments only widened the divide that separated the two groups. Although scientists tended to win the factual debates, pond-raising advocates ultimately prevailed in policy struggles. Their victory emerged less from the merits of their arguments than because development had precluded other options. The changed circumstances, mostly the result of habitat loss, opened new avenues for cooperation. In the 1940S a rapprochement occurred between the two groups. Fish culturists incorporated new science to solve old problems with malnutrition and disease, and scientists investigated new ways to increase hatchery productivity. By 1960 these cooperative trends had culminated in an apotheosis of pond-raising: Oregon's Smolt Program for coho. In their efforts to make salmon, however, fish culturists and scientists unintentionally helped to remake salmon. By instituting ever more intensive interventions in the salmon's life cycles and environments, they de203 REMAKING SALMON flected fish onto new evolutionary paths. But salmon responded poorly to domestication. Pond-raising altered the process of natural selection by imposing strange new pressures on early development and introducing endemic diseases not found in wild populations. By the 1950S scientists were noting significant changes in the behavior, size, and genetic diversity of salmon stocks. By the 1970S these changes were transforming the survival of wild stocks into a critical management issue. Hatcheries had remade salmon into creatures that threatened not only the remaining wild runs but also their own long-term interests. Nineteenth-century fish culturists divided nature into the economically useful and useless, instituted practices to protect favored species, and reshaped the environmental pressures on fish. They argued the merits of these practices for decades, but their debates were largely deductive and inconclusive. Salmon had evolved to survive in a complex, constantly changing world. Varying environmental and chemical compositions ofnatal streams, seasonal and random climatic shifts, fluctuating ocean conditions, and multiple predator and prey relationships constantly shaped their evolution. These pressures and their varied environments helped differentiate salmon in many ways. Sockeye specialized by spawning in lakes, while other species spawned in streams; pink and chumjuveniles migrated to sea immediatelyafter hatching, while chinook and sockeye waited up to three years before leaving. Evolution also created variations within species. Upper Columbia River chinook grew larger and had higher percentages of fat than lower-river chinook because they needed the extra energy to travel the one thousand or more miles to their spawning beds; they also matured at a variety of ages to guard against poor reproduction in any single year. In short, salmon evolved into incredibly complex creatures in very complicated environments.! Fish culturists had a much simpler understanding ofenvironmental interactions . Desiring to produce as many of a preferred species as possible, they reduced nature to binary categories of friends and "enemies." Europeans had long portrayed fish predators in these terms, and Americans adopted the perspective as well. In an 1883 questionnaire sent to carp recipients, the U.S. Fish Commission (USFC) asked respondents to list the "enemies of fish" in their area.2 Fish culturists and hatchery boosters, ignorant of complicated predatorprey relationships, described salmon in simple, culturally comprehensible terms. In 1872 Albert Hager complained about the "stupidity" offry because of their seeming willingness to become prey. In 1880 Livingston Stone explained that alevins lived in "the honeycombed ground below their ene204 REMAKING SALMON mies" because they were "persecuted by larger fish ... like the Christians in the catacombs." In 1897 Hollister McGuire worried, "The poor little salmon . . . at once becomes the prey of every fish that is large...