Another clear warning about walleye growth up the Snake has been issued by Idaho salmon and steelhead managers, who additionally unveiled a brand new give attention to addressing nonnative species in that river and the Columbia.
Not solely are much more walleye transferring previous Lower Granite Dam than beforehand believed, however they’re overlapping increasingly more Endangered Species Act-listed fall Chinook and summer time steelhead rearing habitat and have been caught on the mouths of the Clearwater, Grande Ronde and different rivers, out of which swim many wild and hatchery smolts.
And abdomen sampling final 12 months discovered salmonids make up a bigger a part of walleye food regimen than native northern pikeminnow, that are being actively suppressed for simply that purpose, in addition to launched smallmouth bass in almost all instances within the 4 decrease Snake River reservoirs.
While there are nonetheless many questions round Snake River walleye on the market – are they transferring upstream to feed or have they now established a breeding inhabitants above Lower Granite, and if that’s the case, the place do they spawn and what number of are there? Did bucket biologists give this in style Midwest fish a serving to hand? – a brand new state-tribal-federal work group has additionally now been shaped to deal with the species and several other others within the Columbia Basin.
That’s the nut of a presentation earlier this month to the Northwest Power and Conservation Council by Marika Dobos, a fisheries biologist with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, and first reported by NewsData’s Clearing Up information service and the Columbia Basin Bulletin.
It follows on the more and more alarming updates in recent years from IDFG and echoes what I’ve been reporting the previous two years about rising incidental catches of walleye turned in at Lower Granite by Northern Pikeminnow Sport-Reward Fishery contributors – 2,085 final 12 months, which was practically twice as many as 2022, which itself was 12 occasions 2021’s tally.
And all of it ought to sign that there seems to be an growing urgency across the challenge given the continuing struggles of salmon and steelhead and the billions of {dollars} which were spent on recovering them, and the brand new renewed focus towards that finish, together with presumably breaching the decrease Snake dams, by the “six sovereigns” and the Biden Administration, a lot of that are on that new intergovernmental panel.
Dobos stated the Walleye/Non-Native Piscivore Work Group is made up of representatives from IDFG and the Washington and Oregon Departments of Fish and Wildlife, the Umatilla and Nez Perce Tribes, the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center, and it has already adopted a mission assertion: “Implement research and management actions with a goal to reduce, minimize, and prevent piscine predation-related mortality from introduced non-native fishes on anadromous species within the Columbia River basin.”
SO HOW DID WE GET HERE? Since walleye have been illicitly launched into Banks Lake maybe way back to the Nineteen Forties, they’ve inexorably unfold down the Columbia, but it surely wasn’t till the late Nineties that they apparently first swam up into the Snake.
Dobos instructed members of the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, which balances hydropower era within the Columbia Basin with mitigating its impacts on fish and wildlife, that crimson flags about potential impacts to Idaho’s young salmon and steelhead actually started to go up in 2016 when the primary two walleye have been noticed on the fish entice at Lower Granite Dam, the fourth barrier on the Snake above the Columbia. Trap numbers have risen practically yearly since, and 2023’s 154 was greater than twice as many as each 2021 and 2022, 75 and 73, respectively.
She stated that the walleye being seen have already grown to a measurement the place their food regimen has converted to fish, and their arrival within the entice in recent years has additionally moved earlier, from mid-August in 2020 and 2021, to July 1 in 2022 and early June in 2023, which additionally places them extra within the window of smolt outmigration.
But the entice depend solely displays a share of passage – and far lower than beforehand recognized. It had been assumed that 20 % of all species have been caught within the dam’s entice, a sampling facility not meant to seize all fish passing by, however the state of affairs with walleye confirmed that’s not essentially the case.
Dobos defined that whereas the Army Corps of Engineers isn’t contracted to depend walleye and different “nontarget species” on the dam, they did agree to supply window counts for April-October 2021.
“And they counted nearly 2,000 walleye,” she stated. “And what’s alarming is that we only caught 3 percent of those in the trap, and so that disparity was not something we expected. Because the trap rate runs on average 20 percent, we were expecting that 75 was 20 percent of the walleye in the ladder, and that’s not the case.”
That led to a check with final 12 months’s 154 trapped walleye. Instead of being killed like those who turned up within the entice in 2020, 2021 and 2022, these got passive built-in transponders, or PIT tags, and launched again beneath Lower Granite to see how they moved by means of the dam, which is properly geared up with sonar arrays to learn the alerts of passing tagged fish – besides by means of the barging locks. Almost half the walleye entered the ladder once more, Dobos reported.
