Threatened Oregon chum salmon get help

A hundred years ago, a million adult chum salmon would return each autumn to spawn in tributaries and creeks along the Columbia River. But, like other varieties of salmon, overfishing, dams and loss of habitat decimated their numbers in Oregon and Washington. Columbia River chum salmon were listed as threatened nearly 25 years ago under the Endangered Species Act.

A team of biologists at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife has been leading efforts to reintroduce chum salmon in the Columbia River basin. They include operating a hatchery near Astoria, relocating returning adults and juvenile fry to historic spawning sites and tracking their movement using DNA sampling in waterways. Kelcee Smith is the chum salmon reintroduction coordinator at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. The Astorian recently profiled her work and partnerships with nonprofits and landowners to recover chum salmon. Smith joins us to talk about those recovery efforts and the threats the fish face today, including climate change.

This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. 100 years ago, a million chum salmon would return each autumn to spawn in tributaries and creeks along the Columbia River. But as for other native runs of salmon, dams, overfishing, and habitat loss have decimated their numbers in Oregon and in Washington. That led Columbia River chum to be listed as threatened nearly 25 years ago under the Endangered Species Act. It’s also led to efforts to boost their numbers. As The Astorian newspaper wrote recently, a team of biologists at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife has been working to reintroduce Columbia River chum. Kelcee Smith is leading this charge. She is the chum salmon reintroduction coordinator at ODFW, and she joins us now. Welcome to the show.

Kelcee Smith: Hi, thanks for having me.

Miller: So we have heard and we’ve talked a lot about sockeye and Chinook and coho and steelhead in the Northwest. We’ve talked much less about chum, maybe not at all. Why do you think that is?

Smith: Yeah, they do get overlooked. I think one of the main reasons is that they’re not a commercially important species. There’s no fishery for chum salmon, because like you said, they’re listed as threatened. So that’s the main reason. But also there’s so few of them out there, people are really unlikely to encounter them when they do go fishing. So they’re just not that common. People kind of forget about them.

Miller: Was there a commercial fishery for them in the Northwest?

Smith: There used to be, a long time ago in the Columbia. But as you said, not for a long time since they’ve been protected.

Miller: What do they look like?

Smith: Obviously I’m biased, but I think they’re the prettiest of all the salmon. When they come back to spawn, they’re kind of olive green, like an army green. But then they have these really cool stripes on them that are like reddish purple. So they’re really unique from all the other salmon that you might encounter in Oregon tributaries, because of those stripes. The males in particular also get these really gnarly teeth when they come back to spawn. Some listeners might recognize them as being called “dog salmon.”

Miller: When you say gnarly, what do you mean?

Smith: Like, they’re just really big, bigger than other species. They also have teeth, but the teeth on chum are just much bigger, they’re definitely sharper, and you notice them if you see one.

Miller: For you, that’s part of the beauty as well?

Smith: Yeah, it makes them unique.

Miller: How do their migration and spawning or habitat patterns compare to the more well known native runs of salmon?

Smith: Here in the Columbia River we only have a fall run of chum salmon. They basically come back in the month of November, and that’s it. So it’s much shorter compared to Chinook or coho. After they spawn, the fry or the juvenile fish leave their native freshwater tributaries a lot quicker than the other salmon too.

Miller: Meaning they’re smaller when they leave?

Smith: They’re absolutely smaller, maybe like two inches long. Whereas coho and Chinook can sometimes overwinter or they stay months and months, chum out-migrate and get to the estuary within a couple of weeks. So they’re very small by the time they enter the ocean.

Miller: What does that mean in terms of their life cycle or their habits?

Smith: It can mean that they’re a little bit more vulnerable. When they out-migrate, they rely on safety in numbers. There’s going to be a bunch of them trying to move through the estuary at one time, so they’re protected from predators in those mass groups.

Miller: Does this mean that they’re not competing, say, with Chinook or coho or steelhead for habitat?

Smith: Because they only stay for a few weeks in these freshwater systems, they aren’t taking up the resources that other salmon would use. So, yeah, that’s absolutely right.

Miller: Returning populations of Columbia River chum are so low in Oregon that the ODFW, your agency, says they are “functionally extirpated” in the state. What does that language mean?

Smith: That basically means that there’s not enough of them around to produce a viable population. The numbers are so low that the populations are essentially non-existent. There’s just not enough of them.

