235 



Fishing Impacts Play a Very Minor Role Compared to Hydropower Turbine Losses 



Snake river spring chinook are an ESA listed fish There has been no directed commercial 

 fishery on snake over spring chtnook since 1977. What few of these listed fish are caught in gillnets 

 are those few which are strays accidentally caught when fishing on the healthy runs of spring 

 Chinook which come fi-om the Willamette River (and to a lesser degree ft^om the Sandy, Cowlitz, 

 Kalama and Lewis rivers) — almost all of which are hatchery in origin Very few threatened or 

 endangered fish are taken in the small gillnet season still remaining in the Columbia, and every eflFort 

 has been made by the industry to avoid catching them even by accident Any activities which may 

 result in an "incidental take" of any of these protected fish are subjected to full scrutiny by several 

 agencies and cannot proceed if they are deemed to pose a significant risk to the continued existance 

 of the species 



Gillnets are used instead of other gear in the Columbia River, just as they are in the Fraser River 

 and Bristol Bay, Alaska and other healthy fisheries throughout the worid because they are the most 

 easy controlled and directed, and are the best gear to very precisely target the fish desired — and 

 therefore most completely avoid the fish that should not be caught This selective avoidance strategy 

 is highly successfiil In feet, fer more ESA listed fish are "harvested" by the dams than by fishermen 

 To give some real-life examples of the disproportionate impact of the dams versus harvesters, refer 

 to the following table: 



Chut compiled from o£Sci«l figures from Oregon Oept of Fish md Wildlife md Washington Dept. of FUhehes 



It is clear fi'om these figures that the principal problem for these fish is not gillnet harvesting, it is the 

 dams themselves Also keep in mind that even though there has been absohitely no directed fishery 

 on Snake River spring chinook in 1 7 years, there are now fewer of these fish than when all 