The information did counsel some methods to considerably mitigate passage, if managers might agree on approaches, she acknowledged.
In response to her presentation, Ed Schriever, an NWPCC member representing Idaho, favored a “hit ’em hard and hit ’em fast and don’t take your foot off the gas” method utilized the place there could be much less collateral harm from gillnetting, electroshocking or poisoning to the native species that managers are attempting to avoid wasting. He stated the primary precedence is to find out if walleye are already spawning above Lower Granite.
“If we’re just recruiting new animals through the lock or the ladder, it seems like the most urgent thing we can look at is, how do you make changes to the ladder? Walleye aren’t the strongest swimmers in the world. Can we sort them out by making it harder to get through the ladder and still allow those fish we want to get through the ladder, get through the ladder?” Schriever requested.
He additionally acknowledged it might be too late for that, however suggested Dobos to determine the way to cease the flood.
“I’m looking at your counts; they’re ready to go ballistic, and they may already be. It’s quite possible there’s enough fish that have expanded their range; if they are successfully reproducing, that horse has left the barn. I hope that’s not the case, but I would really encourage you to be thinking about significantly slowing down the rate in which these fish are crossing Lower Granite,” Schriever urged.
IT’S NOT JUST TRAP DATA RAISING EYEBROWS, however angler catches reported to IDFG. The company has been placing out the phrase in recent years asking fishermen to report their Snake system landings to the closest regional workplace, and in 2023 they heard about 16 totally different walleye – 4 occasions as many as all earlier years mixed.
“This was a big number and it was pretty concerning. What was even more concerning was where these fish were caught,” Dobos stated.
A map she shared confirmed catches on the mouths of the Clearwater River, Asotin Creek, the Grande Ronde, the Salmon and each additional up the Salmon so far as Riggins and properly up the Snake into Hells Canyon.
Additionally, in that Clearing Up story, WDFW Region 1 Fish Program Manager Chris Donley stated walleye are starting to be seen in fish traps on the Tucannon River, beneath Lower Granite, and he speculated they may even be above there contained in the Ronde and Oregon’s Imnaha.
Walleye have been off the mouth of the Tucannon for much longer than these two different Blue Mountains tributaries, however it’s emblematic of the place the hazard actually is for fish that didn’t evolve with and study to concern walleye.
“We’re starting to get much more overlap in these juveniles that are trying to make it out to the ocean, so they’re spending some time in these large rivers (with walleye) until they make it out to the ocean,” IDFG’s Dobos stated. “It’s also overlapping some of our hatchery releases for these very important mitigation programs.”
She particularly pointed to Idaho fall Chinook, that are decrease mainstem spawners.
“The juveniles are actually rearing a lot longer in some of these lower rivers,” Dobos stated.
The triumphant rebuilding of that ESA-listed inventory, led by the Nez Perce Tribe, allowed for the resumption of tribal and state fisheries in 2009 after a 35-year cessation. Harvest charges up and down the Snake and Columbia are constrained by the Snake River wild, or SRW, element of the general run, however WDFW catch stats for 2021, essentially the most recent 12 months available, present 1,178 clipped and unclipped grownup fall kings have been retained that season.
“Fall Chinook nearly blinked into extinction in the Snake River, and a lot of folks have worked really hard to build that program up over the years, and have done a really good job, and it’s one of our few success stories in the Clearwater,” Dobos acknowledged. “And if walleye continue to colonize and establish in more numbers in these reaches, that could spell a different story for this program in a very short amount of time.”
WDFW’s Donley instructed Clearing Up that when walleye begin spawning in the identical tributaries as salmon and steelhead do, the impression “goes through the roof.”
Dobos’s presentation touched on how that happens.
“We have steelhead in the Clearwater that will occupy the mainstem Clearwater and Selway and Lochsa River for multiple years before they go out to the ocean. So what’s happening is, you’re expanding the amount of time that these fish are overlapping with these predator fish and there’s a higher risk that walleye are just going to capitalize on this food source in the future. So it’s really concerning,” she stated.
And as walleye set up themselves in decrease parts of Snake tribs, pilot fish will proceed to increase the inhabitants into the upper rearing areas for the basin’s spring-summer Chinook and summer time steelhead, Dobos warned.
DOBOS ALSO SHARED 2023 ELECTROFISHING information from ODFW, a part of an every-three-years effort to trace relative abundance of northern pikeminnow, smallmouth bass and walleye and their diets within the Snake. Last 12 months, crews shocked up walleye for the primary time within the Lower Granite Pool, discovering them above Clarkston, she stated, they usually additionally noticed a “significant” spike in relative walleye numbers within the Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental and Little Goose tailraces.
