The fish swimming up the lower Snake River number in the hundreds of thousands, but proponents of breaching the four dams on that stretch of the river say they’re the wrong fish.

Statistics provided by the Idaho Department of Fish and Game show that more than 205,000 fish swam past the Ice Harbor Dam last year.

But 56% of them were hatchery-raised fish which, in the eyes of the region’s Native American Tribes and environmental groups, don’t count. The Tribes estimate that before the dams were built on the Snake and Columbia rivers, about 2 million wild fish swam down the Snake River to spend their adult lives in the Pacific Ocean before returning up the rivers to spawn.

For the entire Columbia River Basin, historic estimates for salmon and steelhead runs range from 5 million to 16.5 million.

In 1938, about 469,000 total salmon and steelhead swam past the newly constructed Bonneville Dam, according to the Northwest Power and Conservation Council’s Fish Passage Center. In 2023, the total was 1.4 million.

Now, Tribes and environmental groups say wild fish are at extinction levels. They believe removing the dams is the best option to guarantee their recovery and survival.

Let’s take a closer look at the numbers.

Natural vs. hatchery fish

Two kinds of fish move through the river system:

• Natural-origin fish, which spawned in a stream or lake. They could include hatchery fish that spawned in the wild.

• Hatchery-reared fish, which spawned in a hatchery and were released downstream.

“We consider ‘wild’ to mean a population with little or no influence from hatchery fish spawning in the wild,” said Tim Copeland, Idaho Department of Fish and Game wild salmon and steelhead monitoring program coordinator.

About 80% of the region’s fish populations are hatchery fish, Copeland said. The goal, he said, is to propagate more wild fish.

Environmental groups estimate that efforts to recover wild salmon and steelhead populations, which are protected under the federal Endangered Species Act, have already cost $26 billion with inflation.

“We do not track total spending on salmon recovery, as it is often defined differently by different groups,” said Michael Milstein, senior public affairs officer for the West Coast region of the National Marine Fisheries Service, or NOAA Fisheries.

Current picture

Numbers are currently down for both wild and hatchery fish, Copeland said.

“Things have not been friendly for salmon and steelhead in the last five years,” he said. “Years bump up and down, but in general, things were better 10 years ago. The ocean has gotten worse, is really the primary driver.”

Copeland says it’s not possible to separate dam impacts from other impacts.

“If the ocean was better, then the effects the dams have on the fish would be less,” he said. “But when you get the double whammy — these things interact.”

Wild populations have bounced back from lows in the 1990s before, Copeland said.

“We actually had some fairly decent returns comparatively speaking in 2014-2015, and then it just started to drop down from that,” he said.

Spring and summer chinook were impacted first, and then steelhead, he said.

“On the other hand, this is one of the headscratchers: The coho and the fall chinook have done better, the reasons for which I am not sure,” Copeland continued. “They use the ocean differently, and that’s about all I can tell you. Maybe things were happening further out that the other fish run into that these fish for whatever reason don’t.”

The effect of factors beyond the dams remains unclear.

“Steelhead go way out in the deep ocean — there’s a lot that we don’t know about them,” Copeland said. “They seemed to be a little bit more resistant to some of the impacts our salmon stocks were seeing, until about five years ago. We’re still scratching our heads, trying to figure out ‘What really, really happened?’

“The ocean is a big place and these are fish that go all the way across the ocean. That covers a lot of territory, a lot of things can happen,” he said.

NOAA Fisheries monitors ocean conditions, surface temperatures and the organisms that salmon eat to get a sense of whether the ecosystem is better or worse.

“There’s your food source and then the source of stress on the salmon — how warm is the ocean?” Copeland said. “If it’s warmer, they need to eat more, and they need good food. If it’s too warm, then there’s not enough good food for them. … The ocean can turn on a dime sometimes.”

‘We can do better’

The decline in wild fish didn’t begin with the dams.

The U.S. Department of the Interior’s “Historic and Ongoing Impacts of Federal Dams on the Columbia River Basin Tribes” report, issued in June, cited the influx of settlers in the late 1800s as a factor. The industries they built depended on natural resources, including “salmon canneries, timber harvests, fur trading, hard-rock mining and livestock grazing.”

“Federal construction of dams throughout the Columbia River Basin further damaged those resources, deepening the Tribes’ loss for others’ gain,” the report states.

The report estimates the current return of naturally occurring salmon and steelhead is 10% of the historical run.

“Dams are not operated to benefit fish,” Copeland said. “A lot of the efforts have been to try to make dam operations more fish-friendly. But this was known even before the dams were built. We continue to try to search for ways to improve that. Those are the things we can affect.

“There have been some improvements, but it’s certainly not across the board,” he said. “I think there are still improvements to be made.”

He points to a “small army of biologists and technicians” who collect data.

“Our populations, especially the ones in the wilderness, are incredibly resilient,” he said. “If we can tilt the field in their favor just a little bit, they will respond. That’s what gives me hope: Every year, it’s like, ‘OK, I know we can do it,’ … and every year, I still think that we can do better.”

