Bringing Fish Back from the Brink
Hood Canal steelhead were on the brink of extinction in the early 2000’s.
In response, LLTK partnered with NOAA Fisheries and nine other entities to test and assess an innovative approach to boost the abundance of these fish: low-impact, time-limited hatchery intervention. The lessons we learned from this study provided crucial information about the efficacy of hatcheries as conservation tools throughout the Northwest, as well as vital life history data for steelhead.
Populations on the Edge of Extinction
Steelhead, Washington’s state fish, have been on the decline in Puget Sound for over a century and in 2007 were listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act. A hundred years ago, steelhead returns to the Puget Sound region ranged from 325,000 to 800,000 annually.
Today, that number has dwindled to roughly 13,000. Fewer than 1,500 of these steelhead return to Hood Canal. Even in its current state, however, the Hood Canal habitat is thought to be sufficient to support much larger steelhead populations.
Current hatchery practices have contributed to the decline of wild steelhead and salmon by weakening the genetic fitness of these populations. Nevertheless, we still look to artificial propagation as one tool for recovering wild populations, especially when abundance is critically low. To address this paradox, Long Live the Kings partnered with NOAA and nine other federal, state, tribal, and non-profit entities to establish the Hood Canal Steelhead Project.
Trying Something New
The Hood Canal Steelhead Project was a first-of-its-kind, basin-wide study to assess the effects and effectiveness of hatchery supplementation when using innovative, low-impact wild steelhead rearing techniques. These techniques were pioneered by LLTK and NOAA on the Hamma Hamma River from 1998–2008, a period in which the abundance of steelhead tripled. The project applied these techniques to 3 major steelhead-bearing rivers in Hood Canal: the Duckabush, Dewatto, and South Fork Skokomish Rivers.
In traditional hatchery programs designed to support fisheries, adult steelhead are collected and spawned artificially, and their progeny are raised quickly so they can be released a year later.
But in our program, we waited to collect fertilized eggs from the redds (nests) of adults until after they spawn in the wild, allowing for natural selection. After the eggs hatch, some of the juvenile steelhead are reared at their natural growth rates for two years before being released back into their natal rivers as smolts ready to migrate to the marine environment. A portion of the steelhead eggs are also reared and released as 4- to 5-year-old mature adults so they can make an immediate contribution to the naturally spawning populations. To further reduce risks, hatchery intervention only occurred over two steelhead generations, or eight years (2007-2014).
In 2016, we began working with Tacoma Power and the Skokomish Tribe to expand the use of these techniques into the North Fork of the Skokomish River. We continue to raise the adult steelhead for this program at our Lilliwaup Conservation Hatchery and release ~300 mature adults each year.
Next Steps
The project wrapped up in 2022 , and while we have seen an increase in genetic diversity and a short term increase in the supplemented populations, poor ocean conditions over the last decade and bottlenecks causing high mortality are continuing to affect steelhead populations around the region.
Early on through tracking acoustic tagged hatchery and wild smolts through their outmigration, we learned that steelhead were dying at high rates at the Hood Canal Bridge. Concerned that these losses could undermine millions of dollars invested in steelhead and salmon recovery in Hood Canal, we initiated the Hood Canal Bridge Ecosystem Impact Assessment.