Ep. 829: Who Will Save the Columbia River's Salmon?

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Check it out at FirstLight.com. That's F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. Welcome to the Meet Eaters Podcast. We're going to dig into something of great importance that we touched on a bunch of times in the past. What in the world happened to and what is going on with the Columbia River and the same in runs? This is a story that's played out over centuries. Historically, the Columbia, I pulled this from you guys website. The guess I'm going to introduce in a minute. I had always read that historically the Columbia had runs, annual runs of 10 to 12 million salmon. I was reading today, it could have been some years as high as 16 million salmon ran the Columbia. Our good old boys, Lewis and Clark, who come up every time we try and describe something from the old timey days, describe salmon in the Columbia as being inconceivable the numbers. They had fish, salmon species running from March, October, steelhead in their all-winter, and then as we'll get into just a never-ending series of mistakes, intentional actions, accidental actions, have led it to be where it is just small fractions of that, small fractions of those numbers running up and down the river. We're going to talk with a couple of guests today who have been involved in salmon recovery on the Columbia River from an intertribal perspective. The Columbia River flowed through, can you guys, I'm leading up to my intro here if you guys, but can you remind me how many miles of river are in the Columbia basin? I was reading about it, say, but I can't remember the number. Well, the Columbia River itself, like we're just coming from Canada, is about 750 miles from the ocean, but half of the Columbia is north of Canada. And then you've got all of the major trips from the Yakima, the Wenachi, the Snake, the Wallamette, just all up and down the river. So you're looking at even now, in the high water years, a half a million CFS have flowed down by Barnville Dam. So half a million cubic feet per second of water flowing through there. And the folks were talking today about tribal efforts to recover fish. The tribes acknowledging that the states just aren't doing it at the speed they would like, and with the vision that they would like them to have, the feds aren't doing it at the speed they would like. And they're not pursuing the vision they would like them to pursue. So increasingly, the tribes, Native American tribes have been getting involved in this. And we're going to speak today with Doug Hatch, who's the Deputy Manager of the Fishery Science Department of the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission. And also Donella Miller is the Fishery Science Manager. And real quick, before we dig in too much, can you tell people what tribes are in the intertribal organization? Yeah, we're a consortia. We represent we're a technical arm of, of course, the Yakima Nation, which I'm a tribal member of. And also the confederated tribes and bands of the Umatila Indian Reservation, which my grandmother was from. And also, I'm also part you Matila as well, but also the the warm springs tribe in Oregon and the Nesperson Idaho. Okay, so we work with those four tribes on Columbia Basin issues and all four, you know, treaty tribes, we sign treaties with the government and 1855 to retain our, you know, hunting fishing and gathering rights. We're out our, our usual and accustomed areas. And that's really key because, you know, we seeded land to the, to the government in exchange for the, the set boundaries of the reservation and also to hunt fishing gather in perpetuity. And throughout our, you know, our natural areas. Yeah. And then that, and then that right is infringed on by the fact that then the people you sign the treaty with went ahead and destroyed the fishery. Yeah, and that's really key. The work that we do is, you know, those rights mean nothing if there's no fish to catch. And it isn't just a different nets and empty waters, it's actual catch fish. And there's language in the treaty that talks about our ability to maintain a modest living. And people can support themselves on, on it anymore are, are people unfortunately live in poverty up and down the Columbia River at treaty access sites that aren't meant to be lived in. And more or less boat ramps and, you know, they don't have water power, just a bathroom, but it's not what, not definitely not what we signed up for. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so we're going to tell that story. First I got to, I want to do. What, what day, when did the thing drop that we made in Texas? When is I, because I explained this all big time in Texas. I already dropped, but we're trying to hit it multiple times until the last, but yeah, the cognizant of fact it. So we record a show down in Texas, talked about taint and meat, skunks, nuts on a cat. In that, we explained it. There's, if you subscribe to the show, you're going to see, if you subscribe to the podcast, you're going to see some changes coming up in March 9. So starting, is it March 9? That's what's going to happen. Yeah, starting in March 9. You're going to start seeing every week, you're going to see two meat eater podcasts drops the regular Monday thing you subscribed to now stays the same. And that's like the interview show. So that would be like what we're doing right here right now. We're sitting around with fish tribal fisheries managers, having an interview with them about their area of expertise. That's like the interview portion of the show and that will always drop at the same time. In addition to that, there's going to be a weekly news show news and commentary drop as I explain. It's like Spencer's concept. We cover our news, your news and the news on the news show. Okay, three kinds of news. That will drop sometime during the week. It'll vary to when it comes out. The, the, the, the, the folks you know and love and the kind of material you know and love from radio live. That stuff will move on to this news show radio live won't be like a set. There won't be a live thing anymore and it won't occur at a set time anymore. It's just there'll be the news and commentary show, which comes out when it comes out. Stay tuned for all that. There'll be some new artwork. You'll know what happened because there'll be new artwork. That'll be the best way you'll know that happened. You'll be like, oh, a new artwork must be this thing. And please subscribe on YouTube and wherever you listen to podcasts that helps a lot. You know what word I learned today from you guys website. I'm going to do a trivia test. Don't act don't don't you know you guys know this but don't tell anybody. I'm going to trivia test these guys. So I was on the Columbia River in a tribal fish commission site today. What is the word? I'm like Spencer here. What is the word for a fish that spawns once and dies? It's in the same vein of like an adjermis catadermis. It's like that flavor of a word. But it's being you spawn once and die. I've heard this before. Is it like a scientific name? Die. I had to. No. Like die. How? I don't know. No. Sorry. You know, you being clever like die. No. Oh, I thought he was being clever too. I didn't think I first had anything he's being clever than I thought he's being clever. No. It's like it's that flavor. What is that Latin? I don't know. Is it Latin? Diadjermis catadermis. No, no, I should look that up. Monodromis. No. No. I know I've heard before about. I have never seen. I have never. I have never. I know there was a word. I've never. You ready? No, you guys got it. I never heard the damn word. Diadjermis comes from Greek roots. It's Greek. This is black Greek. Semmel Paris. So it's not like those words really at all. How do you spell that? When I say same flavor, I mean like a foreign language. Soundedable. You know, I guarantee it's free. Semmel Paris. I never heard that word. Is it. It might not ... You know, you got like a notes function on your phone. I keep words. corporate into my vocabulary on a little list. So though, but those are only the fish that die after they spawn. So not steel head, not it, not steel head, not ocean run cut. Semmel Paris, I should know this because I took Latin. It does have Latin roots. It combines semmel meaning one, so a single time and pario meaning to give birth or produce. Another thing I learned, we're going to go way back deep before we get to this. Nervally I learned on your site, the kind of blue in my mind is those dams, the dams on the Columbia system did a way to think about it when baby salmon, when smolts are coming back down the river. It's basically you lose seven to 15% of them die at each dam. Just incredible way to think about it. Yeah. Can you and how many are there? How many dams are? I know. Yeah. Well, there's four. Stay up to close your mic. There's four on the lower part of the main stem Columbia. And then you have the four in the lower snake river. And then there's also privately owned dams that are owned by the mid Columbia public utility districts. So there's four, right in the mid sea. So there's eight on the main stem Columbia before you get to Roosevelt, right? Or the grand Cooley. Yeah, Chief Joseph is is impassable and then grand Cooley is upstream of that. But yeah, if you're going to the headwaters of the Columbia, which would be the the Matau river, if you're up there, you're going to go over nine dams on the main stem. More if you go on up the tributaries, if you go up the snake, you're going over eight dams before you ever get to the salmon river or the Imnahar, any of those big rivers in the snake. Eight times 15. That's a big number. It's big. I mean, then we can do the math. More than 100. Let's say. And then there's mortality coming up stream to, you know, not just every adult, just because there's a fish ladder, you got to find that fish ladder and you got to negotiate it. You got to get over it. You got to avoid the predators. You've got a lot of stuff. Can you guys lay out a little bit like? What did the system look like before the first major impact? Before the first major negative impact came to it, which I guess was the cannery fish canneries. Like what the, like just try to help people visualize it. Like nowadays people think about salmon runs. And it's like, oh, aska, right? When they think about salmon runs, it's Bristol Bay, right? This was a bigger salmon run than those. The biggest salmon run. The biggest salmon run in the country, the biggest salmon run in the world was the Columbia. Yeah. You wouldn't have been that you had to get you wouldn't go to Alaska to see big salmon runs. You like the Columbia was the big salmon run. Like what did that look like? Like what fish were there? You know, to what quantity is it even possible? No, I know I'm scientifically measured it, but like what did it look like? It was, well, that's why Salilo falls, right? That's historically that was the major trading hub of the Pacific Northwest. You know, that people came from, you know, the, the Midwest to trade Buffalo and the ocean area to trade salt for salmon. We had, it was an even obsidian and toolmaking and things like that. It was inconceivable. And that's why the over exploitation happened because, you know, like you said, you read the old timey descriptions and they thought it was an inexhaustible resource that there was so much that people were able to gather what they needed. And that's what sustained life in our region for millennia. And it was just, you know, the, the trading and the tribal people living amongst the land is, you