Conference on salmon health offers grim future

PORTLAND (AP) - The outlook is grim for wild salmon survival across much of the North Pacific, especially in Russia, biologists said Tuesday at the first international conference to assess salmon health on both sides of the Pacific.

Poaching, overfishing, loss of habitat from logging and mining, and the expected impact of increased oil and gas exploration have combined to threaten wild salmon across the vast but sparsely populated reaches of the Russian Far East, experts agreed.

"In many areas, you just don't have fish to catch," said Mikhail Skopets, a Russian Academy of Sciences biologist who has spent 25 years studying salmon in the area stretching from China to the Bering Sea.

In highly populated areas such as Japan and the Pacific Northwest, the greatest threat to wild stocks is loss of habitat from urbanization and dams.

Only Canada has maintained relatively healthy wild stocks, mostly along the many pristine rivers in remote areas of British Columbia, biologists said.

"Is there any way to break this pattern of one river after another with salmon stocks declining?" asked Guido Rahr, president of the Wild Salmon Center, which organized the conference for biologists from Canada, Japan, Russia and the United States.

"We have new things we can do in the new century that are different than the way we have been doing things," he said. "It's a very dire situation."

The scientists gathered to pool their data on salmon stocks across the region in order to better understand the changes in fish population.

The effort began in 1995 with a team of Oregon State University and Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife biologists who wanted to create a regional map of salmon migration and habitat.

A report on their findings is expected in March, along with an atlas detailing the range of different salmon species, said Xanthippe Augerot, conservation director for the Wild Salmon Center and a former OSU researcher.

Scientists estimate the Pacific Northwest supplies about 5 percent of the wild salmon harvest in the North Pacific, the smallest share. Canada accounts for about 10 percent of the catch, Alaska nearly 50 percent, and the Russian Far East and Japan provide about 35 percent.

Augerot noted that the health of wild stocks improves the farther north salmon range - and farther away from population centers. Conservation measures can be most effective in areas that have suffered the least damage, Augerot said.

"We need to protect the areas that are left," she said.

Japan is making a strong effort to restore some of its wild salmon runs, but the island nation is the most dependent on salmon hatcheries among the four countries participating in the conference, said Masahide Kaeriyama of Hokkaido Tokai University in Sapporo, Japan.

Japan has been a victim of its own success, relying on hatcheries for 99 percent of its salmon - mostly chum salmon, which have adapted well to the relatively short rivers in that country and return from the sea in huge numbers, crowding out wild fish, Kaeriyama said.

But Japanese fishery officials are trying to close inefficient or obsolete hatcheries in order to make room for repopulation of small wild stocks, he said.