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Date Posted: 10:07:18 07/11/04 Sun
Author: Don Johnson
Subject: Forests That Fish Built

The Forests That Fish Built:
Salmon, Timber, and People in Willapa Bay
by Richard Manning

Willapa Bay

Willapa has so many blessings it would be hard to rank them, but toward the top would be the accidental blessing that was James Swan. He had a particular gift for observation and left a record of the people he found and befriended around Willapa, mostly Chinook Indians.

He called the place, an "Indians' paradise," not 19th century romanticism, but rather a hard-eyed assessment of the position of the Chinooks relative to neighboring tribes. By the time Swan met the Chinooks, their numbers had already been decimated by diseases introduced by whites, but those remaining, like their ancestors, were richer than their neighbors, well-fed, peaceful, and leisurely, largely because of overwhelming natural abundance. Central to this wealth was salmon-lavish runs of chinook, coho, and especially chum.

Salmon and oysters still figure in Willapa's well-being, but one can ramble the fishing villages like Chinook, Ilwaco, and South Bend, and wealth is not what comes to mind. Per capita income runs well below the average for Washington state, and the gap is widening. As of 1990, 17.2 percent of the families in the county that accounts for most of the watershed lived below the poverty line.

There has been a correspondingly decline in the wealth of the natural community. Salmon runs have been greatly diminished; most of the remaining runs are sustained by the artificial life support system of hatcheries. This is a reflection of another form of poverty. There is enough in this shared fate of human and natural communities to suggest a link between economic and natural wealth, as of course there must be in a place so closely coupled to the land.


Kathleen Sayce lives in a 19th century house near the peninsula village of Nahcotta, one built by Swedish pioneers and later renovated by her stepgrandfather and grandmother. Her book-lined living room's windows look onto Willapa Bay, which is to say her laboratory. Sayce is an unusual sort of biologist, one who picked a subject and a place before she picked a job. Her choice, however was biased in that she was raised in Nahcotta following her father's work in marine biology.

"I grew up thinking everybody had a saltwater lab in her background," she says.

Once she had finished her formal education, including a master's degree in botany, she came home, because "there was a lot of science that needed doing for the community." Her independent lab now does contract work for various groups and agencies.

In 1992, Sayce began performing an exercise called plankton tows, a simple way of sampling the amount of plankton present in the bay at any one time. Plankton are tiny plants and animals that are the foundation of all ocean life, the first and vast floor of the food chain. Phytoplankton are to the marine world what grass is to the prairie, the way the ocean harnesses the sun's power to support life. Oddly, no one had bothered to routinely census plankton before in Willapa Bay, which is a bit like a rancher who never inventoried his grass.

"Microbiology rules the world, but we know almost nothing about microbiology," says Sayce. Her five year's worth of data show that plankton levels are anything but stable. They fluctuate greatly both year to year and week to week during the summer peak of productivity. This is not an idle question for salmon production. Sayce began her work after being prodded by the example of Bruce Suzumoto, who studied plankton in Alaska's Prince William Sound. He found that by timing release of young pink salmon to coincide with zooplankton peaks, hatcheries greatly increased the survival of the pinks.

"You have ensured that no matter where they go in the estuary, they are going to get lunch," says Sayce.

The hatcheries of Willapa quit releasing chum salmon after 1989 (largely to stop competing with a few remaining natural runs, says Ed Maxwell, manager of the three hatcheries in the Willapa watershed, but chum are not considered a game fish, so have no constituency lobbying for them). Before that, the hatcheries made no effort to key chum releases to plankton production. Meanwhile, natural spawning by chum is a tiny fraction of historical numbers, leaving a big hole in the bay's food chain. This, however, is more than an issue for chum. Coho spend just more than a year in streams or in hatcheries before migrating to the bay, and at that point are looking for young chum for lunch. This is their link to plankton.

The food chain is missing links upstream as well. James Swan recorded a clue to the significance of this in the 1850s. Swan, on the Naselle with a group of Indians taking salmon, recorded among other details that "dog-toothed" or chum salmon were clearly the basis of the bay's wealth.

"From the last of August to the first of December these salmon come into the Bay in myriads, and every river, brook, creek, or little stream is completely crammed with them, and late in the fall the banks of the rivers are literally piled up in rows with the dead fish killed in attempting to go over the falls."

Swan also reports that he tired of catching these fish, and being a proper Eastern gentlemen, went upstream to catch trout on flies. He got skunked only to return to find the Indians reeling in boatloads of cutthroat trout using salmon eggs as bait.

"I found that flies were of no account among these wild fish. They had not learned the ways of a civilized state of society."

Swan's observations are key to Brian Fransen's work. Fransen, a Weyerhaeuser fish biologist, spent the 1995-96 winter following the decay of dead fish. On a stretch of stream, he anchored a pile of salmon carcasses obtained from a hatchery. These carcasses would normally be "piled up in rows" in the stream if natural spawning occurred, but are supplanted now by the hatchery program. Then he compared growth rates of salmon and trout fingerlings there to rates on a stream with no carcasses. Not only coho, but chinook, steelhead, and cutthroat trout all grew much faster on the carcass-laden stream. In the fall, young fish fed on carcasses and newly-laid eggs. Then, later in the year, the young fish showed a strong preference for eggs, especially in the winter and spring when other nutrient sources were dormant.

"You just look at the fish, and they're like little Goodyear blimps swimming around. They're full of eggs," he says. "We're finding when there is natural spawning going on that our stomach samples show a high degree of utilization of eggs and fry; we even found alevins (young fish) somehow being gotten out of the gravel by fish."

Fransen's work, while supporting other similar experiments in the Northwest, goes further in getting at the basic issue of the salmon's role in feeding the system. Carbon and nitrogen produced in the ocean have stable isotopes distinct from those same elements when they are derived from freshwater and land. Since carbon is the basis of life, this allows him to trace the ocean's productive power as it moves upstream.

He found that as much as 60 percent, and an average of 40 percent, of the carbon in tissue from young fish that had never seen the ocean was built of ocean-derived elements. But it does not stop with fish. A sample of salmonberries, a bush that grows at streamside, showed that 18 percent of their nitrogen came from the ocean, giving a new significance to the plant's name. They are literally built of dead salmon.

At certain times of the year, as many as twenty vertebrate species, including deer and elk, feed directly on salmon carcasses, cycling those nutrients further into the landscape. The natural community has an economy built on its members, all meshing together like a series of gears. Remove one gear, and the machine stops turning. It loses its power. All who rely on this productive power, including humans, become impoverished in the process.

Life flows both ways. The forest raises the salmon, but the salmon also raise the forest. This mutual dependence is the very definition of community, and in the end, the heart of the matter.

The fish leave the bay's web of streams no larger than a fat pencil and disappear into the ocean for three to six years. They return weighing up to sixty pounds, all biomass, the fat of the land, harvested from the sea. Salmon are traders, importers, bringing this mass of life back into the forest to feed it and, in the meantime, feed their next generation.

Or at least they did, until hatcheries taught these fish "the ways of a civilized state of society."


Richard Manning is the author of four books, including Grassland and Last Stand. The Forest That Fish Built, published by Ecotrust in 1996, is now out of print. The excerpt above has been adapted for use on the web.

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