The Ups and Downs Of The Upper Adams
Around the turn of the century, the Upper Adams River (a tributary of the Fraser River) hosted one of the fabulous runs that earned British Columbia rivers an international reputation as one of the world's greatest sources of sockeye salmon. But, in 1908, a timber company built a dam that stacked up returning spawners so deeply that the waters below the dam were packed solid with fish from surface to river bottom for miles downstream.
And when the company opened the spillways, sending a torrent of water downstream to break-up logjams, millions of spawning fish were swept from the gravel beds, and the beds themselves were further destroyed by the gouging and digging action of the logs.
By 1922, when the logging was finished and the timber company pulled out, the fish were gone, the gravel beds were empty and the Upper Adams run was declared extinct. In 1945, the dam was torn down and the river flow restored to its earlier flow levels. By 1950, the Canadian Department of Fisheries & Oceans (DFO) had begun rehabilitation and, finally, this year, spawning salmon returned to spawning beds that had lain deserted and dormant since 1908.
Ironically, Ian Williams, a biologist based at the federal Pacific Biological Station (PBS) in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, now finds himself trying to convince a regional land use board that a plan to give logging companies permission to cut nearly 70 percent of the timber in an area near the headwaters of the Horsefly River could once again put the Horsefly sockeye in jeopardy.
Someone once wrote that the universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for humanity's wits to grow sharper. Ian Williams would say that time is not yet at hand.
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While some may regard extinction as nature's final comment on the adaptation skills of a species, on one British Columbia river, Mother Nature --- with a kick start from the DFO scientists --- has miraculously rewritten the equation and resurrected a salmon stock that vanished 88 years ago.
This fall, 30,000 salmon found their way back to the spawning grounds of the Upper Adams River, the largest return since 1908, when a logging company constructed a spill dam and managed to wipe out a sockeye run that had numbered in the millions.
"Thirty thousand is what we consider a critical mass", says Ian Williams, a biologist based at the federal Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. "Once you get that number of fish coming back, the salmon themselves actually begin to rehabilitate the spawning beds, to condition them for spawning --- where, for instance, ovarian fluid has seeped into the gravel and acts as a catalyst for spawning activity".
Williams, who's devoted a large chunk of his career to restoring the Upper Adams run, is delighted with the returns and thinks the best is yet to come. "I believe we'll see runs of anywhere from 6 million to 10 million salmon within the next few cycles," he says.
Regenerating a salmon stock previously judged extinct and subsequently building its numbers into the millions should fit just about anyone's definition of miraculous. But behind that accomplishment lies a story of hard work, repeated frustrations and failure and the relentless persistence of a handful of people determined to recreate the once fabled Upper Adams sockeye run.
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The seeds were sown back in 1950 when federal fisheries scientists began releasing millions of salmon fry in the Upper Adams River. The early results were disappointing.
"Between the '50s and the early '80s," says Williams, "DFO pumped in something like 10 million eggs and 500,000 fingerlings and had little more than a handful of returners to show for it."
By 1980, the run consisted of fewer than 600 fish, and scientists were convinced that the problem was embedded in the genetic signature of the salmon fry DFO was trying to introduce.
"We needed a donor stock that was genetically similar," recalls Williams, "but the genetic imprint of the unsuccessful donor stocks instructed them to turn south as they exited Adams Lake. What we needed were fish programmed to head north when they came out."
So, in 1984, Williams and his fellow biologists tried a new approach. They canoed upriver and set-up camp near Adams Lake ---no roads, no stores, no neighbours, and supplies were ferried in weekly by bush plane.
Turning to a small run from the Momich-Cayenne river system near Adams Lake, they captured and crossed Cayenne females with males from the Upper Adams. "We knew the males were already adapted to the Upper Adams and would at least give us half the genetic material we needed."
Four years later, when the fish returned on their next cycle, Williams knew he was looking at three cherries on the biological slot machine. "We got something like 7,200 returnees --- it was just incredible."
