Artifishal by Patagonia: The Sustainability Catch-22

Because of the building of the Baker River dam, wild salmon were unable

to make their natural reproductive migration upstream to lay eggs. This severely impacted their ability to maintain their population. The dam was eventually demolished to allow the salmon the ability to resume their natural breeding activities, but another issue has come along. Hatcheries are places where eggs collected from “wild” salmon are fertilized and reared until mature enough to then be released into the wild. Fishermen rely on this population to make a living. Indigenous groups rely on it for cultural purposes and sustenance. All people who eat salmon rely on its abundance to afford to eat it. Restaurants that sell salmon rely on abundance and subsequent affordable costs to sell the food and make a profit. Crustaceans and amphipods in the rivers rely on salmon to regulate their own populations and therefore regulate algae. Bears and other carnivores rely on salmon for nutrition, as well as the trees that their carcasses get carried to. It can certainly be argued that everyone is a stakeholder in the population of salmon, not just those who sell and consume it.

Intentions seem to be good across the board based on what was explicitly

said throughout the film, however it is questionable why these hatcheries still use their same methods when it is common knowledge that hatcheries cause more harm than good. Even from my own experience of butterfly rearing, I know that bypassing natural selection and allowing unfit members of a species to reach adulthood and reproduce weakens the overall gene pool. This is why I do not release any that I notice are smaller or weaker than others. I am not a person who rears monarch butterflies professionally, and even I was aware of this. Monarch butterflies in particular are also susceptible to a protozoan parasite called ophryocystis elektroscirrha, and if raised in captivity, people are encouraged to euthanize them and sterilize the rearing container. This was something I connected to the part of the film where the salmon were tracked, pulled out of the water and their eggs and microchip were taken. The reason is because the man explained that while it looked brutish, it is a process necessary to preserve the rest of the stock, and that eggs in the wild simply do not have the same survival rates in the wild. I understand where this mentality comes from because it is one that I am still overcoming. I feel awful when I cannot release a butterfly, just as I felt awful when I saw the salmon eggs being collected after a brutal catch. It is a complex issue, because if the rearing of hatchery eggs stops, then people lose their livelihoods and the salmon population will plummet because hatching creates a cycle of long-term dependency. The film reinforces many times that we as humans tend to think we can control nature and it is ours, but when we do stick our hands in it too much, it often leads to disaster, but if we don’t step in and do something, there is also the threat of disaster.

Willy Frank III, a Nisqually Tribal Council member, speaks on this issue

from a cultural perspective. He said that as much as he would appreciate having healthy numbers of wild salmon, he cannot accept the idea of the population not being externally supported because indigenous people have a strong cultural connection to the salmon. They hunted and gathered and preserved the population of salmon for generations to come and though he does not necessarily approve of hatcheries, he cannot accept the alternative, which is the risk of losing the population entirely. This is important to point out specifically because Frank’s motives are not for material gain and his stance is not firm one way or the other. This viewpoint captures in the essence of the issue’s complexity: it is common knowledge that the usage of hatcheries has a wide variety of issues, but there is seemingly no other option.

As far as “fixing” the issue, this will be extremely complex but would be attainable with

enough knowledge and cooperation. The involvement of children using the fish as nutrients is a small but impactful way of helping younger generations understand how the salmon are a keystone species and what their purpose is beyond a food product or important form of life in the streams. A Princeton Guide to Ecology (Levin et. al, 2012) says in section VI.10 that in terms of ecosystem health, one way to address genetic weakness of salmon is embracing genetic diversity and functional diversity. What this would mean is having different varieties of salmon inhabit different parts of the stream. Genetic diversity is crucial to creating beneficial genetic mutations that allow natural selection to happen. Different seasonal migration/reproduction times of each variety would allow for less species-species competition, more functional diversity, and allow time for the rehabilitation of species to take place while not sacrificing large numbers of population size. Hatcheries don’t necessarily need to be eradicated, but they do need to be more selective about which fish they release into the wild. Another solution could be only releasing hatchlings with specific beneficial genes or characteristics so as not to pollute the gene pool with unfit fish. This, in the short term, would reduce the number of fish because eventually the hatchery fish would be caught by people or predators or die off naturally and a healthy population size would then come from the fish already in the streams over a period of generations. To prevent overfishing of this temporarily reduced population, management techniques such as individual transferable quotas (ITQs) for fishermen and proper education and licensing for fish will help local agencies to make sure that these streams are not overfished and the salmon population is allowed to rebound by means of natural selection and break free of the dependence cycle.

Reference

Levin, S. A., Carpenter, S. R., Godfray, C. H. J., Kinzig, A. P., Loreau, M., Losos, J. B., Walker, B., & Wilcove, D. S. (2012). The princeton guide to ecology. Princeton University Press.