know, intrinsically a part of nature. And, you know, it's just a, it was a completely different way of thinking of, you know, like exploitation and things like that. But that, I don't know that that's why it seems so. That thought process was different from the way that we lived as, you know, taking and being a part of the system versus coming in, like how you said, the first major negative impact would have been the, the fish wheels and the, and even the sainting and things like that. And so those types of things happened. And then, you know, when you look at different, everything is always viewed as a resource. And how can that benefit man? And, you know, you hear about the salmon, but even further down the road, the salmon kind of became a problem to development in the, of the Columbia River system when they were looking at the, the placement of the hydro system. Because then they would have to incorporate fish ladders and deal with the salmon. It would have been easier if they did away from with all these natural runs. And we could retain salmon, but you retain it in the lower river below the dams. So they didn't have to do all these extra steps to, to maintain the stocks. That's why you see a lot of those hatcheries are below Bonneville dam. And it's unnatural, you know, Sprinkle, and coho and things like that. And those hatcheries still operate. But the tribes have been working to try to restore and bring them back into their natal areas throughout. And even to me, I think those numbers that you read are actually kind of low. The 10 to 16 million estimates. Because even today you could get, you know, there's been a lot of work in the Okanagan basin and Lake Okanagan in Canada where they've, we've seen Sakai returns up to 800,000 adult Sakai returning past Bonneville. And just to think that's just one lake. And there's all these other blocked areas and the tributaries. And if today we could get back almost a million of just one stock that, and a lot of that work was done, it was exhaustive estimate. And they looked at a lot of the canary records and what they were able to process. But I think there was more waste than there were fish actual process. Do you see those old pictures where, you know, you have salmon four feet deep and they're just working those canary lines? Well, when that obviously went bad every day, they just shove it out and bring in more. So there was, because you've never run out. Yeah. Yeah. That's the way it was viewed. And just going to go back to what you, what we were talking about, the 15% at every project. That's only the impact of what that damn itself causes like fish going through the turbines or, you know, like in the spillway they get disoriented and things like that. But that's not adding in all of the other factors that those dams create. The reservoirs and the slack water and the water quality and the predation and all those types of things. So the impacts are huge and you're right. You added up. There shouldn't be any more fish left. It's just amazing that that we still have fish coming back. Yeah. I should clarify that percentage. I was making a joke about 15 times eight. But the estimate is seven to 15%. So it's not all, you know, 15% is the high end of what the estimated loss is just direct and gram dam mortality. But that doesn't take into account that the slack water it creates, the habitat that creates for, for Pacificers predators to eat the fish. They get disoriented when they go through the dam birds pick them off. So all of that predation part isn't part of that dam mortality. That's just the direct mortality from the dam. And kind of quickly, I guess historically by the numbers, it was right now you've got a spring Chinook run, right? That's like 80 to 150,000 fish. And then it drops way off for the summers down to 10 or 20,000. And then in the fall, that's the big run now. And it's going to run a couple hundred thousand fish, you know, in our really good years, half million or something. And historically it was, it was a big curve. It was a big mountain that summer Chinook run that's so low, that was the peak. Oh. So Harvard, all of these impacts have split it into these three different groups of Chinook. And so you've got the fall Chinook, which seems like, which is the biggest now, but historically that was the tail, you know, it was those summer run. And so, and that's what they were going after. The early canaries and stuff was the most abundant, you know, group. And so they, they made those big impacts on that. And that was the June hogs that included all of the really big fish that went up, you know, into the lower snake river up in the upper Columbia. The, you know, the fish that were 130, 140 pounds. God, man, that's a big fish. Yeah, we catch those like eight, 10 pounders and in Southeast. Like, yeah, they have 28, where we fished, they have be 28 inches. You're like, sweet, he's 28. And like you go into the bars, you know, you go into old bars, you know, and you always see these kings, you know, from whatever, yep, half century go. And you like, dude, are they, you know, are they there anymore? These 100 plus pound fish, but just like, there's not, and just fewer and fewer and fewer and fewer. Fewer and fewer, we do, we do sampling at Bonneville, damn. So we, we sample all of the fish runs coming through Bonneville. And we'll get a text from, from, from the text that are sampling. It's like, here's a really big one and a big one now is, you know, 60, 70 pounder. Those are pretty rare and used to not be even, you know, mere 35 years ago, when I started, it was, we'd get a lot more of those than we do now. So definitely the size of matured, you're the size of the adult fish has gone down. The largest I've caught was 63 pounds and that seemed like a monster. Well, that is a monster. How did you catch that? Guilnetti. Guilnetti. Yeah, in our fall fishery. But I had, I really had a aha moment back when, so I think I was 18 as a technician working in the Meta River. We're doing, um, sprinkles and expawning ground surveys and it was getting later in the season. And so there was this, uh, portion of the main stem that would float on the, on the Meta River and there's, it runs into a wall. There's a big pool and we floated our raft down and it was just, there was a group of probably about 30 big June hogs, summer, Chinook. They were huge. Of course you get the magnification of the water, but they were still huge and we just floated around and there and watched them. They were just holding up, waiting to head up to spawn. But it's just so amazing to see those things and you're talking about, um, how many miles inland also when I worked up in the Meta River. I think I looked at it. I looked on the map to see it was like 840 miles or. Well, they had come that far in this little bit of tributary to the Meta, where we were doing a spotting ground survey and I was like, just like, because we had to hike in and then walk down the creek is like, how did this fish even make it back here? It's amazing. And then we were walking down another section and there's portions that get dewatered in the fall. And we found a couple of sprinkles, look in this pocket by this boulder. And so my coworker, he takes off one side of his hip weighter and then we fill it with water and put that fish in there and we just ran it like a couple hundred yards. He was stranded. Yeah, because pulling out because irrigation draw. Oh, you ran it. So we ran it back to so he could reconnect with the river. It's like, you can't make it this far. It's not live. You got to. Man, really? Yeah. So the things you run into being out there, it's just that that's what really helps people's connection to understand and, you know, just thinking and. Realizing how much they've gone through to get back. Yeah. Welcome to meet eaters 12 and 26 presented by Maltry mobile and on X maps. 12 of meet eaters biggest and baddest hunts from the last year released throughout 2026. These are long form episodes. So you get more of what you love. The first one up is my baited bear hunting manitoba. If you've ever wondered what a baited bear hunt is like, you'll love this episode. My favorite part was watching a younger bear spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a tree. Check it out now on meet eaters YouTube channel and be on the lookout for more 12 and 26 in the coming months. Can you a little bit explain the process? Or I guess just the evolved thinking that that led to the creation of a tribal organization that would get involved in fisheries management? I know like in some notes, Chris had from pre interviews. She talked about that there was a growing frustration that the states and the feds weren't moving the way. weren't moving this the way you wanted to move. And if the goal was set in a way that that the tribes weren't comfortable with the goal, like say that basically the goal being let's save the fish from genetic extinction. Yeah. And and that wasn't that doesn't satisfy native peoples on the river. No, unfortunately, a lot of the fish are managed on ESA levels, right? That's holding things on the brink of extinction. And that's one of the issues with the ESA itself. Well, for one, it's not proactive. And two, they have protections when things get really bad to save them from extinction, but there's nothing in the act that's binding. It's recommendations towards recovery. There's no requirements to recover a species. So it's just the minimal amount possible that you could do to keep this from this species from going extinct. And you know, that that's not acceptable, you know, as a society, not just with tribes of allowing species to go extinct or, you know, we don't want museum relics that in the river that we look at, you know, we want to be able to enjoy the bounty and continue our way of life. And, you know, kind of getting what we signed up for in the treaties. And that's where the really, you know, sustainable, healthy and sustainable populations that were able to harvest. Because, you know, we've talked about treaty rights and our ability to harvest, but that's a shared right that we have with, you know, with the public, right? The treaties, there's been two, two big court cases that kind of led to the formation of our organization and really the formation of the tribes taking a leading role. First was USP Oregon. And that was really the tribes being established as a co-manager of the resource. So because it was a treaty right. So it's our, you know, we have the obligation to ensure that it persists for future generations. And then several years later, we had USP Washington that made the determination that the tribes were entitled to 50% of the harvestable run, not just 50% of the total, the 50% of the harvestable run. And so we have the, you know, that unfortunately, you know, I've heard others, you know, what I've learned is, unfortunately, we operate, operate in Gavold, the Gavold fish management. Because you talk about gravel to gravel, like, right, you're inclusive of the entire life cycle. But unfortunately, we work in Gavold, the Gavold because it's the court, really into court, really. Yeah. And that's, um, I saw that you have a show out that talks about the recent litigation on the hydro operations of the, on the Snake River Dam. And that's kind of been pulled in really kind of. Unfortunately, it became just a breach campaign, but it's, to us, it's a lot more than that because with our, with our culture, everything, the importance, everything has a purpose, a place and a purpose. And so we really have that holistic management aspect. And, you know, we don't really have the silos that a lot of