Miller: What are the estimates for how big the populations were at their peak?

Smith: You mentioned it at the top of the show, those are the best estimates that we have as far as the greatest number that there used to be, like 100 years ago there were about a million that returned. And now it’s more like 20,000 to 25,000. So historically, that one million number represented about 10% of the total salmon that returned to the lower Columbia. Now, with chum populations returning, it’s more like 1% to 2% of all salmon that are in the river.

Miller: So we’ve talked so much over the years about the decline of native runs, plural, of salmon. But it sounds like what you’re saying is chum have actually fared even worse than other ones that have themselves been nearly removed.

Smith: That’s right. In Oregon, 90% of the chum populations are gone.

Miller: Is Washington any different, the tributaries and streams there?

Smith: The Washington populations are a little bit better than ours, but not at the levels we would like to see.

Miller: What are the biggest reasons for this massive decline? I gave a sort of a very short version in my intro, but I’m hoping you can shed more light on it.

Smith: The main reasons, like with most threatened and endangered species, are some combination of over harvest and habitat loss or degradation. So for us in the Columbia River, that means commercial fisheries, anglers over harvesting chum salmon, especially historically before they were protected. But it also means this spawning habitat that’s been lost over time over the last 80 or 100 years. So any chum salmon that do come back don’t really have a great place to spawn. And when they don’t have a great place to spawn, it means the juveniles can’t grow up in a healthy environment to survive to adulthood themselves. It’s sort of a cascading series of events that happens. And we didn’t even touch on other natural things, like predators or disease or climate change, that could be compounding some of these problems.

Miller: You didn’t mention dams. Does the fact that they spend more time in the lower parts of the Columbia system mean that they’re less impacted by dams?

Smith: Not necessarily. They do like to spawn in some of the lower portions of the watershed which aren’t always affected by dams. But dams in general change temperature, flow of water. And that affects different cues that chum might be relying on for their return.

Miller: So even if they’re not smashing into concrete as the reason that they can’t go to their native spawning grounds, the dams could still greatly affect them.

Smith: Exactly. Very simply, fish need water to live. And so if there’s not enough water coming downstream from the dams, then there’s not going to be any space for chum to spawn.

Miller: Can you give us sort of the overview of your strategies to boost their numbers, to bring them back?

Smith: The first thing that we have is a conservation brood stock which we run out of Big Creek Hatchery. And most people might know that the hatcheries in Oregon produce salmon to help boost harvest levels. A conservation brood stock is basically creating fish for conservation instead.

Miller: Instead of commercial harvest or recreational harvest.

Smith: That’s right. That’s kind of the foundation of our program.

Miller: Does that change the way a hatchery is operated? The end result is the same, or the idea is, let’s help these fish exist in a watershed. Does it matter if the idea is to boost their population so they can be caught and eaten, or so they can just live?

Smith: Not really. Because chum populations are so low in general, having the hatchery as a foundation of the program helps them just to exist to begin with. We already know that they’re not gonna have the threat of being caught. So all of the fish that result from hatchery production are for our conservation efforts.

Miller: Where do you get them? You have so few to start with, how do you even get the fish eggs or stock to have them exist in the future?

Smith: That’s a really great question. So on Big Creek, there is a small wild run of chum salmon. So that’s the first thing, that’s why we decided to locate our program there. But in the early years of my program, to get the brood stock a little bit more robust, we actually transferred chum eggs from Washington from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, to help kind of boost our program. So we have that wild supplementation, as well as original eggs from Washington. Now, that was 13 years ago. So now we don’t really depend on WDFW for those chum salmon eggs. We have enough chum returning to Big Creek to support our own brood stock.

Miller: Do you know right now where chum were happiest in the past? In other words, places where they’d be most likely to thrive today.

Smith: Yeah, we do have a lot of historical data on where chum used to be. And really, just based on what we know now about the kind of spawning habitat that they like, which as I mentioned is lower in the watershed, cooler water, low gradient.

Miller: Low gradient meaning they’re not jumping over rocks.

Smith: Yeah, the stream doesn’t increase in elevation too quickly, so it’s relatively flat.

Miller: So they’re not like Chinook that are miraculously jumping through rapids?

Smith: That’s right, so all of those pictures you see on the internet of salmon jumping over these giant waterfalls into bears mouths or something, those probably aren’t chum, they don’t usually jump too much over that kind of stuff.

