An NPR member station
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Rescue Effort Launched for Snake River Sockeye

Bureau of Land Management of Oregon and Washington
Coho spawning on the Salmon River

It's been a tough year for salmon  in the Northwest, especially for Snake River sockeye salmon.

  

The distinctive fish are the longest-migrating, highest climbing sockeye anywhere. They drop down from about 6-thousand feet in central Idaho mountain streams to the Pacific Ocean, a perilous journey of 900 miles or so.

But this year, the Columbia River turned lethal for sockeye and other salmon species because of extreme heat.

The Northwest Power and Conservation Council found that more than a quarter million sockeye counted at the Bonneville Dam this summer vanished before they came to the McNary Dam, 25 miles upstream.

Alarmed fish biologists managed to find only 101 surviving Snake River sockeye, Half the fish trying to go upstream were netted and taken by tanker truck to Idaho's Eagle hatchery near Boise.

There, their eggs were combined with eggs from hatchery and wild fish.

Biologists say that advances in genetics have allowed hatchery managers to produce sockeye that are nearly identical to 16 wild fish - the only survivors of the species which returned from the ocean between 1991 and 1998.

Some of the brood stock will be reserved for hatchery spawning, and others will be reared and released to spawn in the wild.