the state and federal agencies work, work under that's why, you know, we have people that want to work for tribes that really care about, you know, the resource and things like that because everything that we do is so broad and, you know, like, I'm wearing the sturgeon hat and, you know, like, all species are important to us, not just the salmon, but sturgeon, lampre, even, you know, trout and bridge lip suckers and all of those things that are a part of nature. But, you know, we hold all of those things sacred as their first foods. And so that's the way we, what we bring to the table in our management aspect, because, you know, we're not about ESA level, we don't want museum real, real likes, we went healthy and sustainable. And we would love more than to have, work ourselves out of a job. That's what I've heard one of my other bosses say. But just, you know, the tools that we have to work with along the way, like, you know, hatchery production. I know there's a big, a lot of issues between hatchery versus wild. And the tribes do do a lot of supplementation hatchery production, but we try to bring in non-conventional methods. It's not just fish factories pumping out numbers. We're, you know, using, we have a genetics lab, a state of the art genetics lab that we have in cooperation with the University of Idaho. That's located in southern Idaho, in Hagerman. So we're kind of leading the way on the genetic side. And then also the way we implement our hatcheries is not just releasing them all directly from the hatchery, but taking them out to acclimation sites. So they could return to areas that have suitable spawning habitat and things like that. And as Doug mentioned, we do all of the monitoring at Bonneville Dam of all the stocks that are coming through. So we're able to take that information. And which also aids in harvest management. And just our work is so broad and diverse. We have ocean, you know, a estuary program that we've acquired about five years ago now. So we're really looking, you know, like I said, gravel to gravel and bringing in all aspects. And, you know, the tribes have, I'd say, were a lot less risk averse, I think, because we take that approach to to be careful to do things. It's like, we don't want to study things to death, you know, things get wrapped up in 10, 10 plus year studies before you could actually even do anything. It's like, and, you know, myself being the fish science manager that was kind of, I'd kind of thought twice about taking this job. It's like, I don't want to be just a research scientist, but the approach that the tribes have been taking is like applied research. You're taking actionable measures and measuring the success of those actions. And, you know, you use what's working and advance that. And, yeah, I think that's the biggest thing. And, you know, we've really grown a lot. Like I mentioned, those two court cases, USB Washington, USB Oregon, where, you know, the tribes sued the states over, over harvest and, you know, co-management and things like that. But we've came a lot, a long ways in even just recently. During that litigation on the Snake River, the hydro operations litigation and formed the six sovereigns. That's with our four tribes and the states of Washington and Oregon and come together. And that's how we entered into a stay in litigation. It was meant to be a 10-year stay with a set of commitments over the first five years than there was a check in. And then it could have rolled over to another five years. And we were just getting started rolling in that. And it was bringing commitments to the basin and also giving us a voice to look for appropriations. It's not like we weren't trying to upend energy prices or anything like that. It's just like, okay, can you pay the true cost of the cheap electricity that you're benefiting from? And it's not really grandma's electricity or the common person. It's corporate, right? It's industrial customers that have really the huge benefit of our cheap power in the region. And that's why like we're talking about fish and the Columbia basin, but really it's a global thing, right? Because of all of the industry that our region attracts because of the cheap power, like back in the 80s and whatnot, we had all of the big aluminum smelters where we have none of the natural resources to make aluminum, but they were all there because it was so cheap to process because of that cheap power. And then now we're seeing the new onslaught of that is data centers. We have data centers a lot. And water, that's the bad thing is like there's always extraction. And then we're already like operating in a deficit, but yet we're planning for a future that we don't even have the resources for. And that's why the tribes really bring that to the table of like who's looking out for the resource and what's best for the environment. And that's why we talk about salmon being a keystone species because it's good for everyone. What's good for the salmon is good for the environment and for the people and us looking out for that in that holistic manner. I got three observations I want to hit you with. One is you don't need to take the sun, but you know that people like to look at sort of singular things that had global impacts. And there's this argument that the reason we won World War II is because the dams on the Columbia system, because we could out, we could produce aircraft. We had enough power to smelth enough aluminum and we out aircraft the Germans. And so, you know, whether that's true or not, it always like sticks in my head like thinking about what a mistake those ultimately what a mistake those dams were. And I think about that question and it always like it's just a complication in there. We had on second observations, we had on RFK Jr. when he was running for president and he went and took over health human services under the Trump administration, but when he was he was on, he's talking about his career and litigate environmental litigation. And he said when you look at these big these big corporations and they think that they're these like free enterprise organizations, he says they never ever pay the cost. They don't acknowledge that they don't pay the cost. But in in may in producing that electricity or producing those metals, they never had to account to the American people of what they took from you to make those things. Like no one has ever billed them for the cost of an annual run of 12 million salmon. No one's paid that. You know, he's like, he's like they don't admit it, but they're subsidized. They're subsidized, but what they take from everybody in terms of fish or in terms of anything clean water. Like has anyone ever billed them for? Do you know what I mean? Is anyone build them for what the clean water should be worth? They'll never pay that shit. Yeah, we have mitigation goals of the impacts of the hydro system that have never been met 50, 60 years and they've never met them by millions. I think we're barely even at half of what we should have been getting 60 years ago. Imagine how much that would add up to what the tab is. The way that gets wiped clean is they're working toward interim goals. 50 years later, we're still just working towards interim goals. And even today, the interim goals that we're working towards towards restoration that we actually have the teeth to push on is five to eight million. And that was determined by the Northwest Power and Planning Council of that is the direct impacts of this hydro system is the five to eight million. And then that's when you then the other the other losses are due to like irrigation and the tributaries and other types of urbanization and things like that. So we're we'll never get fully get back what we had, but you know, I know we could do better because in a lot of that too is just people's resistance to change and you know, that's the way we've always done things and the status quo continues. And until they, I don't know, it's hard. And like you said, you will never get back. We don't play the truth cost for power. And a lot of this stuff is for export foreign companies that come in and exploit our resources and you still have communities that, you know, they were promised jobs, but that's only during the construction and what's ongoing is minimal. Like even with Google and the city of the Dallas, you know, they came in and updated their waste waste treatment plan. But then they built a data center and then two more data centers. And now they're overwhelming that infrastructure that they promised and they were taking groundwater. And so they have communities just south the town that are coming up with dry wells and things like that. And now they want to buy land in in the national forest to be able to create a reservoir to extract water. And then like Sam Altman and Elon Musk, they'll never they'll, you know, he'll emerge as the world's first trillionaire and there will never be a reckoning. There will never be a reckoning for the cost of what they did. Never. Yeah, it was funny. We applied for a grant from Google because they have this. They want to be green by 2030 or something. And then we have a Delta project where the click attack river comes into the Columbia that needs some major work. It's never had any maintenance. Like you could practically walk halfway across the Columbia because that sand bar is so big because you don't have the fresh it's that that flush it out. And that's one of our big issues that that were work on. It's predation hotspots and warm water and things like that. But we applied for that Google grant. It's just downstream just across the river. We didn't even make it past the pre-proposal phase. And when we asked why like why wouldn't this qualify as good merit and everything they gave us the AI response. It's generic. So you paid for your own response. I want to get into like one of the things that I want to talk about we want to talk about is like what can like what are things that can be done. You know, and I want to get into that like like sea lions and all that. But there's a thing I want there's a third thing I want to bring up. No one was I'm embarrassed to tell you this. But all these guys here can vouch me on this. It's like I was raising the Great Lakes. And I was raised to know that like the real villains in fisheries management it's always the natives. Because people can't reconcile. They're like they're like how could it be that they're conducting commercial fishing. You know, so they run like in the Great Lakes natives run fish traps for whitefish. Which white people don't I mean like generally speaking white people don't fish white fish. Generally some do but it's not like a top tier fish. People don't travel like to go there to fish white fish. People wants the non-native chef or like large miles of native fish all the salmon, introduce salmon. But you'll go and be like the reason you didn't catch anything today is because of natives right. And you'll hear it so much from guys in the Pacific Northwest where they'll be like you mentioned earlier you're having to kill that. They'll be like that's the problem with the fishery. And it's like but that's what you're raised to believe that because it's always like a blame game. And you look at but behalemate they fished here for 20,000, 10,000, 16,000 like thousands of years supported to people on the fishery. Then European culture like Euro American culture came in and destroyed the fishery. The things we did destroyed the fishery. But now you look and there's some native people catching some fish and that and that's who is like that's who's the blame. It's pervade. I don't even know if