The Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife is closing two Southwest Washington hatchery programs and lowering releases at another as a part of a settlement agreement stemming from a lawsuit by two environmental groups.
The Washougal River winter steelhead hatchery program will close near the end of the year. The Deep River net pens coho salmon program in Wahkiakum County will close by April. And the Kalama River/Fallert Creek Chinook salmon hatchery program will release only 1.9 million hatchery fish in 2025.
The settlement is the latest development in an eight-year battle over hatcheries’ role in salmon recovery as wild salmon stocks continue to struggle after decades of decline.
To government fish managers, hatcheries are the key to balancing salmon conservation with commercial and recreational fish harvests. Environmentalists view hatcheries instead as a direct cause of the potential local extinction of wild salmon.
Jim Scott, special assistant to the director of the state fish and wildlife agency, touted the agreement, noting it won’t change total hatchery fish production from what the agency was already expecting for the coming years.
Washington has the world’s largest hatchery program, with more than half of the roughly 200 salmon hatcheries in the Columbia River Basin located around the state. Washington facilities produce 200 million juvenile fish each year. Eighty percent of the salmon and steelhead that return to the basin as adults came from hatcheries.
Environmental groups — Wild Fish Conservancy Northwest and The Conservation Angler — sued over Lower Columbia River hatcheries allowing returning hatchery salmon to spawn with wild fish at levels that violate standards.
The lawsuit named the Washington agency, as well as the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service and Clatsop County, Ore. The original complaint also alleged the National Marine Fisheries Service failed to produce required yearly reports.
In addition to the closures, the settlement agreement resulted in protection for the defendants from future lawsuits from the plaintiffs on the same issues until 2028; increased transparency on hatchery programs from Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife, including publishing some data on the agency’s website; and increased communication between the Oregon and Washington departments of fish and wildlife about non-tribal commercial gillnet fishing, according to a WDFW release. In addition, the government agencies must cover the environmental groups’ legal fees.
The settlement agreement, however, notes that Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife “denies any fault, wrongdoing, or liability.”
pHOS measurements
The conflict centers on a measure known as “pHOS,” short for proportion of hatchery origin spawners.
In 2017, a lawsuit from Wild Fish Conservancy led the National Marine Fisheries Service to produce a “biological opinion” on Columbia Basin hatcheries. Biological opinions provide guidelines intended to ensure a proposed project will not hurt the survival and recovery of a species listed in the Endangered Species Act. Fourteen Columbia Basin salmon runs are currently listed as endangered.
The document set limits for the maximum percentage of hatchery fish spawning with wild fish at sites around the Columbia Basin.
The most recent lawsuit alleged that the defending agencies exceeded both the acceptable ratio and, separately, the number of hatchery fish that could be released on many Lower Columbia tributaries.
Wild Fish Conservancy executive director Emma Helverson said 77 percent of spawning salmon were hatchery-reared in Cowlitz County’s Mill, Abernathy and Germany creeks, despite a limit of 50 percent.
The congressionally established Hatchery Scientific Review Group found in 2009 that the percentage of hatchery fish spawning should be less than 5 percent of the naturally spawning population, unless the hatchery population is integrated with the natural population.
The 5.8 million hatchery fish that made up the 2015-2016 average release number of Kalama fall chinook — or more than twice the standard — is an example of hatcheries greatly exceeding release standards, according to court documents. Bonneville Fish Hatchery, meanwhile, released about half of the 5 million they were allotted.
Hatchery vs. wild salmon
While the relationship between government fish managers and environmentalists is often defined by disagreement, they do agree that hatchery fish are less suited to survival in the wild than natural origin fish — a difference that grows over generations.
“Evidence suggests that hatchery rearing can inadvertently select for traits that may be disadvantageous in the wild,” a 2024 National Marine Fisheries Service write-up of research said. “This could have downstream implications for native stocks, if these fish breed with wild fish when they are released.”
That’s why the alleged violations have dire implications, said Helverson of Wild Fish Conservancy.
“The Endangered Species Act is the most important tool to protect biodiversity and to prevent extinction of species that are threatened, but that law can’t protect those species if we don’t follow the safeguards and the limits that are set,” Helverson said. “We think it’s unacceptable: these are science-based limits set by our agencies that (the defendants) acknowledge are important to preventing extinction.”
That’s where environmentalists’ and government fish managers’ views depart. For Scott of Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife, hatcheries are a crucial part of a group of tools to keep salmon in the Columbia.
“These hatchery programs are just fundamentally important for both conservation, for providing for the tribes, to providing prey for southern resident killer whales and yeah, fair enough, for supporting sustainable fisheries for everybody,” he said.
But, to Helverson, outside of a hypothetical scenario where a small hatchery program is used to save a salmon run from imminent local extinction and then pulls back, hatcheries are instead an impediment to the project of salmon restoration, she said. Hatchery programs merely prop up unsustainable commercial fish harvests, especially in the ocean.
Scott flatly rejects that view of hatcheries.
“NOAA scrutinizes (biological opinions) very carefully to make sure that we’re not applying a higher harvest rate than the natural stocks will allow, and it sets the allowable rates and fisheries,” he said.
Though, he noted that, along with climate change and salmonid predators such as seals and sea lions, the “legacy effects from the way we used to operate hatchery programs and the way we used to run fisheries” have contributed to the species’ struggles.
But, for Scott, that doesn’t mean hatcheries, as they’re run now, aren’t a part of the future of salmon restoration.
“Here at WDFW, we use our continuing evolution of hatchery programs to contribute to conservation and recovery — and providing sustainable fisheries,” Scott said.
Although Helverson views hatcheries as a main driver of salmon’s problems — along with over-harvest, habitat loss and dams — she recognizes they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
“If we’re going to have hatcheries, we need to be managing them according to the best available science,” she said.
Whatever hatcheries’ role in the decline of wild salmon in the Columbia Basin — or the increasingly unlikely recovery that everyone wants to see — that decline has been dramatic.
A 2022 NOAA assessment found the number of wild salmon spawning in Columbia River tributaries — measured in “raw natural spawner counts” — declined substantially for nearly every salmon run in nearly every river they measured between 1990 and 2019.
Editor’s note: This story was updated to correct the spelling of Emma Helverson’s name and clarify that only the winter part of the Washougal River steelhead hatchery program will close.
