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Hatcheries and artificial salmon rearing have unwanted and problematic consequences for wild salmon populations, however, re-introduction of salmon to the Okanagan has been a success story, according to a local salmon expert.

Dr. Scott Hinch, local Summerland resident and Director of the Natural Resources Conservation Program at UBC, told iNFOnews.ca that the Okanagan Nation Alliance’s reintroduction of salmon into Okanagan rivers has been successful for a multitude of reasons.

Part of this success rests on the Indigenous leadership of the hatcheries, Hinch said.

“I've been to the hatchery. I've toured it and I know the people that work there. It's a very professionally run hatchery that produces large numbers of sockeye juveniles. The technological advancements that were involved in that hatchery was impressive compared to ones that were built in the 1970s and 80s,” he said.

This advanced technology has set the Alliance apart from the other hatcheries within BC that often garner negative attention.

Although it only contributes about 4% of all the hatchery fish to the North Pacific, British Columbia often gets lumped into discussions surrounding problematic salmon production, Hinch said.

“Despite having record high abundances of salmon in the Northeast Pacific, we are still seeing an effect of over-ambitious hatchery production coming from certain areas,” Hinch said.

One of the issues associated with salmon production is the behavioural traits of artificially raised fish.

Fish raised in hatcheries, even up to just the fry stage, are sometimes unable to avoid predators like wild salmon.

“If you've ever been to a hatchery, you'll see they feed the fish usually from the surface of the water, and the fish rise to take the food. That's not necessarily the way they would be doing it in the wild,” Hinch said. “That puts them at a higher risk of being eaten by a predator.”

On top of that, the fish that do survive often don’t make it back to the hatchery, and those that do are sometimes not accepted.

“In many cases, the hatcheries can't accept most of them. They have a limited capacity in what we would say their brood stock would be,” Hinch said.

The turned away fish then go off and spawn in the wild, causing inter-breeding problems with wild salmon.

“There's issues with that because you have fish that perhaps have a very unique... phenotype... in terms of how they act, how they behave, interbreeding with wild fish that have different ways of acting and behaving,” he said.

The resulting offspring are not as fit to survive in the wild, Hinch said. However, they are still competing with wild salmon for the same food source, meaning there's a whole lot less food to go around.

“We're increasing competition between wild fish and these hatchery fish that look like them and in some cases act a lot like them, but they're all competing for the same food,” Hinch said.

Large hatcheries in Alaska, where a lot of species must rear as juveniles, means that huge densities of fish are eking out an already dwindling food base.

“We are actually, ironically, at a point in history where we are at the highest abundance of salmon existing in the Northeast Pacific Ocean," Hinch said. "Which is somewhat counterintuitive when you hear all the issues associated locally with declining salmon runs and not many fish returning."

Despite these issues surrounding the industry, the Okanagan Nation Alliance has been spearheading a large hatchery program for Sockeye and Chinook salmon for the past several years.

These salmon must travel out of the ocean and up the Columbia River, heading northward to reach Okanagan waters. Historically, the development of dams and other constructions have caused major problems in salmon migration, almost destroying the local population. 

“In recent years (the Alliance) have seen really large returns of adult sockeye coming back into their territories,” Hinch said.

Considering the huge lack of salmon at the beginning of the process, Hinch said he sees this as a huge success. 

“We're starting at a very different point (than other hatcheries in BC), because there were very few if any sockeye getting through historically and now there are some getting through and significant numbers in some years recently,” he said.

This is even more of an achievement with sockeye, a notoriously difficult species to rear.

“Sockeye hatcheries are not easy to run,” Hinch said. “In fact in BC, generally speaking, we don't raise sockeye in hatcheries. There's only a couple small ones involved in that and it's just for conservation purposes. So this is a bit of a unique situation for BC to have a large sockeye hatchery.”

Sockeye depend on lakes for their juvenile rearing, Hinch said. The lakes of the Okanagan region provide an ideal geography for that.

Through the work of the Alliance, the Okanagan is gradually returning to the abundant numbers of salmon that populated local waters prior to the later twentieth century. 

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