you realize how pervade of that thinking is. Because it's like they can't click like how could they be commercial fishing. When I can only keep one fish or I can't keep any fish but they can commercial fish. That's who killed all the fish. It's out there. That perspective is just out there. Yeah. I've lived it. You know like growing up fishing on the Columbia you do get a lot of hate. People come out and yell at you and things like that. We've been shot at at night in the dark we're out and I called the cops. The cops didn't even show up. You could see the muzzle flesh. It sounded like a 22 and we were like what the heck. We're good thing we were a ways from shore in that kind of like a bay area in the 911 operator. Well can you see what they're wearing? And I'm like no it's dark. I see a muzzle flash and can you let us know? And it's like we got down and I did drive out of there and another time I was remember there was a older gentleman. He followed us because you know we're tied off of the bank. It was two and a half hours. He stood on the shore and yelled in custatus. Like I called the cops like I think he might need to I don't want this guy to have a heart attack. Yeah. That's how it worked up. He was and you know like Chuck and Rock sat us and things like that. Because people can't picture the long history. They like they look through the dam. They look through the dam or pass the dam and they see you. And that's the problem. Do you know what I mean? They're like they can't picture what happened. Yeah. You know. Yeah. I guess we're so visible right? There's there's plenty of non-native guill� fisheries that are happening in the lower river and a lot in the ocean but it's just we're visible. And that's you know like if it wasn't for that little handful of fish everything would be better. It's like no dude. It wouldn't be better. You're not talking about the problem. You don't want to talk about the real problem. Yeah. You don't want to talk about the real problem. Yeah. The glass half full thing is I think it's awesome that people are starting to realize like you know the work that we do it benefits everybody. Not just the tribes. It's everybody. And so like I've been at places like a like a trade show or whatever and then you know somebody will come up look at my tag like I want to shake your hand you know they're you know part of the they're a fishing guide or something like that and they'll say we wouldn't have Sam and if it weren't for the Indians and you know people do see that connection. Yeah a little bit of that so they're you know we're starting to realize it and you know just the outreach and the partnerships that we have and that the benefits that we bring is for all and not just us. Yeah. So yeah. It's crazy. I mean we have commissioners that had spent time in federal prison for fishing exercising their right to their treaty reserved right to fish and they were arrested sentenced spent time in prison for for fishing. So it's it's a crazy deal. I'm from Idaho. I saw this the same thing you're talking about Steve with the salmon what happened in the salmon fisheries in the Columbia. But you know that led to those court decisions and then that formed you know out of that the tribal co-management that formed the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission in 1977 and so this the tribe started building staff from then and now we're like at 150 to 170 people at Critwick in Portland each of the four member tribes the the the Yakima warm spring jimitila and Nez Perce combined we have like 750 people working on fish recovery and I think that's where we get our the tribes get their power is that they're co-managers and they get that a singular focus on it's the fish commission right it's not the it's not the fish and irrigation commission it's not we don't have the things that the the states are you know they've got to look after all these other interests and this is singularly focused on on fishery coverage so we're not what we want to do will will provide more fish to our constituents are you know the the tribal fishermen that are out there exercising their tree right and they're entitled to half of that harvestable fish yeah and however they take them they they decide how they're going to take them in states decide how much they're going to split their 50% into sport fishing versus commercial fishing however they want to divide it and the tribes don't you know the party to that but they don't tell the states how they're going to allocate their fisheries and you know it kind of should go the same way for the tribes they're you know this is this is a big conservation effort and they run hatcheries uh what about 10 hatcheries that are run by the tribes to get the money for it and they don't catch all those fish I mean those fish are going out to the public yeah everybody's catching them from here to to the Gulf of Alaska you know and we're we're kind of the end users on some of that there's some stocks of fish like the click attack the majority of those are caught in in Alaska and by you know the the other ocean fisheries along the west coast and you know we have a pie chart and then it shows all of the take and the tribal harvest is just this little bitty sliver but that's the people putting them in and doing all the work to the habitat restoration because the work that we do goes beyond just fish and that's what you know like being in management now of like getting people to understand like the the things that we do like you know energy production is fish issues because of the hydro system and habitat restoration and even roads like we have our habitat staff that they've worked with the DOT to like move a move a highway and and you know putting in better fish passage and just you know reconnecting rivers which helps um you know floods and flood management flood risk and and then also especially in the face of climate change and how things are changing like you were just talking about the weather here you know we're seeing that we're you know potentially in our three years of drought and this year isn't isn't looking much better and so it we we have definitely have our work cut out for us and it goes a long ways and like Doug was saying about how the tribes choose to allocate the other thing that um our jobs are so great to me and why it means so much is on the the cultural side you know how much that that these things are natural resources in salmon we refer to ourselves as salmon people you know and it it's cultural preservation and that that's really what because I grew up in a traditional home with you know like my my mother and my grandparents and practicing our you know hunting fishing gathering and you know our our tribal religion and all of the things that go along with that all of our ceremonies are are centered around our natural resources around the salmon and and things like that and you know sadly we're losing that and then that's how you know people get led astray you know you have you know the effects of drugs and alcohol and stuff but if we really had those things that for us to be able to continue I think would be better off and well I know we would because you know living in those communities and it's it's like we're lost we're still lost because we were displaced by the construction of the dams on the river we weren't relocated or subsidized or anything it's just they came and spray painted on the on the houses like at Slylo Falls took inventory and that was it we've never we've never received our Columbia River housing and you know for the villages that were flooded it's just like your house is gone you have they painted the ones that were going to be underwater yeah just took inventory and then people have had no choice but to move to the reservation or drown yeah yeah yeah and it's funny even me realizing that now like you know I was born on the reservation and topenation I lived at my grandparents house but I was even as it just as an adult a couple of years ago I realized like that wasn't my grandpa's home my grandpa was born born and raised in at Slylo and he went to the war it's so funny like my my grandpa's older sister she used to tell us this story and even as a older lady she would cry about it still gets to me she she was born with cataracts so she was legally blind and so she couldn't help do all the the work so she took care of my grandpa and she said when they Slylo the government the military police everything they just pulled in with cattle trucks and they took the children by force and took them to a boarding school and she said people were beaten arrested and she said that she held on to him and was dragged across the ground crying no don't take him is just the baby and she she cried as an as an adult that she said if I could have just held him a little longer maybe they would have gave up and then he went on to fight the war yeah he was four years old taken to the boarding school in Warm Springs Oregon he didn't get to come home for two years and and that was only because they were moving them to the boarding school at Fort Simco which is on the Yakima reservation and then he was there through like elementary school and then he got shipped to Chamowah which is in Oregon that's a high school you know boarding school high school he graduated from there when he was 17 and then he enlisted in the Navy and fought in World War II you kidding me yeah and his home now sits underwater that's the home that he came back to from the war so yeah welcome to meet eaters 12 and 26 presented by mulch remobile and on X maps 12 of meet eaters biggest and baddest hunts from the last year released throughout 2026 these are long form episodes so you get more of what you love the first one up is my baited bear hunt in Manitoba if you've ever wondered what a baited bear hunt is like you'll love this episode my favorite part was watching a younger bear spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a tree check it out now on meet eaters youtube channel and be on the lookout for more 12 and 26 in the coming months you know when I was talking about the conflict between like white dudes fish and the perspective that native peoples are taken fish it's like everybody's fighting over crumbs in some regions everybody's fighting over crumbs and they don't even know what happened like if it's bread crumbs they don't know what happened to the loaf of bread there's you know I mean they're not that it's it's just gone and now they're just gonna like fight for crumbs and then one of the ways that that like fighting for crumbs and it's it's I guess it's important because once those crumbs are gone everything's gone you know to think about like in terms of fish right if they if we lose the fish if you lose all the memory of the fish and all the runs and all the historic areas it's less that you can build up someday when you get it back together but what turned me on to even want to talk to you guys this idea and and Heather my friend Heather do bill sent me some links about it was was like the the sea lion issue and I want to talk about that for a minute or have you guys explained the sea lion issue for a minute just to sort of demonstrate this idea of that to fix the problem is like impossible or seemingly impossible damn removal is so hard and so you got to look like well that's what would like there's these huge things that would occur and you could slowly rebuild the whole thing but in the meantime you got to like fight for crumbs and it's even gotten to what we're fighting for crumbs with with sea lions could can you talk about that that issue a bit like how sea lions play into