The Last-Ditch Effort to Save Wild Salmon

The story was originally published on Hakai.

She parked the white pickup at the side of the road, climbed out of the cab, and wondered how any salmon could have survived in the narrow valley. The land used to be so lush that the ridge and gulley were no longer visible. The Walbridge Fire burned through the valley in August of 2020.

The California Sea Grant biologists adjusted their mask to protect them from the haze. Dark hair tucked under a hard hat, wading boots kicking up ash, and Ruiz was on his way to Mill Creek. The field crew was dedicated to saving a population of coho, one of the most threatened runs of salmon on the West Coast of North America. Birds don't disturb the quiet. Most of the animals had left.

It felt like we were at the end of the world.

Before the record-setting fire season of 2020, this corner of California was not as clean as it is today. Mill Creek is part of the Russian River Watershed, which empties into the ocean. It is an hour's drive north of San Francisco, where early buildings in the city were made with redwoods. In places the streambed dropped to the height of a two-story house, due to the amount of gravel mined from the river. In the late 1950s and early 1980s, the US Army Corps of Engineers built dams on the Russian River to destroy fish habitat. Smaller dams prevented coho from reaching important spawning tributaries. By 2012 vineyards and wineries had become the main industry in Sonoma County. The oak-dotted hills and steep canyons that were once a haven for locally adapted salmon and steelhead now lend themselves to local vino.

In a typical year, 20,000 coho would return to the Russian River and its tributaries. The number fell by 95 percent. There were only six coho in 2000. After three years, a coalition of county, state, and federal agencies brought the last young coho into captivity at the Warm Springs Fish Hatchery. The southernmost limit of coho's wild range, central California, is where the species has vanished or is on the verge of vanishing. The population was saved in the Russian River.

500 to 1000 coho return to the Russian River each winter. Some were born at the Warm Springs Hatchery and others in the river. The last wild fish that were taken into captivity were descended from nearly all of the others. Warm Springs has a coho run for almost two decades and no longer has a completely wild population.

The dam is still black from a prescribed burn by the Army Corps to prevent plant roots from damaging it. The hatchery gets its water from a steep concrete channel. Dry Creek is one of the only waterways in the Watershed that always flows in the summer. There are rows of grapevines downstream of the dam.

The Mill Creek empties out of the Coast Range into Dry Creek. Prior to the Walbridge Fire, Mill Creek was a great place to study critically-endangered coho. In Sonoma County, the valley cuts through the rainiest spot, capturing water that the slopes kept cool through the summer. The Warm Springs staff stocked young salmon in the upper reaches of the creek. The gravel bars were streaked with iron-red flame retardant from the fight to save nearby homes when Ruiz and his coworkers waded into the creek after the WalbridgeFire. The team was startled by the scene and began to search for salmon. A person wearing a backpack wired to a pole that emits an electrical charge into the water stuns fish. They took the animals and put them into a bucket to be tagged and released. They found close to twenty coho by the end of the day. The Russian River Watershed experienced a devastating fire in 2020.

The crew decided to go for ice cream. The salmon was able to pull through. It's for now.

Many rivers on the west coast of North America are likely to have no salmon at all if the Russian River is any indication. Climate change is showing a preview of what may be in store for other parts of the country. As wild stocks decline due to environmental change and other pressures, the hope is that Warm Springs can keep salmon runs intact until their habitats are restored. Sometimes it is a task that is difficult to complete. Mariska Obedzinski has led California Sea Grant's coho monitoring program in the Russian River for 18 years and says it can feel like one step forward and five steps back.

The belief that salmon can exist without habitat is still held up by hatcheries. On the west coast of North America, they have been used for over a century to supplement wild salmon in areas where logging and development have stopped abundant runs. Is it possible that salmon raised in captivity are replacements for wild ones? It is a question I have pondered for a long time, and I once coauthored an opinion editorial with a group of salmon advocates encouraging the British Columbia government to restore fish habitat instead of building more hatcheries.

By the mid-20th century, scientists were able to show that fish were struggling to survive. The US Fish and Wildlife Service suggested in 1948 that the fish were becoming domesticated. The salmon produced by the tens or hundreds of thousands are more combative and larger than the salmon produced in the wild. Poor life skills, failure to avoid predators or to successfully find food, are the main causes of salmon deaths. A facility manager told me that a coho had eaten bits of wood after it had been released. Most of what makes a salmon a salmon is missing from hatchery fish. They don't have a study of 10,000 years.

