With about 3,500 passing up the fish ladder at the Ballard Locks through June 30, it’s on track to be the smallest Lake Washington sockeye return in 50 years (which is when they started counting).
So few fish are returning that local biologists have concluded they’re going extinct without emergency help. So they’ve launched a makeshift rescue plan: To drive the fish, by truck, around their last 30 miles of habitat, from the Locks all the way to the Cedar River headwaters area.
“This is a full-on life support effort,” says Aaron Bosworth, district fish biologist for the state. “It’s necessary, but it’s definitely a sad day in the story of this salmon run.”
Called Operation BLAST — for Ballard Locks Adult Salmon Transfer — the rescue goes like this: About a dozen state and tribal workers have been stationed at the Locks fish ladder, watching and waiting for the sockeye to return.
When some come in from the ocean, usually at high tide, workers light M-80-style firecrackers called “seal bombs” and throw them into the water. The blasts shoo the ravenous harbor seals off for a moment, and thrill — or appall — the tourists.
As the fish splash up the ladder, heading toward Lake Union, workers from the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe catch them with hand nets. The fish are put in a tank on a boat and then driven a quarter-mile up the ship canal, where they are loaded into a larger tank on a repurposed Seattle Public Utilities flatbed truck.
Rather than letting the fish try to swim through Lake Washington and up the Cedar River to spawn, the truck bypasses all that and deposits them at Landsburg, nearly 40 miles distant by road, east of Maple Valley. The crew plans to truck about 900 salmon; that number of adult fish can produce more than a million fry.
This labor-intensive operation is all to get around Lake Washington. Sockeye are unique in that they only exist in river systems with a lake. But our particular lake is now a death trap.
In recent years, more than half of the adult fish passing through the Locks haven’t made it out of the lake into the Cedar River.
The hazards, biologists say, are warmer water temperatures, diseases and stress from urbanization.
Ours used to be the largest sockeye run in the Lower 48 states. When it’s on, it’s Seattle’s greatest tourist attraction — the thing that still makes us different from anywhere else. As I wrote in 2006, “so much wildness surging through the city has the feel of a miracle to it.”
Salmon have been artificially transported around man-made obstacles like dams for decades. But trucking them around miles of their own key habitat is another level of existential. As one biologist working on the project noted, if you have to bypass the entire sockeye lake to save the sockeye, you start to wonder whether Seattle is meant to have such a salmon run anymore.
It’s a noble effort, yet an absurdist situation. We’ve driven salmon to the brink. Now we’re literally driving them to try to save them.
I guess all I can add, though it sounds like disaster tourism, is: Go see the sockeye. Despite the small size of the run, tourists were still gasping at the sight when I was out at the Locks viewing windows last week.
Go see them before it’s too late. Or before our great annual salmon migration is down to trucks going by on the highway.
