Inside the Failure Of $8 Billion Effort To Save Prized Fish (subscription required)

For more than a quarter of a century, a federal agency in the Pacific Northwest has been running the world's most expensive wildlife restoration program, designed to save 13 species of endangered salmon and steelhead. The Bonneville Power Administration, responding to concern about dwindling fish populations, has spent more than $8 billion helping salmon travel from the mountain streams of their birth to the Pacific Ocean and back again, where they lay eggs for the next generation. Impeding their journey are several hydroelectric dams. The agency has little to show for its efforts. In any given year, only 1% to 3.5% of the fish complete the 1,800-mile round-trip fish trek, which begins 20 miles northeast of Lewiston, Idaho, and continues down the Snake and Columbia rivers. Fish scientists say the success rate should be at least double that. With the help of elaborate handling and tracking equipment, Bonneville is beginning to figure out what has gone wrong. Previously overlooked dangers abound. Some of the perils, including federally protected birds and sea lions -- as well as Canadian fishermen -- are beyond the agency's control...To further help the fish, Bonneville this year will spend almost $700 million. That includes the cost of spilling water over dams to create a cooler, more rapid-flowing stream, which is supposed to help salmon reach the sea. The water otherwise would be used to produce $356 million of electricity. Other fish-friendly improvements include special chutes for young fish and electronic transponders to track their journey...Salmon remain as long as three years in the ocean, where they mature and take on weight. Some are caught by Japanese and Russian fishing trawlers. Ocean conditions are the single biggest factor that determines whether the fish return to spawn or die at sea, according to NOAA. Food-filled cold currents are good for the fish, warm currents bad. Salmon that make it through Canadian waters and start their trip homeward have to run a gauntlet of new perils. On the return journey, the dams are a less of a concern, since all are equipped with fish ladders. Instead a population of voracious male sea lions waits to ambush the salmon below the first dam. The sea lions tear off and eat the egg sacs of returning females. The fattening fish oil in the eggs makes them more attractive to female sea lions during summer mating season. Commercial fishermen used to shoot the sea lions but that is now banned by the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act. As their population increases, some sea lions have learned to climb the fish ladder of the first dam...Above the Bonneville Dam -- 140 miles into the salmon's return journey -- the human threat looms large. There, Indian tribes and other fishermen are permitted to fish for salmon under not only the Endangered Species Act but also under various treaties and state laws. Indians have had the right to fish for salmon for more than a century in return for turning over their land to the federal government...The result of this legal loophole: The tastiest of the salmon species, the spring Chinook, is served up at Seattle restaurants that pay as much as $26 a pound....

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