Frustrated would-be salmon fisher suspected, but not yet caught
PORTLAND, Oregon––The Oregon State Marine Board, the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office, and the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration––as well as ANIMALS 24-7, many other concerned media, and countless outraged private citizens––are all hunting for an as yet unidentified individual who on April 3, 2023 was caught on video speeding in “a boat with fishing gear, weaving back and forth, appearing to try to intentionally hit dozens of sea lions swimming around Hayden Island off the Columbia River, as KGW reporter Daisy Caballero described it.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Older Hewescraft with Bimini top
“Whoever was driving it,” said Portland, Oregon resident Michael Brady, who took the cell phone video, “they went right through the pack of the first [group of sea lions] in the path of the boat, which had plenty of time and room to avoid them, “and it was kind of [like he] was trying to hit every pack and I just looked around me and everybody was devastated.”
The boat appears to have been an older model 18-or-19-foot Hewescraft with a Bimini top. The serial number is visible in the Brady video.
The responding law enforcement agencies told KGW they could not comment while the suspect remains at large.
ANIMALS 24-7 identified a possible suspect with both a history of violent crime and of trying to evade law enforcement by boat on the same stretch of the Columbia River. A man of the same name and approximate age commented favorably online about the evident attempt to run over sea lions.
A second boat tried to do the same thing
“While KGW was out getting video today in that same spot,” said Daisy Caballero, “we witnessed another boat targeting groups of sea lions bobbing in the water. They scrambled away when it was right on top of them.”
The KGW camera caught less identifiable details of that boat.
Commented Brady, identifying himself as a former commercial fisher, “I see both sides of it. I understand the frustration. I understand this year is tough on salmon. Lower coast, I think, is even closed [to salmon fishing] for some people. But I think this was a sport fisherman who had a little chip on his shoulder and it was terrible to witness as a community here.”
“Nature was here first”
While fishers view sea lions and seals as competition, Brady added, “I’m just going to say, nature was here first. That’s all.”
National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration rules allow fishers to use noise-making devices to haze away seals and sea lions from damaging nets and lines, and from stealing catches, while actively fishing.
Fishers can also circle sea lions and seals to chase them away. But the Marine Mammal Protection Act prohibits private individuals from either physically harming or trying to physically harm seals and sea lions.
Be that as it may, though, the boater in question was not actively fishing, and appeared to be returning to port after fishing, at a higher rate of speed than is advisable for the channel.
Alleged seal shootings continue
The Columbia River incident is only the latest of many apparently involving unsuccessful fishers taking out their frustrations on seals and sea lions off the Pacific Northwest coast and within the Salish Sea, including Puget Sound in the U.S. and the Georgia Strait in British Columbia.
As many as nine harbor seals may have been shot since January 24, 2023 near Whidbey Island, Washington, mostly in the Saratoga Passage near the mouth of Holmes Harbor.
All four of the carcasses examined by ANIMALS 24-7 were females, three of them pregnant, all of them exhibiting apparent gunshot entry and exit wounds.
Necropsies by members of the Orca Network and a National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration veterinarian have not found ammunition fragments, but deer slugs and high-velocity bullets could easily pass through a seal’s body without leaving fragments in the wounds.
Elephant seal?!
The Orca Network and a National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration veterinarian have suggested that the wounds might have been inflicted by an elephant seal known to have been in the area. However, the condition of the carcasses has not resembled the condition of harbor seals known to have been killed by elephant seals that ANIMALS 24-7 helped biologists to examine at Año Nuevo Coast Preserve in California in 1974 and 1976.
Fisher fury at seals and sea lions has meanwhile reached a fever pitch, fueled by social media and further stoked, wrote Seattle Times reporter Isabella Breda on February 3, 2023, by “A new report commissioned by the [Washington] state legislature and completed by the Washington Academy of the Sciences,” which “says seals and sea lions are likely impeding salmon recovery, and that the full impacts of predation on salmon may not be fully understood without lethal intervention.”
(See Advocate for shooting seals turns to pushing hunt for Sasquatch.)
