Dams and Chinook

Dams and Chinook

David Sparks Ph.D.
David Sparks Ph.D.
As long as I have been doing Sportsman Spotlight, dams in the Snake River have been very controversial. Conservationists claim that dams have decimated salmon populations. New claims however suggest that dams have little impact on the survival rate of migrating Chinook. Scientists at British Columbia-based Kintama Research became suspicious of such claims. David Welch, president of Kintama says dams may not be the Chinook’s problem: “Here in British Columbia, where I live, the Fraser River is the second largest river on the West Coast of North America. There’s no dams and this year, unfortunately, we have had historic low returns. They’ve been grinding down for decades and they’re actually down now to the lowest return on record in over a hundred years. There’s still room for debate, but I think the needle has swung to most folks accepting that the majority of the problems, the survival problems are happening in the ocean.”

 

And, Welch says he’s never really argued against freshwater travel being the problem for Chinook, until recently: “You know, it makes sense and all of us that are conservationists, you know, hunters or fishermen, are taught that from an early age. But where the challenges come is that the big drivers are happening in the ocean not so much in fresh water. And, we may be getting some kind of distorted policy decisions because of that lack of appreciation of what’s happening in the ocean.”

 

The study found the survival rate is similar for salmon traveling through all West Coast rivers, with and without dams, to a common destination, the Pacific Ocean.

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