The students of place are the wild Pacific salmon. New genetic tools gave ecologists the power to document this remarkable diversity in the 1950s and ’60s, but geneticists warned that hatchery fish could degrade wild genes, potentially contributing to declines driven by habitat destruction. The Snake River sockeye became the first west coast salmon population to be listed as being in danger. The first three Pacific salmon stocks in Canada were identified in 2002. Some managers wanted to cultivate more fish to stem the declines, but true recovery was not possible unless the facilities could produce fish that were as resistant to decline as wild ones.

In 1997 the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation began collecting wild spring chinook for a new facility in central Washington. The Columbia River basin supported 200,000 springs in the past. The type of chinook that migrates back to fresh water in the spring is called the fall chinook. The stock of salmon returning from the Pacific Ocean plummeted in the late 1990s because they had to navigate nine dams. According to Charlie Strom, who manages the facility, Levi George was an influential leader in the fight for fishing rights and wanted the tribes and bands to produce their own salmon. The Yakama were looking for something different. They wanted something close to the chinook that had been lost.

One of the first places to apply hatchery techniques was at Cle Elum. The hope was that by painting the concrete channels in greens and tans, the young fish would start to develop camouflaging colors. They shaded the water and submerged evergreen trees in order to hide. Instead of tossing fish feed into the water by hand, food was distributed underwater. For the first five years, the facilities were compared to traditional barren channels for raising chinook.

The other hatcheries were doing the same things. The only fish to survive the carnage were found wedged inside the aluminum mount for an underwater camera. Other results were more positive. One summer night in 2004, Rob Brouwer visited two of his outdoor pools. The first was without enhancements, the other was a playground with shade, branches, and less fish. The first pool was still in the dark. Two coho leaped across the surface as Brouwer watched.

The people were playing. Enrichment does that.

Camouflage paint and evergreens weren't going to guarantee survival for the Upper Yakima River chinook. The shading and underwater feeding were retained by the hatcheries. Genetics can be affected by the collection of fish from the wild as broodstock. Genetics in your fish are at risk if you gather too many. Past research has shown that salmon that are born in the wild tend to produce less offspring and are more likely to die before they reach adulthood.

Salmon are able to adapt quickly once in captivity. The trout could be dialing up the activity of genes known to help fish heal wounds quickly and resist disease if they were to be domesticated. Salmon might be affected by genetic changes after they are released into the wild. Christie says it's difficult to get fit in both environments. They are adapting to captivity and that results in a trade off with fitness in the wild.

When a salmon run is limping along, starting a hatchery is likely to have a negative effect, according to a senior scientist with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. The worse the situation gets, the more likely it is that a hatchery will help. It might be the most realistic option when a wild population is on the verge of extinction. Even domestication selection in a hatchery isn't as bad as extinction.

Salmon advocates face that situation in more and more waterways. It was too late to take the last wild-born coho into captivity.

The Russian River Watershed was scoured by government biologists in 2001. They were only able to find coho in two of the three rivers. They didn't find anything in 2004.

The captive breeding program started with very few coho and their descendants were too close to each other. There were fish with twisted spine. Most animals have developed ways to identify close relatives and avoid having sex with them, according to a geneticist. People in captivity decide which salmon to mate with. The act of killing a fish with a blow to the head, squeezing the female's eggs into plastic dishes or a pail, and then squirting milt from one or more males is not romantic.

Stud books like family trees for rhinos or elephants are kept by zoos to prevent inbreeding. The idea was for genetic markers to be used to identify distantly related coho. Since 2001, Warm Springs staff have FedExed fin tissue from adult coho to the University of California at Santa Cruz campus. Ben White, who manages the Warm Springs coho captive breeding program, received a list of females and males that he could pair with. The four males that are highest on the list are the four females.

Some of the males have not been born in the Watershed. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife was urged to allow something called genetic rescue. He wanted to bring in wild coho from a nearby creek to increase the diversity of the genes. There was a lot of resistance from us. "'You can't do that' You can't make a monster fish. Stakeholders in multiple agencies and NGOs objected to the idea of breeding fish from separate watersheds in order to produce offspring that weren't genetically compatible with the two rivers. There is a small percentage of salmon that stray from where they were born. It took five years for everyone to get the permit. White saw fewer fish with deformities after adding the new coho. Up to half a million eggs are fertilized by Warm Springs staff. Less than 100,000 grew into young fish that could be released into the water. Less than one percent of these fish live long enough in the wild to return to the Watershed as adults.

