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THE ASTORIAN • SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2021
Low steelhead numbers cause concern
By BRADLEY W. PARKS
Oregon Public Broadcasting
It’s an extremely tough
year to be a steelhead.
Fish are returning from the
Pacifi c Ocean back to their
freshwater spawning grounds
in some of the lowest num-
bers on record, prompting
widespread fi shery closures
and dire warnings of a race
toward extinction.
On the Columbia River,
just about 54,000 steelhead
have made it past Bonneville
Dam as of this week. The
count so far this year is less
than a third of what it’s been
the past 10 years on average.
“It seems like the bottom
has just dropped out on steel-
head,” said Laurie Weitkamp,
a research fi sheries biologist
with the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administra-
tion in Newport.
Columbia River steelhead
runs have been gradually
shrinking for the past decade,
so a small run this year comes
as little surprise in that regard.
The dismal state of this year’s
runs have exposed a critical
gap in our understanding of
steelhead and how they live.
Like salmon, steelhead
are anadromous. Steelhead
are born in freshwater eco-
systems and undertake a long
migration out to sea when
they’re about the size of a
grocery-store zucchini. They
navigate waters through des-
erts and forests, over moun-
tains and dams and out to sea.
After spending a few years
in the ocean growing big and
strong, steelhead return to
freshwater to spawn, and the
cycle starts again.
“There are many places
in the life cycle of steelhead
and salmon where things can
go wrong because they use
this incredible landscape and
waterscape throughout their
lives,” said Nate Mantua, a
research scientist for NOAA
in Santa Cruz, California.
Steelhead are not salmon;
they’re trout, but the two are
so similar that they’re often
spoken of in the same breath.
Pinpointing what’s going
wrong for steelhead requires
close examination of how the
fi sh are diff erent.
Thomas Buehrens is a
senior research scientist with
the Washington Department
of Fish and Wildlife and
Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife
Columbia River steelhead runs have plummeted.
said coho salmon, in particu-
lar, provide the best point of
comparison.
“In previous years, steel-
head and coho haven’t been
perfectly positively cor-
related,” Buehrens said, “but
good years for one have often
been good years for the other.”
Coho salmon and steel-
head both exit river systems
into the ocean around the
same time of year at around
the same size. They initially
face the same predators and
the same ocean conditions.
But then comes the key
diff erence: Coho, as well as
other salmon species, typi-
cally remain close to shore for
their marine life. Steelhead,
on the other hand, jet way out
into the deep blue, off the con-
tinental shelf.
Coho are having a rela-
tively good year, with returns
well above the 10-year aver-
age so far.
Dams in the Colum-
bia basin have severely dis-
rupted salmon and steelhead
habitat, which has been per-
haps the single-largest con-
tributor to the fi sh’s long-term
population decline. Overfi sh-
ing hasn’t helped either. But
Buehrens noted it’s diffi cult to
attribute rapid swings in run
size to either of those factors.
“We haven’t made any
major changes to those vari-
ables on the timescales that
we’ve seen this short-term
collapse of steelhead or the
short-term uptick in coho,” he
said.
That’s led many research-
ers, including Buehrens, to
think this year’s steelhead
struggles started somewhere
in the ocean.
“It implies the problem’s
not where (coho and steel-
head) are found together, but
it’s once the steelhead are
parting ways with the coho,”
he said.
The ocean life of steelhead
is clouded in mystery.
Conducting research that
far out in the ocean is hard and
labor-intensive. The ocean
is huge, and NOAA’s Laurie
Weitkamp said even fi nding
steelhead — let alone learn-
ing the more intricate details
of their marine life — is a tre-
mendous challenge.
“The whole steelhead
ocean ecology is a black box,”
she said. “We really do not
know anything.”
Steelhead could be hav-
ing a bad year because of
increased predation, insuf-
fi cient food, marine heat
waves, disease or any num-
ber of things. Weitkamp said
scientists can’t know for sure
until they fi gure out where
steelhead are.