ODFW pumped the stomachs of fish they’d electroshocked, she additionally reported.
“Salmon and steelhead … made up a large portion of walleye diet. That’s not surprising; what’s surprising is that when you compare it to northern pikeminnow and smallmouth bass, walleye had the highest proportion in most cases,” Dobos stated.
It may have been a point-in-time estimate and sure collected if you would count on smolts to be available in some numbers and on the transfer downstream, however salmonids represented 50 % of walleye food regimen at Lower Granite, 47 % at Ice Harbor, 30 % at Little Goose and 14 % at Lower Monumental, in response to the info Dobos shared.
Little Goose was the one place the place both of the opposite two species outconsumed walleye, and simply barely – salmonids made up 33 % of the northern pikeminnow food regimen there.
More info on ODFW’s electrofishing efforts must be spelled out within the forthcoming 2023 annual pikeminnow program report, however Dobos additionally in contrast and contrasted previous increasingly more recent salmonid consumption charges. In the early Nineties, early on in walleye colonization of the Lower Columbia and at a time of comparatively suppressed salmon populations, they ate lower than half a smolt a day at peak outmigration, she stated. In the McNary Pool in May and June 2016, a time of extra strong mitigation applications, a longtime walleye inhabitants consumed 2.52 young salmonids a day.
“So you have higher consumption and you have a lot more mouths to feed. And I can tell that you most of these are from fall Chinook consumption from the upper Columbia bright program,” Dobos stated. “If the prey are available, these fish capitalize on it and they do a pretty good job of adapting to the situation.”
INDEED, WALLEYE ARE JUST DOING WHAT WALLEYE do. They’re not unhealthy fish, IDFG has acknowledged up to now, they’re simply not applicable for the Northwest’s salmon-bearing streams. Given access to new waters with naïve and considerable feed, after all they’re naturally going to colonize them. It’s a narrative as old as mankind and the Earth itself.
The measurement of each the Snake and Columbia Rivers, the multitude of managers concerned and the robust year-round overlap between anadromous species and walleye makes managing them a “logistical nightmare” at this level, Dobos acknowledged to the council. Even in waters not linked to the ocean, walleye suppression efforts “have been met with a lot of difficulties,” she added.
She stated that one of many greatest challenges managers face – and one not typically talked about – is the angler assist seen for walleye within the Inland Northwest.
Both the scrumptious eater-sized fish and the “big girls” – these egg-stuffed trophies that simply would possibly get your title in state report books this time of 12 months – are revered by some. And with a decrease stigma round maintaining them than with bass, Stizostedion vitreum represents a “bridge” fishery between fall and spring salmon runs, amongst different occasions of the 12 months, serving to to place filets in fishermen’s frying pans and dollars in guides’ wallets.
“There’s a community out there that is very supportive of having walleye everywhere,” Dobos stated. “These folks are very boisterous, they’re a very strong group, and if pushed to the suggestion of managing walleye, they do get organized and they will be something to – a difficulty to try and mitigate through,” she stated.
Sheila Hasselstrom can inform you that higher than many. She’s the president of the Clearwater-Lewis County chapter of the Idaho Farm Bureau and she or he and her husband Eric elevate cattle and sheep on 3,000 acres on the Nez Perce Reservation simply north of Winchester.
When they will break free from the farm, the Hasselstroms take pleasure in taking journeys to catch walleye, in addition to bass and steelhead. It was whereas speaking with guides about rising numbers of walleye on the Snake-Clearwater River confluence that an thought was born in Sheila’s head.
“(Walleye) are predator fish that are eating our salmon, and they are migrating right upstream to our salmon hatcheries. The truth of the matter is that a high percentage of salmon smolts are being eaten by predators like walleye and birds on their journey to the ocean and a high percentage of adult salmon are being eaten by non-native sea lions and seals on their trek back up the Columbia to spawn, but not much at all is being done about that,” Hasselstrom instructed me.
After pitching her county board on internet hosting what grew to become the “Farmers for Salmon: Walleye Jackpot” out of Lyons Ferry on the Snake, Hasselstrom stated they contacted the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife to go over the nuts and bolts. She recalled she was suggested to name it a jackpot and never provide payouts like a conventional competitors. Fish are largely launched alive at walleye and bass tournaments, however this was to be a catch-and-kill occasion with prizes awarded by way of a ticket drawing.
