YAKIMA — After last year’s hot, dry summer, fish forecasters are cautious in their projections for this year’s salmon runs in the Yakima and Columbia rivers.
Summer sockeye in the Columbia died off in alarming numbers due to warmer water last year, so the forecast is just a quarter of what it was in 2015: 100,000 fish compared with 400,000.
Chinook on the Columbia are looking more positive. Spring chinook are forecast at 189,000, down from 289,000 last year, but “still pretty good,” said John Easterbrooks, Region 3 fish program manager with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Summer chinook are up slightly, he said, with a projected run of 93,000. And fall Chinook up in the Hanford Reach are even better: 589,000 forecast compared with an estimate of 500,000 last year. Last year’s prediction ended up being significantly underestimated when the actual run totaled nearly 800,000 fish.
For the Yakima River, data manager Bill Bosch with the Yakima Klickitat Fisheries Project is more pessimistic.
The forecast for spring chinook in the Yakima is 4,610 adult fish, only about half of the area’s 10-year average run of 8,320, he wrote in a report for the Yakama Nation Fisheries Resource Management.
That doesn’t mean the population can’t rebound, Bosch said. As recently as 2007, only 4,300 spring chinook returned, followed by several consecutive years above 10,000.
Bosch and Easterbrooks said the impact of last year’s drought and warmer temperatures, which heated up local rivers and kept many salmon from spawning at their normal destination, won’t be completely known until the grown 2015 crop of smolt returns in three or four years.
But it still makes it hard to predict what’s coming this year, Bosch said.
“The 4,600 forecast might be a little conservative because it’s based on fish that came back last year, and we had a hot river,” he said. Since snowpack conditions appear much better this year, potentially erasing the drought, “There is reason for optimism that this forecast is too conservative.”
At the same time, Bosch said, there’s concern that the mature fish returning this year spent the majority of their adult lives swimming around in a “warm blob” in the Pacific Ocean, and no one yet knows how the resulting difference in the ocean’s food web will affect salmon survival rates.
Apart from population recovery woes, an issue for fishermen this year is the ratio of wild-born to hatchery-raised spring chinook.
The forecast in the Yakima is for 3,100 wild salmon and 1,510 from hatcheries. That ratio is skewed the wrong way, Easterbrooks said.
“Wild fish are off-limits – they have to be released by the sport fishers,” he said. “Anglers will likely cycle through a bunch of wild fish to be able to catch their one hatchery fish. … I’d like to see more of a balance, or even a higher percentage of hatchery fish.”
Statewide fish forecasts for 2016 were announced at a meeting in Olympia onMarch 1 Tuesday, although forecasters here developed their projections in the fall.
