River Of No Return Salmon Science Often Disputed, Ignored

Special Report, Part 2

Jim Anderson fiddles with virtual salmon on his computer screen, sneaking a look now and then at the sweeping view of Puget Sound from his downtown Seattle office. His research team has spent six years and about $6 million of electric ratepayers’ money on a computer project to figure out how fish-recovery schemes affect salmon.

The University of Washington scientist predicted two years ago that a $12 million plan to spill water over Columbia and Snake river dams would kill as many fish as it saved. Salmon decision-makers went ahead with the spill, intended to help fish down the river.

“They didn’t even consult this model,” Anderson complained. “If we aren’t going to use science, why fund it? They’d be better off giving us all big retirements and we’ll just go away.”

Instead of pointing a clear path to salmon recovery, science has been ignored, disputed and fought over for years.

Biologists are embroiled in an arms race of salmon studies and experiments, bankrolled by utilities, state and federal agencies, Indian tribes, industry and environmentalists.

Many of the same groups that recommend or conduct the studies have a financial or political stake in the outcome.

The region’s largest electric utility is paying for a study that suggests dams kill fewer fish than believed. Dam operators paid for research that shows salmon pass more safely through some dam turbines than costly fish bypass systems. State agencies and tribes back research that indicates dams are fish killers.

More than 60 experiments involving fish protected under the Endangered Species Act are in the works in the Columbia Basin.

Much of the research focuses on getting baby salmon safely past the dams and to the sea.

But after 16 years of studies, basic questions remain unanswered. No one knows exactly how or where the fish die, or what to do about it.

Part of the problem is that salmon are notoriously tough to figure out. Experiments are hard to replicate. The Columbia and Snake are big rivers, and the fish are difficult to track. Results take years to determine.

But getting good answers has been harder than necessary. There’s been no traffic cop to direct salmon research, and little independent review to determine if findings are valid.

So the experiments continue.

In Anderson’s case, the National Marine Fisheries Service picked a competing computer model backed by state agencies and tribes. It recommended spilling water over dams for fish.

Scientists are still fighting over whether releasing the water in 1994 did more harm than good.

It’s an expensive way to argue.

To resolve the standoff, scientists are meeting to review the two computer models and other on-going research. The cost: $1.4 million and counting.

BIG QUESTIONS, BIG SPENDING

Utility customers and state and federal taxpayers pay for this pile of studies.

More than $262 million was spent trying to figure out Columbia Basin salmon between 1981 and 1991, the U.S. General Accounting Office says.

Some studies take so long, they are outdated before they are published.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Bureau of Reclamation and Bonneville Power Administration collaborated on a report published last winter that examined dam operations.

The study, called the “System Operating Review,” cost $20 million to produce, weighs 35 pounds and fills more than 6,000 pages in 22 volumes. At least 200 people worked on the six-year project.

But by the time it came out, the decision-making dynamics on Columbia and Snake rivers had shifted.

The fisheries service had placed Snake River salmon on the endangered species list, giving that agency the authority to dictate dam operations.

In 1995, the fisheries service produced a $200,000, inch-and-a-half-thick recovery plan for Snake River salmon. It was followed this year by a $614,000, 388-page report requested by Congress from the National Research Council that reached most of the same conclusions.

There’s more. Richard Williams, a Meridian, Idaho, fish biologist, is leading a team of scientists convened by the Northwest Power Planning Council to produce another, $182,557 study.

The report, due this fall, is intended to review the scientific underpinnings of the council’s fish and wildlife program. A year and a half into his research, Williams was still stumbling across experiments and studies he hadn’t heard of.

“It gives you some idea of how much is going on,” he said.

A $30 million menu of research proposed by the fisheries service last year assumed studies were under way that weren’t, and called for research on fish habitat already addressed three times.

Research spending is growing even faster than the paper pile.

The Corps has spent $56.7 million on science since 1980. Now, it wants another $65.5 million for more research, experiments and prototypes - just for the coming year.

Spending on salmon research at one lab in Seattle run by the fisheries service tops $10 million a year.

THE RIVER LABORATORY

When baby salmon head downriver, the Columbia Basin research machine kicks into gear.

As fish zoom through pipes intended to carry them around turbines at Lower Granite Dam near Pullman, technicians press a button to shunt off a sample of the morning run.

Another technician dumps the fish into a tank filled with water and pours in a load of knock-out juice. Once the fish roll and go belly up, they’re ready for their trip through the fun factory.

The fish are flushed in a white plastic flume into a laboratory near the dam, where workers examine each fish to note its species and check for bites, disease or other injuries.

“Wild chinook,” calls out one worker, as he picks up the fish gently but loses his grip and drops it on the concrete floor.

The fish are returned to the flume, which sluices them to two nearby trailers. In the first, a brand cooled by liquid nitrogen is pressed to their bodies.

Then it’s on to the next trailer where more than a dozen workers wait with buckets full of hypodermic syringes.

They palm each fish and poke a needle into its soft underbelly, injecting a computer chip. The chip gives each fish an identity code, read by computerized detectors as the fish swim by. That lets scientists track them.