“As farmers, we care about salmon recovery, and we just want to draw attention to the predator problems in the river system,” Hasselstrom instructed me. “This event was to be a fun way to engage the agricultural community in a sideline problem to salmon recovery.”
Soon, the statewide Farm Bureau board supplied money to assist with funding, she stated, and it took off from there, with guides contacted to carry boats open and IDFG asking to tag alongside and gather organic samples as a part of their analysis into Snake River walleye motion.
However, as phrase concerning the Walleye Jackpot unfold additional, Hasselstrom confronted “extreme pushback,” and so she determined to cancel.
It all left her puzzled.
“We understand that sportsmen and guides are protecting their walleye and bass populations to preserve their businesses,” Hasselstrom stated, “but walleye and bass are both nonnative species that feed on salmon and steelhead smolts as they flush to the ocean. Washington Fish and Wildlife currently have no limits on walleye, but what we have seen is that the guides are throwing back the big trophy mommas and limiting their customers to 12 to 15 fish per day.”
“This begs the question,” she requested, “have sportsmen and guides given up on salmon and steelhead?”
IT’S A TOUGH QUESTION. I KNOW I haven’t in anyway, which is why I’ve spent a lot rattling time reporting on this rising hazard of building walleye numbers within the Snake (together with shad, northern pike and walleye in Lake Washington, pike in all places, smallmouth bass within the Coquille, and so on.).
But I may see how Chinook and summer time steelhead may not be for all anglers, particularly those that’ve come right here from Minnesota, Wisconsin or elsewhere within the native vary of walleye. Given the widespread perception in conserving the useful resource in anglerdom, I can perceive why some restrict their take and launch the spawners in order to perpetuate the species advert infinitum.
And lord is aware of that many years of doom-and-gloom tales about salmon and steelhead runs with few vibrant spots may have of us attempting to dial in a fishery that appears to have legs and ain’t ever gonna be kiboshed by poor ocean circumstances, or business fishing on the North Pacific or mid-Columbia, or pinniped predation, or managers’ allocations, or ESA restrictions, or all the myriad different issues impacting salmonid returns and making for much less secure fisheries. I imply, when the hell was the final time you ever noticed walleye season closed by an emergency rule change discover!?!
A pair months in the past after I introduced the Walleye Jackpot as much as a longtime salmon fishing world supply I very deeply respect, I used to be gobsmacked to primarily hear a meh out of them. But their argument was that eradicating invasive fish hasn’t been proven to be efficient in bringing again native ones, so why upset walleye anglers’ apple cart?
Furthermore, biologically, the rising walleye inhabitants is emblematic of the Snake’s altered state, they asserted. Nonnatives and even native ones like northern pikeminnows are simply going to do lots higher in modified habitats than Chinook, steelhead and coho.
A greater plan, they argued, was to revive what salmonids want, together with specializing in lowering water temperatures by means of streamside habitat enhancements and buffers. Cooler flows would possibly assist offset the benefit walleye will obtain as local weather change continues to heat rivers.
Sheila Hasselstrom and I’ll discover ourselves on very totally different sides of breaching the decrease Snake dams –they’re important to her area for transporting wheat and different merchandise to market; eradicating them is prone to sharply enhance spring Chinook smolt survival and doubtlessly reclaim misplaced fall Chinook spawning grounds for me – however I do very a lot applaud her for the Natural Resources Conservation Service applications she says she and her husband have applied on their farm.
“They range from changing our tillage program to a no-till practice (to reduce tillage erosion) to fencing off our streams from livestock access, and implementing riparian waterway planting to absorb nutrient loss from our farm ground,” she instructed me.
Hasselstrom added that her county’s forestry and agricultural communities additionally look to how greatest they will defend streams and cut back erosion and runoff.
“This protection improves water quality and salmon populations. In Clearwater County, the Clearwater River brings a large amount of revenue in the form of tourism to the town of Orofino with salmon and steelhead fishing,” she acknowledged.
While the Walleye Jackpot was canceled, she, fellow farmers and some visitors fished out of Lyons Ferry on March twentieth anyway and saved a reported 69. It was a visit I used to be invited on however couldn’t make due to my April deadline.
IF HASSELSTROM SHIED AWAY FROM BACKLASH over killing walleye in the long run, not so one among her veritable neighbors. In a pair of recent articles, Eric Barker, out of doors reporter for the Lewiston Tribune, suggested anglers to do their half and eat extra of ’em and stated he was going to provide it a go himself, publishing fishing suggestions from an area sort out store.