this thing yeah sure so um sea lions were were heavily managed in the late 1800s and then from like 1915 or so to 1970 into Columbia there's a bounty on sea lions bounty and a sea lion hunter so that the Oregon Fish Commission hired a guy that would shoot sea lions and cut their ears off and then get paid by how many sea lions he took care of and that was specifically to protect the salmon room protect the salmon exactly so that was the management that went on and and in that era the early 70s when all of the environmental laws got passed you know you had the Environmental Protection Act the Clean Air Act Marine Man. Marine Mammal Protection Act is passed in 72 and marine mammals were in terrible shape I mean it was really necessary California sea lions were around 20 25,000 coast wide so it's managed as a single stock it it ranges from Baja California up to lower BC okay so that stock was 20 or 25,000 animals now there's close to 300,000 animals and it's at Karing capacity so the Marine Mammal Protection Act protected marine mammals if you were marine mammals you're a very effectively man yeah and super successful right yeah but what wasn't part of the all in you know you had sea otters whales all kind polar bears all kinds of things that are super depressed and there wasn't any thought put into management you know it's like we're gonna lose them we need to protect them and it worked really really well on on some populations like California sea lions I mean their way past recovered there at Karing capacity it's the classic S curve it's plateaued we're at at Karing capacity for sea lions coast wide is there is there any talk at D listing? oh they're not that well see it's different that some of them remain in the animal attack not yes exactly so if you're a marine mammal you're protected period we've talked about this there's no management provision at all yeah we've talked about this a bunch of times in different management things we're talking about this year today I can't remember what in what context but ways in which something gets so bad you can't picture it getting better and then you draft regulation like that like the wildhawares point out the wildhawares in Burrow protection act things get so bad you draft regulation because you can't picture the future ramifications and then you wind up laying you like damn man we should have thought of that yeah it's like it's like the sea otters up on POW well that have exploded people like well they'll never be abundant why even make a provision for abundance yeah I mean it's just hard to see over the horizon right I mean you see what's there and it's like it couldn't happen it gives you hope though for salmon right maybe maybe we can do this but then what happens good point man with the ballard locks up you know the the inlet or the outlet of Lake Washington in the in the 80s all the sudden sea lions started showing up at the ballard locks there in Herschel if you remember that there's these particular California sea lions started praying on this the steelhead run going into the ballard locks and like they figured it out they figured it out yeah and you've got this growing population they're expanding right to to different places where they where they really haven't been in years and years because there's no management and they they're decimating the the winter steelhead run in in Lake Washington well that triggered legislation then to finally amend the Remembrance Protection Act and and they finally got that done in 94 and it was section 120 that they put into the act so this was management it's only on sea lions and it's that they have to be individually identifiable they and they have to be shown to have a significant negative impact on listed salmon populations and if you can meet that criteria and you have a permit you can remove that sea lion so it was like we know this one's a bad egg we got to get rid of them right and how do you know how do you know what that sea lion is where you got to catch him and you got to put a brand on him and you got to have an observer there that sees him eating a fish then you got to get you then you got to trap him again and duthorizing you know and so it's very tough and that was the 120 was not successful at the ballard locks the the steelhead population unexcained before really before the legislation was passed. Mm-hmm, extinct. Yeah, they're gone. So then Bonneville down like that run of fishes could put. Yeah, yeah, it's gone and now there's actually a current problem another problem which is the Sakai run in Lake Washington and it's going down that same that same route. And the only thing to manage there is this section 120 so they would have to to get you know they'd have to submit an application to to National Marine Fish Research Service to get a permit through this 120. Yeah, and that's all to do with the ballard locks. That's not even the Columbia. That's not Columbia because in the Columbia system I don't know this is true. I was reading that sea lions take more fish than humans. Yeah. Where are they doing that? Because I mean they're not getting past dams. Right. So what happened in about 2000 we started seeing sea lions at Bonneville dam at the tail race of Bonneville dam and it was just a few. Now how far up the river is that? 145 miles. Wow, both sons of bitches swim that's our ocean. Yeah, and I've got all kinds of stories. We've track we've radio tracked them and they will they'll go back to Astoria and back upstream two or three times in a year it takes them just a couple of days. Are you serious? They are they're they're they're pretty remarkable animals. 140 miles up the river. Yeah, dude ain't a lick a soul. Yeah, no. No. Well then this problem once these animals saw hey this is this is the buffet right because you've got this concentration of fish at the tail race they're trying to find the sea ladder or the fish ladder entrances and so they're congregating you get a collection of fish and the sea lions find that and it's like this is great. They come back every year they bring their buddies they become habituated with it and they start taking out a you know a whole bunch of fish so then the core of engineers who runs the damn. Yeah, I got to back up on that because this is an unanswerable question. A sea lion like a sea lion goes way to hell up the river like a pioneer sea lion because we have the river he's like holy smokes this is the promised land right? And he goes back down at some point no one will know no one can answer this. How is it conveyed? Like how does it convey to another sea lion? I mean, like the brother like wherever Billy was he's like honey bees like honey bees have that deal honey bees have that deal when they come back and they have they have like a thing they do people call it a dance and they don't you know they don't perceive it as a dance I'm sure but honey bees come back and they they have a movement pattern that says I'm into it heavy duty pile and that way. Then it just be like a generation like it's like generational learning like your kid offspring yeah you bring it offspring yeah you bring your mate yeah no you bring your offspring yeah because your mate's like what are they doing I can film follow them yeah just like it's so hard to like imagine by the mechanism by which yeah you come back and then there's more but yeah like you just bring your offspring then some generations down the road everybody knows well that's the honey pot these these sea lions that go to Bonneville damn are like the biggest sea lions that that have been recorded so a California sea lion and it's only males so the biology is the female state they stay down in the rookies that are mainly in the in the channel islands the California so yeah Santa Barbara so that's where the females stay and they don't venture out of there they stay very close to those islands the the the males that are going 140 miles of the Columbia are breeding with females in the channel islands amazing huh yeah wow yeah so what it is is it's like me telling I found this really good hunting spot I'm gonna come and check it out with me you can't but you can't talk though but obviously they talk yeah so there's photos of them at the rookies like on Sam McGill Island where there's a male sea lion male sea lion and in all the sudden there's this gigantic male sea lion oh the brand on him he was at Bonneville really oh yeah we have animals that we had captured branded and then recaptured two months I think it was two months later a month and a half later and it gained 400 pounds whoa that's a lot of salmon yeah it's a lot of fish and they do have so this is the spring of the year Climber or California sea lions arrive at Bonneville early April and then by the end of May they leave and they go because then it's it's time to go to the breeding grounds so they leave the system and the stellar sea lions that are there now which is a newer story they also leave the system by the by the end of May and then the California sea lions show up back up the next the next April okay what are they what are they feeding on specifically when they get there that time of year at Bonneville spring Chinook okay yeah spring Chinook is the big that's the big one and a little bit of there's probably some steelhead around as well but it's primarily primarily spring Chinook they also eat sturgeon that lower the Columbia River the lower Columbia sturgeon population has really gone down and a lot of those would come up in a big congregating area would be the tail race of Bonneville and they just got decimated by sea lions so they don't know this is like a two-part question those sea lions don't have any impact on like non-native game fish that are in there now like walleye and smallmouth and then what kind of impact are the walleye and smallmouth bass having on salmon as well yeah so uh they're outproposonistic feeders right so whatever's the most abundant that's what they're going to eat and a sea lion that's at the ocean is going to have a really diverse diet and then further up river they go the more salmon centric they're they're diet is and when you get to Bonneville it's they're eating depending on time they're eating salmon steelhead primarily they're eating sturgeon now and then and then they're eating some lamprey as well and that's really it we we see a few other things you'll see sucker maybe an occasional walleye or whatever but do you guys view that like walleye and smallmouth as a big problem for salmoners it more like larger predators like sea lions walleye and smallmouth are a problem for sure and it's probably a bigger problem upstream of Bonneville and the reservoirs yeah you know the thing with the the sea lion issue that I hadn't really put the thought of before but I mean that's almost a that's almost a damn problem like the dam is creating the fishery for the sea lions yeah because it's creating a holding pen form where they can't get past right right and and like you brought up Lewis and Clark when they went through salilo they they talk about seen folka well they'd never seen a sea lion so they thought it was a seal that was what they called seals also they were okay they ran into them way up the hell so they ran into them there and they were there in October right late September early October at at salilo and they shot one but they weren't but they weren't able to collect it so they were trying to document it and stuff but so they had historically used the resource away yeah so our tribal members are certain that they came up there in the fishery they took care of the of the problem the sea lions didn't stay long as a competitor there