Coho salmon's return to Columbia exceeds expectations

December 30, 2009

YAKIMA - Fisheries biologists are cheering a record return of coho salmon
this year to the upper and middle Columbia River basin, where the fish were
virtually wiped out 20 years ago.

Biologists began working in the 1990s to restore coho by introducing
hatchery fish from the lower Columbia River and improving dam passage and
habitat in tributaries where the fish would spawn. Prospects were uncertain,
largely because the lower-river fish would basically have to be trained to
swim to upriver tributaries.

Those efforts, combined with improved ocean conditions, are credited with
higher returns this year.  Twelve adult coho returned past Rock Island Dam near Wenatchee 10 years ago.  This year, 19,805 returned past the dam.
Though most of the returning fish are hatchery fish, returns exceeded all
expectations, said Tom Scribner, project leader for the Yakama Nation Indian
tribe. An increasing number of returns came from natural spawning, Scribner
said, which biologists hope will resurrect self-sustaining wild-coho stocks
in the future.

Coho in the lower Columbia River are a threatened species, but upriver coho
never received protection under the Endangered Species Act because there
were no fish left to protect.

In the 1990s, the Yakama Nation, with support from other tribes, Washington
state, Bonneville Power Administration and other groups, decided to try to
resurrect the fish runs.

About $2 million has been spent specifically on coho restoration each year
since 2005. Before then, coho restoration was part of a larger hatchery
program that included many species.

In Central Washington's Yakima River basin, coho were extinct by 1985.
In 2002, only about 800 adult coho returned to the Yakima River. This year,
roughly 10,000 adult coho returned, with 1,800 of them wild fish, said Todd
Newsome, biologist for the Yakima-Klickitat Fisheries Project, a joint
project of the Yakama Nation and the Washington state Department of Fish and
Wildlife.
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