Abundant runs

Joe Oatman, deputy program manager for the Nez Perce Tribe, points to the historic abundant salmon runs throughout the region.

“We were able to catch fish in volumes that would provide for up to 50% of our total daily caloric needs,” he said. “Each and every day, from our youngest to our eldest, we ate salmon at those levels. Each and every Nez Perce would consume 300 pounds of fish per year.”

Historically, he said, a total of about 2 million fish would return up the Snake River each year, and the Nez Perce would harvest about 242,000 in the river and its branches, including 102,000 spring and summer chinook. That’s about 48 fish per person.

During the last 10 years, the average harvest of spring and summer chinook has been about 6,000. That’s about 1.6 fish per person, Oatman said.

The Tribe estimates 1 million or more spring and summer chinook returned to the Snake River Basin historically, said Jay Hesse, harvest director for the Nez Perce Tribe. Last year, more than 7,000 natural-origin spring and summer chinook returned.

“That level is so low that when you spread out that 7,000 fish over the entire landscape and the populations those fish come from, just about 40% of (Endangered Species Act-listed) populations had 50 or fewer natural-origin fish returning,” Hesse said.

That’s a “quasi-extinction” threshold in conservation biology terms, he said.

‘Mitigation promise’

Hatchery production and management were a “mitigation promise” to reduce the impact on the fish when the lower Snake River dams were authorized and constructed, in the 1960s and early 1970s.

The original goal was 90,000 hatchery-origin spring and summer chinook returning to the Snake River Basin.

“We’ve only met that three times,” Hesse said. “In most years, we are well short of meeting that promise.”

“Especially up in the Snake (Basin), the impacts were much greater than anticipated,” Copeland said. “The mitigation has not met the objectives that were set for that program.”

Hatchery production has maintained any level of harvestability for Tribal and non-Tribal members in recent years, Hesse said.

“Even in their inadequate or failed performance to date, they are still the lifeline for having that connection,” he said.

Tribes support breaching

About 455 miles of the Columbia and Snake rivers and their tributaries stretch between the Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho and the Pacific Ocean, Hesse said. About 325 miles have been transformed from a free-flowing river into a series of “slow-moving reservoirs,” with eight dams that fish must get past, he said.

Removing the four Columbia River dams, however, is “not currently a policy position of the Nez Perce Tribe,” Hesse said. Breaching the four Snake River dams would restore 140 miles as free-flowing, Hesse said.

The Tribe estimates breaching lower Snake River dams would improve life cycle survival by 100% or more, he said.

“It’s going to take some time to rebuild populations; if we’re only at 7,000 fish, you don’t automatically jump up to 100,000 in one generation,” he said.

The Tribe estimates that just removing the four dams, with no other restoration actions, would put a smolt-to-adult survival rate at 3%.

That would take about seven salmon generations, or 30 to 35 years, to reach mid-range goals set by Columbia Basin stakeholders as a target — about 120,000 to 130,000 natural-origin spring and summer chinook.

A “healthy and abundant” goal would be 235,000 natural-origin spring and summer chinook salmon, he said.

Breaching the dams, restoring habitat and restoring access to blocked areas and continued harvest management makes achieving that “healthy and abundant” level “very realistic in the next 30 to 50 years,” he said.

Ag’s perspective

“We remain concerned that supporters of dam breaching are not using sound science and evidence-based research to guide decision-making,” said Michelle Hennings, executive director of the Washington Association of Wheat Growers. The region’s farmers rely on the Snake and Columbia rivers to barge their crops to ports downstream. Alternatives such as roads and rail can’t handle the volume of wheat and other crops that use the barges.

“To be clear, wheat growers and other river system users are both pro-dam and pro-salmon. We believe that the dams and salmon recovery efforts can and do co-exist, “ Hennings said.

WAWG supports work by federal and state agencies, Tribes and river partners to install and improve fish ladders and other mechanisms along the river, she said.

“Rather than pursue drastic action on dam breaching, which is not a proven method of salmon recovery, we are committed to finding ways to address the root causes of salmon declines through research on ocean conditions, toxin reduction, and predator abatement,” she said.

Other critics of breaching dams are less conciliatory.

“It shouldn’t shock anybody that science doesn’t always settle political debates,” said Todd Myers, vice president of research at the Washington Policy Center, a free-market think tank.

He points to “special interests and other political considerations” as the reason dam breaching arguments continue.

“What I hear a lot is that people who don’t like the dams simply want the romance of wild and free rivers, and they’re willing to have others pay very high costs for that,” Myers said.

Myers pointed to the federal 2020 Columbia River Systems Operation environmental impact statement, which recommended keeping the Snake River dams in place. The EIS found that salmon recovery is possible while maintaining the dams, and salmon recovery benefits from breaching would be minimal, Myers said.

“The salmon recovery occurs slightly more slowly with the dams in place, but it does occur,” he said.

