Fisheries service: Coho almost gone

Mike Dair/TWN Staff Writer
The Willits News
04/23/2010

Only about 400 wild Coho salmon returned to North Coast streams to spawn
in 2009, according to Maura Eagan Moody of the National Marine
Fisheries Service North-Central California Recovery Team. That figure
included the entire Central Coastal California region, which extends
from Aptos Creek in Santa Cruz County to the mouth of the Matole River
in northern Mendocino County.
Moody revealed the plight of the Coho at Tuesday's board of supervisors
meeting, during which National Marine Fisheries Service staff updated
the board on the status of the its recovery plan for Central California
Coast Coho Salmon.
The NMFS staff has been working on the Coho recovery plan for the past
four years. Currently a draft of the plan is available for public
comment. The comment period on the plan began March 17 and will end on
May 17.
Coho populations continue to plummet, although the fish has been a
listed species on the North Coast since 1996. It was listed as
"threatened" under the federal Endangered Species Act in October 1996,
after the population was estimated at 5,000. Years of understaffed and
underfunded federal efforts matched with underfunded, back-and-forth,
start-and-stop policy shifts by the State of California have spawned a
patchwork of poorly integrated regulations, and an underfunded array of
habitat recovery and restoration projects, as well as a steady barrage
of invitations to landowners to cooperate with the agencies to save the
salmon.
As the fishes'
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population continued to plummet, the
federal Coho listing was upgraded to the more restrictive "endangered"
status in 2005.
In March 2005, the Central Coast Coho salmon was also listed as
"endangered" under California's Endangered Species Act.
In spite of that listing, the state has yet to conduct a thorough
inventory of Coho salmon populations; nor has it established a statewide
monitoring system. Doing so would allow both the state and NMFS to
obtain better data on the plight of the fish, and would show any trends
in population recovery that might result from efforts to conserve the
species.
Moody told supervisors Coho populations have declined from an estimated
350,000 statewide in the 1940s to 100,000 in the 1960s and 30,000 in the
1980s.
Within the Central California Coast Evolutionarily Significant Unit
(ESU), populations have fallen from 56,000 in the 1960s to 18,000 in the
1980s to just 6,000 in the 1990s.
Currently, the number of returning spawners in the CCC ESU is listed as
"fewer than 500."
"We have moved from putting out a recovery plan, to putting out an
extinction prevention plan," Moody said. "Our aim now is to increase
species survival at all life stages of the fish."
Moody added she believes chances are good the plan will be successful.
"With the Central California Coast, we have three things that are going
for us," she said. "First, we have no large dams in our region.
Secondly, we are not proposing any wholesale changes to land and water
use. And lastly, we are building on the social and economic
infrastructure that already exists here in our coastal communities.
"We are building on the existing knowledge base already out there," she
said. "There are a lot of people out there who have done a lot, and who
know a lot. We are going to need their knowledge and their continued
involvement if we are going to bring the Coho back."
Supervisor John Pinches grew irritated during a Power Point synopsis of
Moody's presentation. One of the presentation's slides listed important
threats to salmonid habitats, such as "alteration of stream flow and
water temperatures," "alteration of channel morphology," and "passage
barriers." NMFS did not mention oceanic conditions.
"It's ironic to me there is not one mention of what's going on in the
ocean," Pinches said. "Why is there such a concerted effort not to talk
about these huge foreign boats that are coming into our waters and
taking all the fish? How can you ignore what I feel is the biggest
threat to Coho salmon?"

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