Filling in the knowledge
gaps about steelhead can
help us understand how the
fi sh will respond to increas-
ingly volatile oceans, added
NOAA’s Nate Mantua.
Humans’ relentless burning of
fossil fuels has driven climate
change that’s contributing to
turbulent ocean conditions.
“We’re not going to be
able to turn that around any
time soon,” he said. “Not in
our lifetimes. We might put
the brakes on it and get on a
better track for what the future
holds, but these fi sh are going
to have to deal with a lot of
climate change, a lot of ocean
change.”
Mantua added that we
already have a clear picture
of what steelhead — and
salmon, for that matter —
need to survive and adapt in a
changing climate.
“They need that incredi-
ble diversity of life histories
that existed in the best pop-
ulations,” he said. “And we
know that that diversity of life
histories comes from really
diverse and connected habi-
tats … and that is sorely lack-
ing in the Columbia basin and
on the Washington side, the
coast and Puget Sound.”
Idaho expands health care rationing over virus
By REBECCA BOONE
Associated Press
BOISE — In another omi-
nous sign about the spread of
the delta variant, Idaho pub-
lic health leaders on Thursday
expanded health care rationing
statewide and individual hos-
pital systems in Alaska and
Montana have enacted similar
crisis standards amid a spike
in the number of unvaccinated
COVID-19 patients requiring
hospitalization.
The decisions marked an
escalation of the pandemic in
several Western states strug-
gling to convince skeptical
people to get vaccinated.
The Idaho Department
of Health and Welfare made
the announcement after St.
Luke’s Health System, Ida-
ho’s largest hospital net-
work, asked state health lead-
ers to allow “crisis standards
of care” because the increase
in COVID-19 patients has
exhausted the state’s medical
resources.
Idaho is one of the least
vaccinated U.S. states, with
only about 40% of its resi-
dents fully vaccinated against
COVID-19.
Crisis care standards mean
that scarce resources such
as ICU beds will be allotted
to the patients most likely to
survive. Other patients will
be treated with less eff ec-
tive methods or, in dire cases,
given pain relief and other
palliative care.
A hospital in Helena,
Montana, was also forced to
implement crisis standards of
care amid a surge in COVID-
19 patients. Critical care
resources are at maximum
capacity at St. Peter’s Health,
offi cials said Thursday.
And earlier this week
Providence Alaska Medical
Center, Alaska’s largest hos-
pital, also started prioritizing
resources.
Thursday’s move in Idaho
came a week after state offi -
cials started allowing health
care rationing at hospitals in
northern parts of the state.
“The situation is dire
— we don’t have enough
resources to adequately treat
the patients in our hospitals,
whether you are there for
COVID-19 or a heart attack
or because of a car accident,”
Idaho Department of Welfare
Director Dave Jeppesen said
in statement.
He urged people to get
vaccinated and wear masks
indoors and in crowded out-
door settings.
“Our hospitals and health
care systems need our help,”
Jeppesen said.
In Idaho’s St. Luke’s
Health System, patients are
being ventilated by hand —
with a nurse or doctor squeez-
ing a bag — for up to hours
at a time while hospital offi -
cials work to fi nd a bed with
a mechanical ventilator, said
chief medical offi cer Dr. Jim
Souza.
Others are being treated
with high-fl ow oxygen in
rooms without monitoring
systems, which means a doc-
tor or nurse might not hear an
alarm if the patient has a med-
ical emergency, he said. Some
patients are being treated for
sepsis — a life-threatening
infection — in emergency
department waiting rooms.
The normal standards of
care act as a net that allows
physicians to “carry out the
high wire acts that we do
every day, like open heart sur-
gery and bone marrow trans-
plants and neuro-interven-
tional stroke care,” Souza
said. “The net is gone, and
people will fall from the high
wire.”
One in every 201 Idaho
residents tested positive for
COVID-19 over the past
week, according to a tally by
Johns Hopkins University.
The mostly rural state ranks
12th in the U.S. for newly
confi rmed cases per capita.
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