through the archaeological stuff that they've done they do find sea lion bones but not in huge numbers so they probably had hunts that would go down to get sea lions occasionally or trade or something but there isn't it isn't like salmon bones that you just see everywhere so it wasn't a you know nowhere near as important as plus like salmon or something like the competition factor would when you've got 15 million salmon like there's room for the sea lions to take exactly yeah yeah yeah you say the Stellars are coming up there too they're coming from the north yeah so so as the plot thickens and the story goes on by the states of Oregon and Washington put in for this 120 permit to remove animals that Bonneville about the animal rights people love that shit yeah it was it was a challenge yeah and they got it they got to permit in08 and that was after documenting the presence of these animals for a long time and there how many animals are there how many fish are they eating how many days are they staying there all of that stuff all that information was necessary to get the permit as soon as they got the permit then uh stellar sea so they got to permit to remove California sea lions and then two years later Stellar sea lions are in bigger numbers at Bonneville than California sea lions and what had happened bigger out of a Stellars are gigantic Stellar male and again it's males only and they'll go they'll go at time can you for people who don't know the difference can you explain like where the Stellars are coming from and versus the California one yeah so California sea lions range from bridge Columbia to southern part of Baja and the rookies are primarily in Baja and along California and then you got a couple little places at California or along Oregon coast but that's it stellar sea lions are more northern so they will range down into California but they'll go up into British Columbia probably up into into Alaska and you have them oh it's all these left well we haven't broken to two stocks this is the eastern stock which is like the 144th latitude anything that's uh east of the 144th degree latitude is the eastern stock of stellar stellar sea lions and those are the ones that that we're getting at Bonneville to the west of that are the ones that are up in in uh southeast Alaska off the illusions and and and further up so those dudes aren't going all the way down to the Columbia no they're not and they're not in very good shape they're they're listed uh they're a listed species western stock the eastern stock that would beg the big one the eastern stock i was just think of that rock the eastern stock was listed as threatened and then were delisted by 2013 2012-2013 so that was why they you couldn't even if even if they'd have been showing up at Bonneville that would have been on the permit we never would the states never would have got to permit to remove them because they were listed now they're now they're unlisted and they are part of the removal program now i want to get to that program i got one that little technical question you mentioned earlier catching them and branding them yep can you explain that catching them how and branding them how yeah so the way we catch them is a trap that's a dock it's like a 16 by 16 square foot dock with chain link fence around a big chain link fence and then like a a gate that's on a guillotine type thing and you can hold it up with an electronic device to trigger so we can remotely drop that gate you wait for sea lines to get on that trap you bait them or just letting them haul out no no so they just haul out so they they want a place to rest and so you're looking for places for them to haul out and so that's the live trap that's part of the trail big ol have a heart is you got to you got to set these traps where they've been hauling out where you think you can get them to to use and then they get accustomed to it and they'll haul out and then you'll drop the drop the trap and then we have a barge with these transfer cages you go up against it against that trap open the doors run them into that transfer cage he's just pissed probably yeah how do they react when you walk up to him so stellar sea lines can be pretty ordinary they they don't yeah they don't take to it very well California sea lines are pretty pretty docile they will they'll move around you could get in there with a piece of plywood in front you could kind of hurt them but nobody would do that with a stellar sea lion right there they're big I mean it's a two thousand pound animal that's pissed in fact we're now we put these arrays so we we take these 16 by 16 traps we put three of them together a couple of times we had single traps and you'd get three or four or five stellar sea lines in there and then they'd start doing the WWF and they'd roll the trap over so yeah they're they're big any brand and them with a cattle brand yeah what's the brand so a letter up there at sea and then a number different locations they there's branding programs at different places the states use the state vorigin used to brand at a story so there's there's animals from there there's you know all these different places where studies have been done they have kind of a coding system where do you hit them on the hill right on the back okay trust the back huh how long do they live like are you seeing the same ones the year after year after year after right so adult these are these are mature adults that we see primarily we do see occasionally a few smaller sea lions now but they'll live they can live you know like in captivity they might live to be in their 20s but they'll probably in the wild maybe 15 good and how many like at peak spring Chinook run how many are in that dam or at the foot of that dam how many sea lions so from the observation program that the Corvian engineers does the highest observed consumption was 10,000 fish that they saw that they documented being eaten there in a tail race and what does that mean over how much time that's over the spring so that's April through mid mid-made a lake so those are 10,000 Chinook that's cherry pick and that's the top that's the top number but that were represented almost 5% of the spring Chinook run that was going over the dam okay so you're losing 5% to sea lions yeah well that's within this quarter of a mile that you can see from the face of the dam and do the observations national marine fishery service has done studies in the lower river where they put pit tags and so that's you know that's the way we track salmon in the Columbia units basically the same thing that's getting your dog to track them and there's a huge program in the Columbia where they these pit tags go over antennas that activates the antenna and records the number so they're all individually numbered so we know any salmon that we put a tag and we know by by individual and at all of the dam ladders like at Bonneville we get have pit tag detectors so when they cross the dam we know it so they captured these by Gilnetting in the lower river down by Astoria National Marine Fishery Service would capture these fish put pit tags in them with this a spring Chinook and then release those fish and also took genetic samples and with the genetic samples we could figure out what their origin was so you could subtract off any fish that were going to lower river tributaries also harvest is highly regulated and we know what the harvest estimates are for each week so subtract off harvest and then you have the number of fish that you tag that should go over Bonneville and in the biggest year which was 2015 the biggest loss 50% of the spring Chinook run was lost between Astoria and Bonneville and that's peer-reviewed publication 50% attributed to sea lions and so we had a 200,000 fish were eaten by sea lions 200,000 fish cross Bonneville that's the largest spring Chinook run we've seen in decades Welcome to Meet Eaters 12 and 26 presented by Mulchry Mobile and on XMaps 12 of Meet Eaters biggest and baddest hunts from the last year released throughout 2026 these are long form episodes so you get more of what you love the first one up is my baited bear hunt in Manitoba if you've ever wondered what a baited bear hunt is like you'll love this episode my favorite part was watching a younger bear spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a tree check it out now on Meet Eaters YouTube channel and be on the lookout for more 12 and 26 in the coming months going back to what Steve said how many sea lions are consuming 200,000 salmon yeah it's crazy it's ballpark I mean it's not that many right you know that are at Bonneville it's like I think at a couple of years we've maybe seen 200 a little over 200 individuals okay so it isn't huge and the animals that have been from the this group of branded animals there's a big haul outside at Astoria called the East Moring Basin and we'll cite animals there and then the ones that you'll see at Bonneville or at Willamette Falls another place where where they congregate similar situation with sea lions it's only about 7% of that branded population go that far up but that seven come back every year just like you're talking about they habituate those faithful is the same and man yeah once they've locked into it they come back and we'll see them multiple years three four five years but so the tribal rights because it seems like sometimes they can trump other laws and rules and regs but I'm guessing that doesn't work in this case to trump the marine protect man with production act yeah because of the act and that's what I've been talking about is like well do you guys don't have harvest rights on sea lions no because historically they didn't come back in those those numbers and they're not coming above bonn- well we have a few that come above Bonneville down that where where our guillNet fisheries are only above Bonneville down in the zone six fishing area and so we don't harvest them like the big numbers are the lower river and how you said their sea lions are a down problem well it goes beyond just the down problem when they're using that entire stretch of the lower river from Astoria one year Astoria what he was talking about that East Moring Basin I think there were was it 10,000 8,000 it was a right around 4,000 yeah at the East Moring Basin in the East Moring Basin it's not very big you know it went from the early 2000s there would be a couple hundred a year and they do counts every day on these and they'd haul out on the docks the East Moring Basin is not used anymore used to be commercial vessels there as well as recreational and it was taken over by sea lions basically well I think what I think what Yannis asking is like picture that like for instance I have more familiarity with regulatory structure in Alaska but there are cases where you have NOAA administered species you have like US and Fish Wildlife Service administered species whatever but you have like tribal harvest rights where like you know they can harvest they can harvest walrus they can harvest whale species right that things would be off to often as everybody else if you're if the inner tribal group on the Columbia like if you wanted to you wouldn't have the authority of just saying we're going to do sea lion control on our own because we're not beholden to we're not beholden to ESA or not beholden the marine mammal protection act like you don't have that ability that you don't have that legal ability just to take it into your own hands yeah we actually have no yakma has written their own resolution right which is a tribal law that the taking of sea lions to protect life and property and it was funny I actually ended up