This week’s blog entry will be featuring Craig Smith the Harvest Program Manager with the Nisqually Indian Tribe. Craig is focused on conservation efforts, specifically on how to conserve Nisqually Salmon while also exercising treaty rights to fish. This blog will be question and answer style, with a few comments by me throughout.
What is the nature of your work?
I am the Harvest Program Manager for the Nisqually Indian Tribe protecting the Nisqually Tribe’s treaty fishing right. I am the technical liaison between the State, Tribe, and Federal Government. I help to ensure sufficient fish return to the terminal area, to fulfill our treaty rights and escapement needs. I manage our in river Treaty Fishery to assure escapement to hatcheries and the spawning grounds depending on species and management intent (lots of catch, hatchery, and escapement data analyzed to create computer models). Some stocks are considered hatchery management stocks, some are hatchery and wild, and some are wild only. Listed fish take precedence in management (i.e. Chinook and Steelhead).
What do you love most about your job?
I love the Nisqually River. I grew up in the Olympic Peninsula where habitats and rivers are mostly in really good shape. The Puget Sound is a habitat nightmare and the golden child is the Nisqually Watershed due to my predecessor’s forethought and determination to bring all parties together to work towards habitat restoration. I love steelhead spawning ground surveys. The smell of cottonwood, the chorus of the river, birds singing in the spring, the chrome bright steelhead and redds illuminated by sun under massive fallen trees creates a euphoric nature party. It is medicine.
What is the hardest part about working in your career?
Salmon provoke unimaginable emotions in massive amounts of people from all walks of life. Wild opinions (meaning wild salmon) are rampant and a product of these emotions, not educated opinions. As a person that is technical in nature, I work very hard to work with what we know and what we don’t know about the resource. I often am confronted by someone who knows more than me on how to do my job. I always ask them what they do for a living. Let’s say it is driving a Dump Truck. I ask them, “Do you think I could negotiate the specificities of operating a Dump Truck better than you?” Everyone “knows” something about salmon.
There are few people that tell me thanks for what I do for the resource. Resource Managers usually are not viewed as helping the fishermen, because they use science to perpetuate runs for the future. Very few fishermen want to hear they cannot fish.
**As someone who has also worked with the fishing population this is very true. Everyone believes they can do your job better, without realizing all the working components of fish management.
Do you know about the Tragedy of the Commons approach to management?
Yes
What are your thoughts about it?
Salmon are a food source. Salmon are managed and could be managed better. Not managing with the best available data and/or letting money counter sound management produces Tragedy of the Commons. However, on the flip side, if Salmon are not managed as a food source it neglects to become a resource, and when that happens it becomes a silent Tragedy of the Commons. Habitat continues to decline because no one cares.
If not what do you believe is the best way to manage fisheries?
In the river plain and simple. Pre terminal fisheries produce a fine product but are not sustainable.
**pre-terminal areas are those areas fished in the ocean, where all salmon stocks are mixed, fishing in the river allows for more selective fisheries, where you can fish healthy stocks, without hurting stocks that are weak. Here is a good short video by the Northwest Treaty Tribes that explains terminal and tribal fishing.
What is the state of salmon on the Nisqually River?
This is a loaded question. Chinook, Coho, Pink, Chum, and Steelhead. A book could be written on this.
**yes a book could be written on the subject, I know right now Chinook and Steelhead are threatened status.
What are some hot issues surrounding salmon currently?
What are we going to do with climate change and 2.5 million more people that are headed to the region? Rampant habitat destruction.
How is habitat restoration progressing on the Nisqually? Good, bad, stagnant?
Fantastic. More on the way, however no one can prepare enough for glaciers being gone and sea level rise.
**Habitat restoration is an ongoing process, that includes tree planting engineering log jams, re-meandering stream or tributaries that run in to the Nisqually, acquiring land so that restoration can happen and so that the land can be managed.
What are some core values that contradict each other about salmon fishing vs. salmon protection?
Not understanding how pre-terminal fisheries impact salmon. Pre terminal fisheries disrupt the natural maturation and force smaller fish to the terminal areas. Mark Selective Fisheries are supposed to harvest the first legal fish. However, many fisheries and especially winter season derby fisheries encourage the largest fish so people release fish that are small. Because you are not seeing a dead fish when caught, managers have to provide a model with assumptions. Assumptions often become accepted over time when they are not testable or managers are unwilling to test because of cost or other reasons.
*Mark Selective Fisheries is a term used in fishing and management. It’s a tool where only marked hatchery fish can be retained. Hatcheries will mark fish usually by clipping the Adipose Fin, although other methods are used.
Are fisheries sustainable?
Depends upon which fisheries you are talking about. Some are some are not. For example Chambers, Minter, and Tumwater Chinook hatchery programs are sustainable in the sense that they are not a wild stock, they never had Chinook in these areas, and fisheries on these stocks are only managed to make sure the hatchery gets enough back to perpetuate the program. These programs are considered “wipe out fisheries/stocks”. However, in a non-direct way these programs production are not sustainable because they can prop up pre terminal fisheries on non-wipe out stocks or ESA listed stocks. Also, these productions have competition impacts while rearing in the same places that wild stocks are rearing.
Wild South Sound Chum stock has been commercially fished in the Puget Sound by Treaty and Non treaty for 60 to 70 years; catching hundreds of thousands of Chum every year. Very little sport fishing is directed on this stock. The Commercial fishery has been managed very well with catch and test fishery and In Season Update (ISU) models discussed weekly by treaty and none treaty managers. Commercial fisheries are much easier to manage because there is a solid known impact, i.e. fish tickets and intensive monitoring. This fishery is almost a terminal fishery in areas 10 and 11. The fish are returning to spawn with known ages and there are minimal non-target species mortalities.
Pre terminal fisheries are not sustainable. Multiple non-target species (beyond just salmon) and ages are “encountered” and true impact to any one stock is impossible to determine.
In your opinion how can we better restore salmon?
Return management to the rivers.
Find a more sustainable source for power than hydroelectric. Evaporate cement, pollution, bulkheads, and bring back herring populations.
Or what steps need to happen in order to better protect salmon?
Revamp science around hatchery practices. Understand ecosystem changes that happen from our management and environmental changes. I.e. artificial production changing food web – increasing sea mammal population beyond natural capacity. Manage fisheries in the extreme terminal areas.
**Sea mammal population rise has had an enormous impact on salmon. The big issue today is the protection status of sea lions. Should they be protected now that their numbers are strong or continue to protect them?