Between 96% and 98% of the smolts moving downstream successfully pass each dam, Myers said.

“If you tear down the dams, that’s the marginal benefit you’re going to get — a few percentage points at each dam,” he said. “That’s not nothing, but it’s pretty small considering the cost. If you’re going to spend $30 billion, $40 billion on salmon recovery and you’re only getting a few percentage points improvement, there’s a lot of things we could do across the Pacific Northwest that we could use that money for.

“The problem with the Snake River chinook is not unique to the Snake River — chinook across the Pacific Northwest are having problems for a whole range of reasons,” he said. “Why are we so fixated on the Snake River chinook when chinook in Puget Sound are having some of the exact same problems?

“One of the things you hear all the time is that salmon runs on the Snake used to be enormous and now they’re very small, and that’s true,” Myers said. “But that’s true of literally every river in the United States. I would be surprised if there’s a place in the U.S. where fish populations are today what they were 200 years ago.”

Working together

The Nez Perce Tribe’s policy is that breaching the dams is “right and necessary” for fish recovery, but it also commits to keeping other interests whole and helping them adjust in a way compatible with salmon, Hesse said.

“Salmon have been impacted and asked to change and adapt to an altered environment, and they can’t change any more,” he said. “So we need to change in ways that are compatible with salmon.”

The Tribe wants to find resources for getting agricultural products to market in a economic and environmentally wise way, without adding to the carbon footprint, he said.

“What we’re asking for is all of those communities to join with us and make changes in a way that works for all of us,” he said. “Change is hard, but we’re looking for ways to make those changes that work for salmon. … We’re willing to support transformative change in those other sectors, but in a way that continues the livelihood of all of those other people.”

Under the Endangered Species Act, federal agencies review the status of listed species every five years.

In the most recent biological viability assessment, released in January 2022:

• Spring/summer-run Snake River chinook are listed as threatened, unchanged from the previous report, with a moderate-to-high risk of extinction.

• Fall-run Snake River chinook are threatened, unchanged from the previous report, with a moderate-to-low risk of extinction.

• Snake River sockeye are endangered, declining since the previous report, with a high risk of extinction.

• Snake River Basin steelhead are threatened, unchanged from the previous report, with a moderate risk of extinction.

A “high” risk of extinction indicates that the risk of extinction is more than 5% in 100 years, according to the report. “Moderate” risk of extinction indicates that it is more likely than not to be at a high level of extinction risk within 30 to 80 years. Low risk is neither moderate nor high risk.

Wild fish have the most value, said Austin Smith Jr., general manager of natural resources for the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs.

“They are the same genetics, the same fish that took care of our ancestors since time began,” he said. “Hatchery fish are more susceptible to disease and change, but they are a means to supplement those runs that were lost. They were the solution at the time when dams went in and blocked off and killed off runs.”

Wild fish adapted to different rivers and watersheds have natural diversity that helps them survive various challenges, such as a wildfire burning through the watershed or climate change, said Michael Milstein, senior public affairs officer for the West Coast region of the National Marine Fisheries Service, or NOAA Fisheries.

“They all have inherent genetic advantages and disadvantages that help some of them make it through challenges others could not,” he said. “That is resilience.”

“Wild fish are prized in fisheries, they’re revered by most sport anglers,” said Liz Hamilton, policy director for the Northwest Sportfishing Industry Association.

They’re an indicator of watershed health, she said.

Hatchery fish are a “seed bank” to maintain genetics while restoring healthy, functioning watersheds, Hamilton said. They’re the primary kept catch, as most wild fish are released in fisheries.

Hatchery fish are bred to yield predictable results in hatcheries but in the wild they are essentially all the same fish, so they do not have diversity that might help them survive a disease or escape warming waters in their stream, Milstein said.

“If one is vulnerable, they all are,” he said. “When diseases take hold in hatcheries they run rampant. In the wild they typically either disappear or decline to a very low level because the inherent diversity means some fish eventually figure out how to survive the challenge and they spread that surviving gene around.”

Hatchery fish have a fleshy tab on top of their tail that is clipped off to distinguish them from wild fish.

Without it, “it would be tough” to tell the difference, said Tim Copeland, Idaho Department of Fish and Game wild salmon and steelhead monitoring program coordinator.

Does a hatchery fish taste differently from a wild fish?

“It is feasible that a person eating salmon or steelhead would be able to tell the difference between hatchery and wild fish, especially if comparing fish from two different stocks or runs,” said Britton Ransford, communications specialist for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

But difference in taste is more a factor of the particular stock or run timing, what a fish run tends to eat, how far into freshwater it was caught, how it was handled and cooked, personal preference and other attributes that can apply to both hatchery and wild fish.

“Taste is highly subjective and a variety of variables beyond origin contribute to the overall flavor,” Ransford said.

“We could triple the number of hatchery fish out there and it wouldn’t have much of an impact on fisheries, because the fisheries are set up to protect the wild fish,” Hamilton said. “All of us long for the day when hatchery fish are no longer necessary.”