Young Students Witness a Run of Embattled but Defiant Salmon
The fifth-graders shrieked as biologist Bob Tuck lifted a dead salmon from the Yakima River and brought it near the children.
“Ewwwwww! It’s oozing,” one girl squealed.
“The head’s falling off!” a boy exclaimed. “Oh! I touched it! It’s gross!”
Tuck grinned indulgently as the fifth-graders, from the state’s Apple Valley Elementary School, got past their fear of the fish and began wanting to touch it.
“You can tell by looking at this fish that she’s all spawned out. Her belly here would be all curved if there were eggs inside,” Tuck said, lifting the fish and pointing to the underside so the 100 or so fifth-graders and 10th-graders from Yakima’s West Valley High could see clearly.
The fish, about 2 feet long, had patches of decay mottling its scales. The tail was bright silver, the scales having been rubbed off as the salmon dug nests for its eggs in the riverbed gravel. It weighed about six or seven pounds, less than half what it weighed in the ocean.
The students were among about 2,000 Yakima Valley students who took field trips in late September and early October to see salmon spawn in the river near this town about 70 miles east of Seattle.
The educational program, which receives a grant from the Bonneville Power Administration, first teaches teachers about salmon and then brings the students here to study the salmon.
Tuck leaned on the bridge, looking over the shallow water at four female salmon preparing to spawn.
“Last week, there were two dozen salmon down there. We’re hitting the end of the spawning,” he said.
He then excitedly interrupted himself, pointing to a salmon below the bridge. “There she is! She’s digging! She’s digging! Right there! Do you see her? Right there!”
The exhausted fish was sporadically turning on one side and beating her tail rapidly on the gravel, hollowing out a shallow nest on the river bottom where she would lay her eggs. Her dark back made her difficult to see until she turned on her side, flashing her silvery scales.
Biologists estimate that as many as 900,000 salmon once spawned in the Yakima River before dams, dikes and other development destroyed most traditional spawning grounds in the Columbia River and its tributaries. The BPA markets hydroelectric power generated by the dams.
The Yakima’s wild coho and summer chinook runs are extinct. Fewer than 5,000 steelhead and fall chinook return annually to the Yakima Basin. Spring chinook numbers stand at about 3,500 this year, up from just 665 last year; about 60% spawn in the 15 miles between Cle Elum and Easton.
Tuck mourns the loss of the big salmon runs.
That’s why the independent consultant enjoys teaching schoolchildren about the salmon life cycle. He believes that by taking youngsters out of the classroom and showing them the salmon in the river, they’ll grow up with more respect for nature and the environment.
“You believe it more when you actually see it,” said Michelle Francis, 16. “It’s a lot different from watching a movie or reading a book. You get to touch it and feel it and smell it.”
Fifth-grader Adrea Lambert, 10, of Yakima was amazed by the salmon’s sharp teeth. “I never knew that the fish could bite,” she said.
High school biology teacher Keely Teske said she spent two weeks teaching her sophomores about the salmon cycle. Then they held a mock hearing, with students acting as landowners, environmentalists, rafters and others, and debated whether to build a dam.
“Four out of five of my classes voted not to dam,” Teske said. “The interesting thing was one class voted unanimously to build the dam.”
The salmon that spawned this fall were born from eggs laid in the fall of 1992. The eggs they laid will hatch around December into alevin, tiny fish about the length of a pin with bulbous yolk sacs attached to their bellies.
They’ll stay in the gravel until April or May, then emerge into the river as inch-long fry. “The timing is impeccable. They come out at the same time food becomes abundant,” Tuck said.
In the spring of 1998, the fish will travel 500 miles down the Yakima and Columbia rivers into the ocean.
For every 3,000 eggs, about 150 smolt will make it to the ocean, Tuck said. Many fall prey to predators, but each dam takes a toll as well, he said. There are four dams between Easton and the mouth of the Columbia.
“And from those 150 smolts that go out, we’re lucky to get two or three back,” he said.
The survivors will return in the spring of 2000, when their internal clocks tell them it’s time to spawn. They stop eating as soon as they hit fresh water, relying on their body fats and oils to sustain them, then spend about three months navigating the river system, arriving at their birthplaces in June or July.
Then, the salmon wait until their eggs ripen and the spawning cycle begins in mid-September. Each female salmon lays about 3,500 to 5,000 eggs, which are then fertilized by the males as they drift into the riverbed.
The fish die about 10 days later, their bodies sustaining eagles and other scavengers and finally, in decay, providing nutrients to tiny aquatic creatures and insects that their offspring will feed upon, and enriching soil along the banks.
