Wednesday November 20, 2024
Northwest Sportsman —
It’s not the final word on whether to list Olympic Peninsula steelhead under the Endangered Species Act, but a deep dive into the population has concluded that the fish are at “moderate risk of extinction,” a development that will be worrying for anglers and state and tribal managers, and one that comes with recovering numbers in recent years.
Late last week, the National Marine Fisheries Service released a federal status review team’s “pre-decisional working draft” that weighed a range of factors affecting winter- and summer-runs returning to rivers from the Copalis near Ocean Shores north and east to the Lyre near Port Angeles.
In making their conclusion, they pointed to declining abundance from the early 1990s to recent years, especially in the “big four” largest basins – the Hoh, Queets, Quinault and Quillayute; very low numbers of summer-run steelhead throughout the distinct population segment and winter-runs in Strait of Juan de Fuca tribs; as well as past harvest rates, use of outside stocks for hatchery programs, assumptions around spawn timing of hatchery and wild stocks; and the impacts and expected affects from climate change over the next half century.
The status review followed on NMFS’s February 2023 determination that an ESA listing might be warranted after the Wild Fish Conservancy of Duvall and The Conservation Angler of Edmonds filed a listing petition in summer 2022. It was also released about a week after WFC and TCA threatened to sue the feds for not issuing a 12-month finding earlier.