Barker wrote that it was unlucky that Walleye Jackpot organizers had canceled their occasion, and whereas he acknowledged that with out a Pikeminnow Program-like reward on their heads it was unlikely anglers themselves would ever knock down the walleye inhabitants, he nonetheless felt a civic calling straight out of the LC Valley.
“The idea that the more of them I eat, the more I’m helping native salmonids is pleasing to me,” he wrote.
Having chronicled the entry of one other toothsome predator into this identical countryside, Barker additionally modified some bumper-sticker slogans for the trigger: “Save a Salmon, Wack a Walleye”; “Walleye: Smoke a Stringer a Day”; “Walleye CCC: Cast, Cook and Consume.”
The rise of walleye numbers at each Lower Granite’s Boyer Park and the Snake-Clearwater confluence was predicted as far again in 2017 by a purported prime 20 pikeminnow program angler primarily based on rising catches and reviews they noticed, but it surely’s taken off far sooner than even they imagined.
When 2022’s reward fishery wrapped up, I emailed WDFW’s Donley concerning the growing numbers of walleye being turned in by contributors at Lower Granite Dam although no money is obtainable for them. I requested whether or not these pikeminnow anglers could be at first salmon and steelhead fishermen involved about walleye predation, and they also have been doing one thing about it.
“I’d like to think that our consistent message that walleye are bad for salmon and steelhead would get people on board with killing them,” Donley replied. “However, after 27 years I’ve learned that many anglers don’t believe us and some simply won’t agree out of politics of identity or spite. Who knows, maybe pikeminnow anglers are more enlightened about salmon and steelhead conservation. We’ve been consistent in our message, so maybe someone is listening.”
THIS IS ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE points that tears me up. Just as with tribal netting of spinyrays that started on Lake Sammamish just a few years in the past to clear the way in which for outmigrating Chinook and coho fry from Issaquah Creek Hatchery, I can see either side on the Snake.
As a local Northwest salmon and steelhead angler, I’ve banged the drums about controlling piscivorous fish, birds and marine mammals, I’m invested in continued hatchery manufacturing for river and ocean fisheries and conservation functions, I advocate for restoring habitat for the prolonged instream rearing of untamed fish, so it’s exhausting to not see this walleye invasion into maybe the final greatest coolwater spawning and rearing grounds within the watershed as something however an existential risk that should be met head on.
Yet as a regional hook-and-bullet journal editor, it’s exhausting to disregard the rise of a nonetheless comparatively new fishery, one which’s created its personal sort out strains, one that draws anglers from as distant because the Midwest, one which I’ve placed on my cowl many, many occasions, and greater than seemingly will once more, so it’s exhausting to not be a bit protecting of that too.
I do know I don’t have solutions, however I do know that there are tons of upon tons of of river and reservoir miles within the Columbia Basin the place walleye can already be focused and by no means ever will probably be eradicated, even when Glacial Lake Missoula blows out once more, the radioactive Hanford Plume reaches the mainstem, the Chief Joseph Dike Swarm fires up and bleeds basalt all of the hell over the place.
I ponder if, given the nonetheless comparatively early colonization of walleye above Lower Granite, the brand new all-of-government method to salmon restoration and the significance of this area for native fish – in addition to their unparalleled cultural weight – an argument could be made to designate this a part of Washington’s, Oregon’s and Idaho’s Snake River as a walleye management zone, à la sea lions at Bonneville and Willamette Falls throughout salmon runs, cormorants on Oregon Coast bays throughout smolt outmigration, smallmouth on the Coquille – a place the place they’re simply not tolerated.
Admittedly, it’s all type of a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too method, but it surely appears extra viable than doing nothing a few rising downside or attempting to go nuclear on it.
But what do I do know? The actual concepts are going to come back out of that state-tribal-federal Walleye/Non-Native Piscivore Work Group that I discussed within the first few paragraphs of this story.
As phrase will get out about it, there’s the potential for a firestorm, so I believe the very first thing they should do is create a web site that higher lays out who they’re, the realm they’re taking a look at, the scope of their goals and mission assertion, the authority they wield to place these into movement or how they’d, and so on.
And I believe they need to additionally contemplate bringing anglers onboard the panel – salmon, steelhead, bass, walleye, channel catfish fishermen and pikeminnow program contributors. Representatives might function sounding boards, present suggestions and function messengers again to organizations and boards deeply invested within the subject concerning the more and more important have to act right here.
The time to do one thing was just a few years in the past now, however there’s no time like the current both.