in that situation where I fish by the city of the dals there was an animal there was a boat basin right where people have house boats and whatnot well there was one that was actually living on a dock in there and those people were feeding it was there for a couple years right it wouldn't leave and it was I'd be running my nets and it would be swimming back and forth right next to me and you know they had passed that resolution and my supervisor at the time was like you could shoot it and I was like yeah that would be real good optics the Accommodation Fish Biologist and I don't want to end up in court for the next 10 years I didn't want to be the test case on it but in hindsight maybe I should have like you could have yeah I could have but that those types of things are happening but like I said the animals aren't up where we gill net they're down below so it would be hard for us to and we still have those laws in place but you know and a lot of it is just being good co-managers right we don't want to you know we want to work together with you don't want to go rogue and yeah yeah because there's so many other issues like we talk about death by a thousand cuts right this predation the sea lion is a huge impact but there's tons of other things that we work together on yeah so just pushing it you make too much smoke around the sea lion issue and you and you create like a bad optic situation it could impact you addressing all of the other issues that are making the problem and funding as well just because you get the permit doesn't mean that you're getting any funding that comes from appropriations and things like that is so this the program that we have like how Doug's explaining the trapping and it has to be chemically euthanized by a license veterinarian and things like that so it's really inefficient like because there's that's in the act right that it has to be chemically euthanized by a license veterinarian like it would be so much easier if you had it and you could just shoot it you know that's humane as well like rather than dragging them through all of that yeah like torture before leading them to their death and you know that it's really inefficient the the laws that are put upon us to be able to to do this work like we could be doing a lot more like darting you could dart to euthanize but then you have to be able to recover the animal as well so it's like you have no choice but to trap and you know like you said you see the same animals and as I was mentioning too like it's not just a down problem anymore that's why I brought up how many come to the mouth that Astoria there's thousands there but they're they're learning traits like when we have smelteruns returning when we have sizable smelteruns coming up and you know historically they were in the lower tributaries and a lot come back to the cowlitz river well the sea lions follow the smelto the cowlitz river and they'll be hundreds like 500 plus sea lions at the mouth of the cowlitz feeding on the smelts which are also threatened as well and there was a little narrow down on something that's small I don't know that and so they follow up the smelter they hang around there when the smelterun trickles off then they can move upstream like to the Lewis river and eat you know a juvenile salmonids leaving the system and then by then it's time to head up to Bonneville because you have sprinction up coming so they're exploiting that whole stretch of the lower river and the the removal program starts at the I-205 bridge up to McNairy Dam so it's really site specific we don't have the ability or the flexibility to address to these changing needs for one we don't have funding it's largely underfunded there's so much red tape and how you do things it's inefficient and we don't have the ability to react and take action where it's necessary like Doug said about that that steelhead population in ballard locks going extinct you know the same thing could happen with their soccer same thing could happen with ours and there's no hierarchy there's no act amongst the act about how the MMPA plays into the ESA and another whole can of worms is the migratory bird tree act right you have huge avian impacts of goals and things like that that are eating like up to 70% of juvenile steelhead leaving the system are you eating my goals yeah yeah goals karma ants yeah and then now we have pelicans too that are feeding on adult sake like I mentioned that year that we had the 800,000 returning past Bonneville the majority going to Lake Okanagan half of them died because that year there was also a heat dome warm lethal temperatures there were swimming zombies and pelicans just eating them like crazy we have pelicans that are resident in in the Columbia there it's like a couple thousand breeding pairs right it's it's a ton they don't leave the system anymore and you can't just go out and start doing control measures I know like it's quorum ants were de-listed at least some kind of they're all protected they're all protected under the migratory bird act yeah but they but there's places where they're all in the form rant like there's squishing and nastin shit you know yep true it takes so much to get that to that like you wouldn't even think the seagulls you see everywhere at dumps and at places eating french fries right how protected they are there's a rocks like by island in the mid-Columbia right it's called Miller Island and it's just the outcropping rocks where there's this goal colony that I think it was like they were attributed to eating mid-Columbia still had 31% of the juveniles outmigrating from that one colony and we're still working in that process like you have to do so much effort of non-lethal hazing where we're using like boom canons and the next year we used a falcon and then finally we're able to do some lethal take and able to oil like some eggs and things like that but when you do those things you're just playing whack-a-mole you're just moving sure it sort of sounds like yeah somewhere else so there's really are no ability to manage even on that and so yeah that river it flow with blood man if you just needed to get rid of everything it was eating but everything it was eating sick well actually thing is fish always kind of get the short straw when it comes like you can't be shooting birds that people like to watch your sea lines that people like to you know yeah so that's the the biggest thing there's no act amongst the acts there's no hierarchy how do we we have these species these fish that are on the brink of extinction and these sea lions that are exceeding carrying capacity that's why they're moving to find other food sources and like looking at the future with sea level rise and change and everything that was what Doug's been working on with Noah National Marine Fisheries Service as well looking at impacts to the juvenile out migration that's what he says they eat a lot more french fries than we ever imagined so are you guys involved in the I my I have a older brother he's in his early 80s he's been turning in as he fishes the Columbia every day in the summer he's been turning in you know he's been doing a lot of bionny hunting on northern on the pike menals right what's the story with that are you guys involved in that we're we're not peripherally but I mean Washington uh say to Washington is the one that that runs that program is that is that like productive is that just like tidily wings like is that you think it's just pissing in the wind or yeah yeah because when you have a bounty like that you have people exploiting it right and I think there was somebody that was growing some you know oh my god and some dudes are clearing a hundred thousand bucks a year on the bomb he's not yeah he's telling me recently he had a check for 70 some dollars covered his gas yeah it's just primarily a small mouth fisherman but he likes to make a little side yeah yeah northern pike menals yeah yeah and with that being actual native species just the you know the change in the reservoir system but I think we're getting a lot bigger issue on the predation from the warm water fish the bass and walleye all like there's more that's doing more damage in northern pike menals probably and then I got buddies like God bless them I got boys like to fish those like to fish small mouth there they're all up in arms about people pointing the finger at small mouth yeah that's what I get because it's like the the crumb fight dude the crumb fight is a complex crumb fight why would you want to get rid of this beautiful game fish yeah exactly and then you have these gigantic walleye that they're catching up there around humitilla area right and so it's attracting people to come there to catch these big walleye well a big walleye eats a lot of smooth yeah there's probably some group like walleye fisherman of the Columbia know it's like fighting to like preserve the walleye whatever you know up and down it is and that's a big issue like and then you have the fishing guides right they say well that's our that's our offseason from salmon it's like we're the salmon then you'd have a lot more salmon openings like they show those big walleye and they cut them open and there's like tons of small cinam in multiply that this guy I heard big walleye got you could have a combino you know what shows that mine frame is like totally different water system but you familiar here we have the yelts on park you know and yelts on lake hado at some point in time they put lake trout in there which is real detrimental to the cutthroats and so at one point they like made it that I think it was mandatory retention you know catch if you caught it you had to kill it I had a buddy he lived here in town years ago he would love that to grow up there in fish and I remember I was asking about it and he's like yeah I like to hit it but I'm conscious to not damage the resource because like people just get that's just how people's minds work you know you go out and you catch some big old small mouth and then it's just you know there's like a certain human adaptability I guess man like people maybe you get where you get where you get fatalistic or pessimistic or something and you get where we're not going to the same and things not going to get fixed and I love the fish and they're not going to fix that so I'm here for small mouth I'm here for walleye and that'll have to that'll do that'll do for me not much I see the hundred pound shinnok yeah sure but I'm just trying to get into the like you know I mean like that's probably without even thinking about that's where people arrive plus you're like you've created a recreational fishery that never existed before so people jump on it you know no do we know how and stop me if I'm gonna jump ahead too much but I got to get this question asked what's why can't we just get rid of all the dams is that no but it is damn related but do we know how now with all of our knowledge to do hydroelectric power and salmon simultaneously oh it is there it it's somehow yeah has someone figured out how to do it but we just don't have the funds to do it like is there a way to make these things not be part of the central you know system of the river where like the nature could still do its thing but offset from that you'd have hydroelectric power we keep it's it's ever changing goalposts right there's no limit or there's no oversight of carrying capacity it's always more like we could be we couldn't have there's room for salmon in the northwest you know in the environment with this amount of electricity and that spill right having spill keeping the river a river and not just you know the way they want to operate