The building at the Warm Springs hatchery is open and has skylights. The air is moist and warm. White is a fisheries Biologist with the US Army Corps of Engineers and he shows me around the complex, which was constructed and is still operated as a way to mitigate the effects of Lake Sonoma. An energetic man in a ball cap with a dark, neatly trimmed beard is speaking loudly over the water rushing through the drain under the cement floor. There are two rows of shallow troughs. Up to 1,500 adults can be held in a dozen round tanks at the far end of the room. The rest of the 200,000 coho that Warm Springs produces each year is loaded into blue water jugs. In order to set the fish free in the best habitat they can find, the staff loads the packs and hikes to the streams. White and his team must leave the coho to fend for themselves after raising them so carefully.

Warm Springs discharged coho at a very young age to minimize their adaptation to the hatchlings. White said their goal was to get them out as early as possible. What is the point of losing all your fish? The individuals best suited to thrive in their environments are left behind by high mortality rates for young fish. The main goal in hatcheries is to save every fish. White has learned to spread the risk by releasing coho at almost every life stage, from eggs that hatch out of in-stream incubators to 16-month-old fish headed for the Pacific.

With salmon numbers falling on the west coast, hatcheries are being proposed to keep populations alive. The Congress of the United States and the government of Canada made new investments in Hatchery programs. The funds were earmarked for habitat restoration and downsizing. More than two decades have passed since the evolution of hatcheries to produce wildish fish. There are still subtle but important differences. Hatchery fish are more likely to approach people expecting food than wild-born salmon are, which makes them easy prey.

Multiple agencies and nonprofits are restoring habitat in the Russian River Watershed, but the pace has been too slow to reverse the decline in coho populations. The only defense against extinction is civility. The recovery program can now consider how their coho compares to wild fish. At Warm Springs, the signs of inbreeding have largely disappeared, as White pointed out on my visit. It's still an all-hands-on-deck effort to get more salmon in the river despite the efforts of Garza and White. Estimates of up to 800 free-swimming coho descended from Hatchery stock returning to the Watershed are more promising in some years.

Much is beyond the control of the recovery team. Salmon are exposed to a gauntlet of threats due to their nature. In rivers, fish face pollution, and at sea, they face more predator fishing. Climate change makes it harder for fish and their keepers to adapt. Many things need to go right for the program to succeed.

White says that they have never had big years of returns, but they have never had everything lined up. "It's always there."

The people trying to bring back the Russian River coho knew a lot about the weather. The last five years have seen a number of major wildfires. Most of the Sea Grant staff have left the area before. In the past, Obedzinski has had a fire burn within 50 meters of her house and once authored a project report from temporary accommodations. As the Kincade Fire approached the town of Windsor, where the Sea Grant program is based, Ruiz went to the office to back up important data. One of the team members lost his family home. Everyone is on edge from June to November.

The Sea Grant office was getting frequent notices from the electrical company because of the lack of rain and the risk of fires caused by wind damage. The Walbridge Fire was started by dry lightning on August 17 and spread into protected forests. Thousands of people were ordered to leave within a couple of days. The hatchery moved to a skeleton crew on the edge of the zone to make sure the coho was still alive.

It was a big learning experience for White. Power to the area was out and the diesel supply tank was malfunctioning, so someone had to refill one of the hatchery's backup generators every six to eight hours or the water pumps wouldn't work. He wants the generators to be able to run for days at a time, so if someone can't come, we know the fish have water. The Walbridge Fire burned an area larger than Seattle and destroyed hundreds of structures, including the homes of people who help with coho recovery.

The fire was finally contained in October, but the state of California continues to suffer from the effects of the El Nio weather phenomenon. The salmon were not out of danger. The Sea Grant team counted a record number of wild-born coho in the Watershed earlier in the year, but they returned to pools that had held fish to find some completely dry. Few streams had enough water for adults to survive the winter. There were 30,000 six-month-old coho trying to swim out to the Pacific in the spring of 2021. The Sea Grant team helped save fish.

There is no water in the creek. In June 2021, I was told that juvenile coho were pressing their faces into the gaps between rocks to keep their gills wet. White stocked some fish into the cool waters of Dry Creek and kept the rest at the hatchery so they wouldn't be released into the water. He says that it is one of the most difficult parts of his job. Fish are released into unreliable water.