About half the salmon are then piped back into the river. The rest shoot at 25 feet per second through a pipe into the waiting tanks of their chariot to the Pacific Ocean.

For the next 36 hours they are guests of honor of the Corps of Engineers, barged past the other seven dams between Lower Granite and the ocean.

The $1.5 million barge chops through the Snake River as a technician checks the oxygen levels in the aerated tanks and scoops out dead fish.

Barging, started in 1968, is one of the longest-standing experiments on the river. Some biologists swear it’s a lifesaver; others say barging kills fish by crowding and stressing them.

The crew on the tugboat doesn’t claim to know much about the great barge debate, or particularly care.

A deckhand cooks chili burgers in the galley as the canyons of the Snake and hills of the Palouse roll past a tiny porthole over the lunch table.

Captain Jerry Canning, on break from his shift piloting the tug for $23 an hour, tucks into a half-gallon of fudge ripple ice cream.

Once below Bonneville Dam, the crew opens slots in the bottom of the barge and the salmon are free to go. The cost for the trip: $15,000.

LEARN BY DOING

Without scientific consensus on how to the save the fish, decision-makers are stuck with a strategy called “adaptive management.”

Others might call it trial and error.

Consider the Corps’ to-do list at just one dam. The Corps is studying or carrying out four salmon strategies at Lower Granite at the direction of the fisheries service.

The Corps is spending about $17 million to improve a set of screens, pipes, chutes and flumes called a bypass system intended to get fish around dam turbines.

Another $12.6 million is developing a giant metal box called a surface collector also meant to help fish avoid the turbines.

If results from the prototype collector look promising, another $100 million or so may be spent to build a permanent one.

The Corps also is conducting a $6 million study of lowering Snake River reservoirs to natural-river levels, an $840 million enterprise in construction costs alone if the region decides to go for it to help migrating salmon.

Trouble is, lowering the reservoir would leave a new surface collector and improved bypass system high, dry and useless.

A planned $20 million expansion of the fish barge fleet also would be wasted if the region decides to back off barging, and let fish swim to sea.

“What we’re seeing is it’s really expensive to test all over the place, and some of it will be dead-end paths,” said Witt Anderson of the Corps. “Adaptive management sounds real good but the downside is when everything costs a lot, we will waste a lot of money.”

SCIENCE OR POLITICS?

Politics also shapes the scientific debate.

Consider drawdowns, the controversial experiment that lowers reservoir levels to speed young salmon to sea.

The Northwest Power Planning Council voted for a wide range of salmon-saving measures in December 1994, including experimental drawdowns on the lower Snake River. An independent report requested by the council said drawdowns could help fish.

But drawdowns also would dry up irrigation intakes, disrupt recreation and hurt the economies of upriver towns like Lewiston.

In January 1995, conservative governors and members of Congress elected in a GOP landslide took office.

Idaho Gov. Cecil Andrus, a Democrat and staunch defender of drawdowns, was replaced by Republican Phil Batt, who opposes them.

In less than the lifecycle of a chinook, a whole new salmon-saving agenda emerged.

New members were appointed to the Power Planning Council in January 1995. They disagreed with much of the salmon plan adopted just the month before.

The turnover in Congress added more voices against going ahead with drawdowns: seven of eight U.S. senators from the Northwest joined Batt and the governor of Montana in opposition.

With the science supporting drawdowns in dispute, backers were powerless to insist on them. Opponents were relieved to see politics turn the tide turn their way.

Now, the National Marine Fisheries Service has put off a decision on whether to call for Snake River drawdowns to protect threatened and endangered salmon until 1999.

William Stelle, head of Northwest salmon recovery for the fisheries service, says he is optimistic an independent science advisory board appointed this summer will help generate data to decide which salmon recovery measures work.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 7 Color photos

MEMO: Two sidebars appeared with the story: 1. RADIO-EQUIPPED FISH Antennas bristling from Columbia River dams pick up signals from adult salmon carrying radio tags in their throats. Scientists monitor the signals to track the fish swimming upriver. Biologists capture adult chinook at Bonneville Dam. They lubricate the tags, which are the size of a man’s index finger, and slide them down the fish’s throat. A foot-and-a-half long wire is left wagging out of its mouth. Salmon don’t eat as they migrate upstream, so the tag doesn’t get in the way of feeding. Ted Bjornn of the University of Idaho, who heads the radio tag experiment, remembers hearing about scientists who followed one signal to an angler’s cabin near the river. They knocked on the door and politely retrieved the tag.

2. MICROCHIPS HELP SCIENTISTS TRACK SALMON Earl Prentice was driving to work in 1983 when he got an idea that revolutionized salmon research. Prentice, a biologist for the National Marine Fisheries Service, heard a story on the radio about a microchip that could be planted in people’s hands, to replace the bar code on their credit card. One wave of the palm, and your purchases could be charged. If an identity code could be stuck in someone’s hand, Prentice thought, why not in a fish? He traced the story to a smooth-talking Colorado inventor and discovered the technology wasn’t actually ready. So the fisheries service helped develop the technology for fish. About two years later, the first chip was stuck in a salmon at McNary Dam near Umatilla, Ore. More than 2 million fish, mostly salmon, have been tagged since.