It was all the more crushing a blow when the 1992 cycle saw fewer than 3,000 sockeye return to the spawning beds. The DFO quickly realized that massive over fishing on the coast had put the Upper Adams run in jeopardy of being wiped-out once again and made plans to ease that pressure in 1996.
This turned out to be a key management decision, because, with cooperation from commercial fishermen and aboriginal tribes, the '96 run passed through without getting hammered, and 30,000 Upper Adams sockeye made it back to the spawning beds. That's when Ian Williams knew he was looking at a miracle.
"There was this strong feeling of deja vu," says Williams, "because the rehabilitation of the Upper Adams run was so similar to what had happened on the Horsefly".
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In the 1970s, the Horsefly, another Fraser River tributary, saw fewer than 1,000 returning spawners, but with a little help from DFO biologists, it hit the 30,000 mark during the early '80s and, by the '90s, had soared to 2.5 million, becoming one of the premier runs in British Columbia.
This raises the question: Can the same approach be applied to salmon rivers in the Lower 48? According to John Roos, who wrote "Restoring Fraser River Salmon," the answer is, "Yes." Many consider Roos' book the bible of salmon-related matters in the Fraser River watershed.
"There's no doubt that the work done on the Fraser River's salmon-bearing tributaries is a dynamic example for us to examine and emulate," says Roos, also a former director of the Pacific Salmon Commission (PSC). "We've missed so many opportunities here in Washington state, so many things that could have been done --- but somehow the spirit, the will and the commitment seem lacking."
Roos thinks the stubborn reliance on hatcheries by fishery managers has been particularly harmful to salmon stocks in Washington and Oregon rivers. "I used to have lunch with (world-renowned BC author and environmentalist) Roderick Haig-Brown on a fairly regular basis, where we'd discuss the issues of the day, and once he said to me "You know, John, these fish, this resource, are even more majestic than we are as a species," and he just hated the hatchery programs. Thought they were ruining wild stocks."
But Dick White, a fisheries biologist for the Washington state Department of Fish & Wildlife, says it wasn't only fisheries managers who backed the hatcheries. "It's not fair to lay the blame entirely on them. Commercial and recreational fishermen, the Army Corps of Engineers, politicians, developers --- lots of people saw hatcheries as a magic bullet and figured, "Sure, we can build a dam, because we'll also build a hatchery and that will offset any losses." But that way of thinking is gone now."
Rob Jones, regional spokesman for the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), puts it another way: "We agree with British Columbia's approach. In the past, we've managed for a few strong stocks. Now we're managing for an entire spectrum of different stocks. In the last five or six years, fisheries management has turned the corner in the Lower 48 and now recognizes that diversity of salmon survival.
"The days where you saw the Johnny Appleseed approach --- where we spread fish far and wide, with little regard for genetic makeup --- those days are coming to an end."
At the Northwest Fisheries Science Center (NMFC) in Seattle, Mike Schiewe concurs. "I think the fisheries community has opened its eyes to the reality that transfers of stocks and efforts to replace native fish by whatever stock happens to be abundant that year seldom, if ever, works."
Schiewe, who directs coastal and estuarine studies for NMFS, thinks that fisheries managers in the Northwest finally realized that using hatcheries to build diverse, long term, healthy populations didn't do any good and actually hurt the wild stocks.
"Old ways die hard," says Schiewe, "but I think the message is getting through. We need to generate some examples like the Upper Adams and Horsefly successes, and we need to do that below the border here, because there's nothing that breeds success like success."
Meanwhile, back on the Upper Adams, there's still a little work left to finish. "The spawning beds have been dormant for such a long time, they tend to develop an armoring layer, becoming hardened and compacted," says Ian Williams. "We need to manually loosen up the gravel before the spring floods, which will do the job."
And that's the final ingredient in Williams' recipe for rehabilitating a spawning stock. "You do all the technical stuff to get to 30,000 --- taking the eggs, getting ovarian fluid, incubating the eggs for shorter rearing and so forth," he says. "But then comes the hardest part. You've got to get out of the way and let Mother Nature go ahead and do what she does best."