“Shoot seals & sea lions to see what happens”
Translation: under intense political pressure from salmon fishers, including Native American tribes claiming treaty rights to more fish than they are catching, and from orca advocates including the Orca Network, who blame the decline of the Puget Sound orca population on salmon scarcity, the Washington Academy of the Sciences in gist recommended killing seals and sea lions to see what happens as regards salmon.
Paraphrasing SeaDoc Society science director Joseph Gaydos, Breda wrote that “While seal and sea lion populations are at the highest since counts began, salmon populations that help feed the mammals are down to 6% to 7% of their historical abundance.”
This statement overlooks that seal and sea lion population counts did not begin until decades after seals, sea lions, and other marine mammals native to the Pacific Northwest had already been hunted to the brink of regional extinction.
No mystery about where the salmon went
Archaeological evidence suggests that seals and sea lions are probably still much less numerous than in pre-settlement times, while other fish-eating marine mammals once common to the region, including orcas and Steller sea lions, remain seldom seen.
There is little mystery, meanwhile, about why salmon stocks have collapsed. Logging and agriculture contributed to silting many spawning streams in the late 19th century and subsequently. Dams blocked most of the rivers leading to the spawning streams in the mid-20th century. Commercial fishing and sport fishing meanwhile depleted the salmon population beyond any chance of rapid recovery.
Global warming more recently has markedly altered the entire marine ecology of the Pacific Northwest, so that salmon and steelhead, especially, are having to cope with an environment during the saltwater portion of their life cycle that is much different from the environment their ancestors knew.
“Dam the salmon, full speed ahead!”
Tearing down dams and restoring salmon spawning habitat costs money and jobs, though, and is therefore hugely politically unpopular, along with telling salmon fishers that the unlimited catches of a time when the Pacific Northwest human population was fraction of what it is now are gone, permanently, never to come back.
Seals and sea lions do not have a politically strong constituency, and are therefore easily blamed.
Gaydos, “while serving on [Washington] governor Jay Inslee’s Southern Resident Orca Taskforce,” Breda wrote, “suggested pulling together the latest research and taking another look at whether an informed decision can be made” about killing seals and sea lions in the name of helping salmon to help orcas.
“Under the taskforce’s recommendation, the legislature allocated $140,000 in funding for the project,” Breda recounted.
Marine Mammal Protection Act “was a success”
“Congress in 1972 passed the Marine Mammal Protection Act to help seals, sea lions and other animals rebound without the threat of human intervention,” Breda summarized.
“The law was a success, re-wilding the Salish Sea and coast of Washington with more whales, sea lions, harbor porpoises and seals than had been seen in a generation.
“From 1975 to 2015,” Breda recited, “the harbor seal population in the Salish Sea exploded from about 6,000 to around 50,000. California sea lions rose from 50,000 to somewhere around 300,000 on the west coast of the U.S., according to the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission.
“Populations of Steller’s sea lions living around Washington, Oregon and California steadily rose from an estimated 15,000 in 1982 to more than 43,000 in 2019.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Seal predation may not be limiting factor”
But as salmon continued to decline, Breda wrote, “In 2018, Congress approved a change in the Marine Mammal Protection Act to allow for sea lions to be killed in a portion of the Columbia River to reduce predation on salmon and steelhead. And in 2020, Congress approved an amendment to up the ante,” allowing fisheries managers to “permanently remove” 380 California and Steller sea lions in sensitive salmon migration corridors, particularly near the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River.
“Now similar actions are being considered in the Salish Sea, from Hood Canal to the San Juans, and even to the Washington coast,” Breda said.
However, the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife “has started to study specific sites where seal and sea lion predation has been reported,” Breda continued. “Preliminary data from a pilot project on the Stillaguamish River shows that seal predation may not be the biggest limiting factor for two populations of threatened Chinook — other predators and factors are at play.”
“Messing with the food web”
The Washington Academy of the Sciences suggested that “Selectively euthanizing seals and sea lions would likely pose little risk to their populations,” Breda noted. “But, unlike the salmon-eating southern resident orcas, Bigg’s orcas [the offshore transient population] prey on pinnipeds [seals and sea lions.] Messing with the food web could have broader implications.”