Sonoma County usually sees little rain from May to October, but in August the situation became a crisis. The Russian River Watershed supplies drinking water to hundreds of thousands of people in three counties. Regulators banned nearly 2,000 farmers, ranchers and winegrowers from using water for irrigation and livestock because they wanted to preserve water for people. White has seen worse conditions in the past. He said by email in August that most of the creeks in the Watershed are not suitable for salmon survival. The situation in the Hatchery had become precarious. The intakes of the dam were drawing water that was too warm for coho. White was worried that the conditions at other locations would be worse than at his location, so he decided to move the fish.

The Army Corps gave the go-ahead to open the dam's maintenance gates. Warm Springs staff trucked 4,000 young coho 70 kilometers to a small facility in California with a water source.

The relocation of Warm Springs was a sign that the refuges built to protect fish are vulnerable in an era of rapid environmental change. Habitat is important for fish. We can't have salmon without water.

A year after the Walbridge Fire, it is a sunny day in late September 2021, and the Sea Grant biologists are driving up the narrow, winding road into the Mill Creek valley to look for salmon. Disaster response crews clear damaged trees and land owners rebuild homes as there are signs of fire and recovery. Every time I come here, this looks different.

The channel is so dry that stepping onto it sounds like you're biting into a cracker. The burn scar has freed up water because of the death of so many thirsty trees. The water doesn't cover our boots in a lot of places. The creek is flowing and where it is dry, while Reinstein drops a cigar-shaped sensor into the pools to check if the water is cool.

In one pool of the creek, the oxygen is so low that coho can't survive. The Sea Grant website has a record of the value being published. The team's job is to record stream conditions and not to intervene. The idea of running miles and miles of aerators has never been seriously thought of. Two water bottles are thrown on the bank. A man picks up a piece of paper. He emptied the bottle into the creek.

A warm breeze blows off a cleared slope. The hilltop is distorted by waves of hot air that can be seen in the future. "I'm thinking about how long it's going to take for the system to recover from all of this and what that's going to mean for the fish in the short term." Some of the new logs fell after the fire. As the roots of fatally burned trees slowly die on the slopes above, they will no longer hold back the winter rains from washing topsoil into the creek and burying salmon eggs. After a fire, you start to see the big slides.

Less than a month after they walked through the forest, rain comes. It doesn't come in a normal way. Two weather systems converge on the California coast in the most powerful storm in more than a generation after one of the driest years on record. The region is bombarded with rain, flooding neighborhoods and taking the Russian River Watershed's streams from dry to overflowing in a day. After the storm passes, White releases the coho he kept alive. Sea Grant biologists have counted the most spawning fish in the last five years. There are coho for the first time in 25 years. The winter rains don't last The riverbeds containing freshly laid coho eggs are already beginning to dry and White, Obedzinski, and Ruiz are bracing for another year of extreme dry weather.

Everyone wonders how far the recovery team will need to go to make sure that the Russian River is free of coho. The industry is looking for ways to breed salmon that can grow in warm waters. Selecting for one trait is not easy. Unexpected results are produced by genes interacting with each other. The possibility of accidentally magnifying a deleterious trait is raised when animal breeders try to high- grade a desirable characteristic. When it comes to salmon, genetic engineering techniques aren't currently used as a way to conserve the fish. It depends on how dire the situation becomes. If a disease wiped out all coho salmon, scientists would be desperate to find a way to protect it.

The situation in the Russian River is a further fork in the road if the choice is between salmon or no salmon at all.

Both courses will be difficult. According to the scientist, there is no track record of being able to do Hatchery Supplementation indefinitely. Epidemic disease, natural disasters, and the most mundane of human errors are some of the ways that a Hatchery stock can fail. He doesn't think we can keep these balls in the air for a long time.

The Russian River can be saved, according to Obedzinski. She knows that more needs to be done to increase the amount of water available for fish. She wants us to conserve water on a scale.

Whether efforts to sustain these rare coho succeed or fail, Obedzinski says, the program stands as a case study for Watersheds farther north that will see similar extreme climate change in decades to come. She says they've learned a lot. She encourages other recovery efforts to look at the team's work in the Russian River before making a huge investment.

Russian River coho aren't expected to reach half their historical abundance in our lifetimes. According to the recovery plan, the run won't reach its target of 10, 100 annual spawningers until 2120. Anything can happen with a long time frame. Predicting what the hell will look like in 100 years depends on what persuasion you use.