Hatchery fish outnumber wild chinook salmon in troubled fall run

"In the wild, they hide in the gravel until they use up the yolk sac, and then there is a period of slower growth while they learn to feed on aquatic insects. This abrupt transition and slow growth are captured in the growth bands of the otolith," Barnett-Johnson said. "In the hatchery, there is an abundant supply of food, so the transition is smoother and growth bands are wider."

Every fish, therefore, carries an identifier of its origin as a natural tag in the earbone, which has significant advantages over techniques for tagging fish, she said. Coded wire tags (CWTs), for example, have been used to mark fish for some studies. But only a small fraction of hatchery fish and even fewer wild fish are tagged or marked in California, according to Barnett-Johnson. Some small hatchery operations clip the fins of all hatchery fish so they can be distinguished from wild fish, but fall-run chinook salmon are not marked that way. As a result, there have not been good estimates of the proportion of wild fish in the population until this study, she said.

"The only other estimates out there pointed in the other direction--significantly more wild fish than hatchery fish," Barnett-Johnson said. "One study used CWT recoveries from hatchery fish and estimated that 33 percent of adults returning to rivers in the Central Valley were from hatcheries. The other number floating around comes from counting the number of fish returning to spawn in rivers versus returning to hatcheries, and this estimated the number of 'wild' fish to be 3.5 times higher than hatchery returns."

One reason these figures are so important is that they could affect the listing of the fall run under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The question of whether hatcheries can help restore threatened and endangered salmon populations or if they actually harm wild populations has long been a controversial issue. It became a legal issue in 2001, when a federal judge revoked the ESA listing of Oregon coast coho salmon, ruling that the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) should have included hatchery fish in the population counts.

A more recent federal court ruling, however, concluded that the health and viability of natural populations should be used as the benchmark for ESA status determinations. That ruling has been appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

"The agency's policy on counting hatchery fish has flip-flopped as a result of these different legal decisions," Grimes said. "Now the focus is again on wild fish, and it doesn't appear there are many of them. That could be bad news for fishing because, if the fall run is listed under the Endangered Species Act, there would be no legal harvest."