Overlooked in all of the current salmon-versus-pinniped discussion is that historical evidence suggests that the Pacific Northwest salmon population followed seals and sea lions in steep decline during the early 20th century.
Far from recovering from overfishing and habitat destruction, even with very little seal and sea lion predation, salmon took many decades to return to a semblance of their pre-settlement abundance.
Salmon are 2% or less of seal diet
Even when seals and sea lions rebounded, between the late 20th century and now, as Breda acknowledged, “A 2016 sampling of harbor seal poop around Puget Sound revealed the seals rely on Chinook salmon for about 1% or 2% of their diet.”
In other words, seals and sea lions neither inhibited the salmon comeback, nor relied on salmon to make their own comeback.
Explained Lesley Evans Ogden in https://www.biographic.com/scales-of-reference/, a 2021 review of salmon history on the Skeena River of British Columbia, “For at least 5,000 years before the first cannery opened on the Skeena in 1877, the Tsimshian, Gitxsan, and Wet’suwet’en First Nations harvested salmon here—especially sockeye.
Salmon population fell by 80% when seals & sea lions were scarcest
“It is difficult to know exactly how many sockeye swam up the Skeena in the years before European settlement,” Ogden acknowledged. “Relying on historical cannery records, fisheries scientists estimated that an average of 2.5 million sockeye came back each season in the first decade of the 20th century, with as many as 3.6 million in peak years. By 1919, however, sockeye averages had begun to drop—below a million per year in the 1920s, below 750,000 by the 1940s,” and “to just over half a million by 1955.”
That all occurred with the Pacific Northwest seal and sea lion populations near their all-time low ebb during the estimated 10,000 years or so of human habitation.
Ghost town tells the story
Similar data comes from Clifton, Oregon, a ghost town along the lower Columbia River consisting now only of pilings supporting what remains of a salmon cannery that operated from 1873 to 1906, by which time the salmon catch could no longer support a cannery.
There were few if any seals or sea lions in the Clifton Channel then, separating the Oregon shore from the Julia Butler Hansen National Wildlife Refuge on the Washington side.
Seals and sea lions today are a common sight, as are sport fishers making intensive use of the National Wildlife Refuge boat launch ramps.
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…”The Washington Academy of the Sciences suggested that “Selectively euthanizing seals and sea lions would likely pose little risk to their populations,” Breda noted. “But, unlike the salmon-eating southern resident orcas, Bigg’s orcas [the offshore transient population] prey on pinnipeds [seals and sea lions.] Messing with the food web could have broader implications.””
Could anyone say it better?
Sharing with gratitude…and all of the usual. Disgusted.
Outrageous! Such a devil!
It takes a lower form of life to use violence as an expression of frustration! Sea lions may be vying for the same food, but they’re part of the ecosystem and no one holds a claim to the salmon – or have we humans become so presumptuous as to assume we “own” everything in nature.
Absolutely and I pray they capture this vile man driving the boat. Those poor seals suffered a horrible death!
Logging and agriculture contributed to silting many spawning streams in the late 19th century and subsequently. Dams blocked most of the rivers leading to the spawning streams in the mid-20th century. Commercial fishing and sport fishing meanwhile depleted the salmon population beyond any chance of rapid recovery.
Global warming more recently has markedly altered the entire marine ecology of the Pacific Northwest, so that salmon and steelhead, especially, are having to cope with an environment during the saltwater portion of their life cycle that is much different from the environment their ancestors knew.
WHAT ABOUT OVERFISHING?? The fishing industry has killed more oceanic life with their nets and fishing lines. It is outrageous that a whale had fishing line all over it for nearly a year before dying from immense hunger and pain. I have zero empathy for theses fishers that are complaining about salmon. There are far more factors to consider than sea lions eating them all!! Complete stupidity. And I hope they find the guy driving that boat. He needs prison time and the biggest fine possible. Those poor sea lions. Some of them suffered horribly before dying.