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THE ASTORIAN • THuRSdAy, dEcEmbER 9, 2021
Coho salmon run breaks record
Steelhead numbers decline
By ALEX WITTWER
La Grande Observer
LOSTINE — A record-shattering number
of coho has made the long journey from their
home streams to the ocean and back.
Nearly 24,000 coho salmon have made
passage through the Lower Granite Dam on
the Snake River — the last dam between the
ocean and the Grande Ronde and Wallowa
rivers.
The prior record, set in 2014, saw 18,098
coho make their way past the Lower Gran-
ite Dam. In recent years, those numbers have
fluctuated between 1,449 and 8,178, with
2020 seeing just 7,797 coho return to the
Lower Granite Dam. The run this year marks
a more than 300% increase from the previ-
ous year.
Part of that return could be attributed to
the Nez Perce Tribe’s monumental work to
reintroduce coho to the Clearwater Basin in
the late 1990s, and recently in the Lostine
River in 2017. The tribe’s efforts returned
the salmon to the Lostine River after it was
bereft of the silvery fish for more than 40
years.
Becky Johnson, production division direc-
tor for the tribe’s Fishery Resource Manage-
ment, was there when nearly 500,000 smolt
were released into the Lostine River in 2017.
She described the release as “awesome.” The
results were almost immediate — the next
year, two coho were caught in the tribe’s
weir. Then, in 2021, 88 fish were caught in
the net.
“Salmon are a really amazing, resilient
creature, and if you just give them half a
chance, if you provide the right conditions,
the habitat and the clean water — I’ve been
impressed with what they can do,” Johnson
said.
To be sure, not every coho released into
the Lostine would return — predation and
harvesting take their toll, as do natural dis-
eases and parasites. Many more would return
to different streams to spawn, in a process
called straying. Still, the return is more than
welcomed, and their journey was a long one
in both length and time.
“We have a lot of work, we’ve only just
begun really, but I know from our experience
from over here in the Clearwater that it can
be really successful,” Johnson said.
Between 1980 and 1996, a total of only 89
coho salmon were counted at the Lower Gran-
ite Dam. Due to the reintroduction efforts,
the fish have returned to the Snake River in
higher numbers — though far removed from
their previous numbers, before the construc-
Coho salmon in Eagle Creek, a tributary of the Columbia River, during the fall of 2009.
tion of the eight dams between the Pacific
Ocean and the confluence between the Clear-
water River and the Snake River at Lewis-
ton, Idaho.
“I want to put it in context, though,” John-
son said, “because you know coho used to be
very abundant up here just like spring Chi-
nook and fall Chinook and steelhead. His-
torically, there were probably about 200,000
coho that returned here (to the Lostine River).
So we’re super excited — happy to see this
return of coho this year, but also want to con-
textualize that this is a mere fraction of what
it used to be like here.”
According to Johnson, the program to
reintroduce coho to the Lostine is based on
the tribe’s success in the Clearwater Basin.
The tribe reintroduced the salmon to the
Clearwater and Snake basin areas in the late
1990s. Before then, the fish were extinct in
the area.
The fish were bred from stock collected
at the Bonneville Dam. The next phase of
the Lostine coho program will use returned
fish as brood stock for the next generation of
salmon, hoping to make use of the fish that
made the long journey home.
“Those fish have survived,” Johnson said.
“They’ve not only migrated out as juveniles
for 600 or so miles over eight dams to the
ocean, but then they also turned around and
came back up those eight dams over those
600 miles, so we want to use those genetics,
you know that stamina from those adults for
the next generation. That’s what we did on the
Clearwater, and it’s been pretty successful.”
At the same time as the record-breaking
coho run, a smaller number of Chinook and
steelhead runs have made their way back
up the rivers. Steelhead trout, especially,
were returning in much lower numbers than
before.
Just 39,359 steelhead have made it past
the Lower Granite Dam this year, in contrast
to its 10-year average of 59,147, according to
the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The 2020
numbers for steelhead were 55,307, accord-
ing to the same data.
But the reason for the coho’s greater num-
bers have flummoxed experts.
“Coho are bonkers all the way up the
West Coast, and I don’t really know why to
be honest,” said Kyle Bratcher, a fish biolo-
gist with the Oregon Department of Fish and
Wildlife. “There’s something going on in the
ocean that’s changed that’s allowed them to
do well.”
The effects of the recent drought, as
well, could play a part in the years to come,
Bratcher said, though the effect will be
muted by regional environmental factors and
the current La Nina weather system.
It also will be some time before the impact
of the drought can be accurately gauged, as
the life cycle of Chinook, coho and steelhead
vary — steelhead and Chinook can take up to
six years to make a return, while coho’s much
shorter lifespan of two to three years means
that it can act as a bellwether for ocean and
weather conditions.
“We get a little bit lucky sometimes
because we have the Wallowa Moun-
tains here, we tend to still keep a little cool
water around even when it gets pretty bad,”
Bratcher said. “We didn’t see any of that this
year but where it’s going to hurt us — the
drought — is probably in the next two or
three years, especially in the return.”
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