35% of this year’s Snake River sockeye run presumed dead

About 35 percent of this year’s Snake River sockeye salmon run hasn’t shown up at Lower Granite Dam, and the fish are probably dead, the Army Corps of Engineers said Thursday. S-R reporter Becky Kramer writes that about 1,240 adult Snake River sockeye were counted at Bonneville Dam on the Lower Columbia earlier this summer. But only 788 of those fish have been detected at Lower Granite, the farthest upstream dam of the four Lower Snake River dams.

“They’re presumed to have perished,” said Army Corps spokesman Bruce Henrickson.

This year’s results are better than 2015, when 98 percent of the Snake River sockeye run died because of high temperatures in both the Columbia and the Snake, Henrickson said. Last year was the hottest on record. Kramer’s full report is online here at spokesman.com.