Miller: They’re lazier?

Smith: They’re a little bit lazier, that’s for sure.

Miller: You’re also using a tool called DNA environmental sampling. What does that mean, and why do you use it?

Smith: This is part of our monitoring effort in areas where we haven’t seen chum salmon in a long time, or where we think they might be. EDNA, or environmental DNA sampling, is a tool that we can use to detect fish, detect chum, without us having to physically see them or spend extra time or labor that we don’t have to survey the entire stream.

Basically, it consists of a water sample that we take during a time when we think chum might be around. We send it off to the lab, they analyze it for us, and they can tell us if there’s been any chum DNA collected on the filter in that water sample.

Miller: So a test tube of water, and the idea is that if chum have recently been through there, tiny bits of their cells will be there, and those will be picked up when you do the test?

Smith: That’s right.

Miller: What do you do with that information?

Smith: It tells us sort of presence/absence. Are there chum here to begin with? So that’s really great information for us just to start. But it can also tell us different things about run timing. When are they there? How long are they there? And that can help us direct some habitat restoration efforts. If there are no chum here and we’ve been sampling for a long time, maybe it means that we need to focus on more habitat restoration so that they’ll be more likely to come there.

Miller: How successful have all of these efforts been, just in terms of raw numbers?

Smith: In the last two or three years, we’ve seen higher numbers of chum salmon return to the Columbia River in general. That’s on the Washington side, and here in Oregon. So that’s allowed my program to do a lot more different types of reintroduction, which has been really cool. It means that we can move fish to streams that they used to occupy historically to see if they could recolonize these different areas. So it’s been really great on that aspect. But there’s still a lot more that we need to do. I think 2021 was our biggest return to Big Creek hatchery since we started the program, and it was about 2,300 fish.

Miller: 2,300. I mean, in case people have forgotten the number you said earlier, it was one million 100 years ago. 2,300. And that was the best year.

Smith: Right. Now that’s just the Oregon side of stuff. That 2,300 number doesn’t include any of the Washington numbers for 2021. And that one million number does include both states. So it’s a little bit tricky when you’re trying to add these numbers up. But yes, in general, 2,300 sounds like a lot for my program in the context of the last decade. But in the context of the last 100 years, it’s a drop in the bucket.

Miller: What, if anything, gives you hope?

Smith: It’s tough sometimes. You’re trying your best and you may not see the results immediately. These fish live to be three to five years old. The stuff that we do this year, we kind of have to wait to see if it works. I think that’s actually part of what makes me hopeful is that we’re trying our best now. And hopefully that will result in something three to five years from now.

I also know that these fish are super resilient. We’re handling them all throughout the return. They’re really hardy. I think if the habitat is there, and if we give them a chance, they’ll come back. We have all the tools to do it. We just need to do it.

Miller: You used to do similar kinds of conservation work involving either threatened species or invasive species in very different places, in Florida, in Louisiana, in the Southeast. What has the transition to the Northwest been like for you?

Smith: It’s been a little bit different. In the Southeast, you don’t just jump into different bodies of water without checking first, because there might be alligators or snakes or snapping turtles, a lot more stuff can injure you. Whereas here in the Northwest, it’s kind of nice. I can just walk into a stream without worrying.

Miller: There might be crayfish nibbling, but there’s no alligators.

Smith: Yeah, no alligators up here, which is really nice.

Miller: I hadn’t thought of that. I mean we’ve got earthquakes and tsunami dangers, but we don’t have alligators. So that’s been a little bit of a breath of fresh air for you.

Smith: Yeah, it’s been kind of nice to focus a little bit more on your work than too much of the safety stuff with other creatures out there.

Miller: What about culturally? Is there a difference in the approach to conservation work in the two regions?

Smith: Not as much as people might think. As you mentioned, I’ve worked a lot on threatened and endangered species in a bunch of different habitats at different conservation levels too. And really it comes down to the same things over and over again. These species are facing habitat loss, like I mentioned, and some sort of over harvest, whether that’s through fishing, whether it’s through other things that are happening that people have done over time. And usually these things have happened 50, 80, or 100 years ago, and today we’re still trying to recover them. So, the story of chum salmon is essentially the same as a lot of other species in the southeast.

Miller: Kelcee Smith, thanks very much.

Smith: Thank you.

Miller: Kelcee Smith is the chum salmon reintroduction coordinator at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

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