it for the grid stability is to turn it off and on like a like a battery like a light switch and which is unnatural you know like you have you know your peak loading and things like that for to support industry and and things like that so that that's what's really damaging you don't have the spill to flush out the the juvenile salmon because that's what we just spring run off mm-hmm okay and then even in the even in the summertime right it's like late spring when when fish are moving out like the the journey that used to take two weeks now takes two months and they've expended it's expended so many of their resources before they even get to the ocean that survival decreases and the same thing when adults are returning you have you know the the temperature of the the Columbia is warming earlier and earlier every year so that you know you have it's reaching 68 degrees like days earlier we have a chart that that I could share with you over time of when you're reaching these lethal temperatures and that's why we have dying sockeye now before it used to be seeing those getting up to the lethal temperatures in the fall but then you'd get fall rains that would cool it back down but you're not seeing that anymore so it's just a lot that's why the litigation has been there for so many years is because it's hydro operations is the huge factor in survival but is but is there like how have you measured the amount of electricity okay like take any particular dam and you measure how much what what are they measured as what what is the damn measured as it puts off blank megawatts okay yeah to the 90s point be like if you take a dam and it produces 100 megawatts on hotel 100 megawatts would you what an engineer now look and go like oh man nowadays I could give you 100 megawatts without all that or I could give you 100 megawatts with a much better fish passage system were we to start from scratch do you know what I mean like is there ways in which there's an engineering solution and I always say like the the the the they're constantly asking for more and more and more megawatts but if there weren't just theoretically if they were asking for more megawatts could you get it all in a way that wasn't so damaging to the fish now that we have all these technological advancements that have occurred since 1950 you know yeah it's that's tough to do so in all of them are different right wells dam which is one of the highest the highest passable dam on the Columbia has what they call a hydro combine so the spillway is it sits and then underneath it is the pinstocks for the powerhouse well there the attraction flow for the pins is all in one place and you can kind of direct your fish up into the spillway and get them over other places you've got the spillway a quarter of a mile away from where the powerhouse is some of them are are built at an L you know I mean they're every one of them is a different place because they had to be to put them in in those locations and so I think it would be like the complete tear down and rebuild so the infrastructure cost would be huge and unless unless nerf starts making turbines there isn't really a way to do it you know yeah so there's not like retro fitting and things it's just they built them and that's what they're better and better they're updating we just visited I'd toured John Day Dam recently which is I think the third largest power producer you have Grand Coulee Bonneville and then John Day and the size of the turbines are huge like you go in there like the dam doesn't look that big when you're driving but the width of it those turbines in there I think they're like 60 or 90 foot diameter like that's how big and they're like 30 feet tall like there's one that's needed repairs they had it lifted you could see it they've been doing repairs on it for 10 years and they were saying that that one's the next one scheduled to be updated with this newer turbine that they have at Bonneville and that's supposed to be you know more fish safe and water efficient because these are literally killed they're literally hitting fish and killing them yeah what um but that but just going on the scale is like I I had to physically see it to understand like my god these things are massive in the amount of money like they're scared that project scheduled to start and I think he said 2030 cost several billion dollars and take 20 years to complete so and that's fixed that's fixed in existing stuff. Welcome to meat eaters 12 and 26 presented by mulch tree mobile and on x maps 12 of meat eaters biggest and baddest hunts from the last year released throughout 2026 these are long form episodes so you get more of what you love the first one up is my baited bear hunt in Manitoba if you've ever wondered what a baited bear hunt is like you'll love this episode my favorite part was watching a younger bear spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a tree check it out now on meat eaters youtube channel and be on the look out for more 12 and 26 in the coming months there's like has to be these power companies are like have to be under some pressure to at least on the face of things show that they're doing things to to help these runs like what kind of partners are they to work with like is it just like do you feel like it's just lip service or is there like like a bona fide effort to help out or like what's the sit what's the relationship with these power companies well the the hardest thing is because it's not a power company it's the federal government right so they could more or less do what they want on the time scale that they want and how things get done with you know 10 years of studies and appropriations five years out and it's not even sufficient for today's dollar let alone in five years so the games are managed by the federal government yeah they're operating core of engineers and the the business and the marketing end of the power is a Bonneville power administration and that's 100% of business focused on money not looking at mitigation they have the Fish and Wildlife program like there's been years of like unanticipated revenues like they've made like millions and millions more than they anticipated okay so the Fish and Wildlife program is X amount they have all this unanticipated revenue there's a cap on how much goes to the Fish and Wildlife program the rest of it they go back to pay down their debt with the feds and they also give breaks they give money back to their industrial users like what what companies so they just kind of view you guys as like a fly buzzing in their ear yeah sad yeah yeah the solutions aren't new I mean basically it's running a river more like a natural river the more you could do that the better it is for Fish but you mean it's like even with the dams yeah even there's like even with the dams in place I guess that's kind of like I guess I'll jump to what would be sort of aversion of my last my last question would be you used to go we had Mike Simpson on and Idaho representative house representatives he came on and and he was at the time I don't think it went anywhere he was pitching a plan on a dam removal plan um which has so many facets around agricultural production shipping and all that and it came with this it came with this stipulation that were they to do this this removal project all the litigants all the environmental groups imagine tribes would agree to sort of this this like cease they would they would stop lawsuits for some period of time on on fisheries that dam still standing right um so like a sort of like broad ultimate question would be what are the odds that dams come out like if you had to crystal ball a century into the future do we have fewer dams then and the offshoot of the question is if is if no the dams will never it's not really the major dams will never go away then it's it's what could be done differently and you're kind of getting out I guess like you could the dams could still be there but there are other things that are plausible that could help yeah you got to run it as close to a natural river as you can it's priorities right if you prioritize fish passage higher than you do now it's prioritize for dam or for power production yeah right and so it's maximize or optimize power production and then whatever's left it's the crumbs whatever's left we could do what we can around the edges for fish but if you raise that and made the fish more important you know you can look at papers from the 50s they knew some of the solutions these aren't new but it's it's always been that the money is from the dams and the power production and that's that's run the whole system and it's all it all operates and revolves around that did they when they were conceptualizing those dams I've asked a lot of people this question I don't have ever got I got a great answer to it but like when they were pitching the dams the engineers right everybody's getting together on these dams did was did they realize do you think they knew do you think their discussions included um conversations about how catastrophic this would be for fish like did they they knew there was actually the the memos were discovered by OPB Oregon public broadcasting recently you did a Tony Shick did a series a Sam and Wars podcast but yeah he had the memos that talked about the kind of the cost benefit and analysis like I said the salmon became a problem because then they'd have to put in fish passage and they also labeled it as Indian problem we get rid of the salmon we we don't have to deal with the Indian problem on the mainstream river anymore so that was and all of those it was a choice even on the upper region but they were wide-eyed about it because they looked at building Bonneville without passage with or without and thankfully with and but you know you look up in Hills Canyon Hills Canyon dam there's no passage but there could be they could bore through the the mountain to for their their turbines you know to make the turbines more efficient but they couldn't provide passage so all of those things you visit them it's it's it was a choice and all based on cost and also looking at long-term maintenance and you talked about like will these be here forever no because there's there's lack of maintenance like Doug said like okay all the all the the money and the emphasis is put on power production and things get fixed really fast but when there's an issue with the passage thing or especially monitoring that's the first thing to get sliced off of the budget and and you were talking about you know litigation we had that stay in litigation which was going good we were just getting started and but in June 25 it was canceled terminated by the by the current administration so we lost all of that headway that we had made over those those couple years with the Biden administration so we're back to we still have the six sovereigns working together pushing to advance those efforts and looking for appropriations but we don't have the commitments from the the agencies of the federal government the Bureau of Reclamation Army Corps and everything like that to address these problems and you know when we started our advocacy we were talking about the billion dollar backlog the billion dollar backlog in in needs in the Columbia Basin well once we started writing it down on paper it actually came out to be like two billion dollars like a billion dollars in passage at the dams and then like another billion and hatchery maintenance because they built these hatcheries they're so outdated and never reach full production they have failing intakes crumbling raceways they're not efficient and so the things that we advocate for isn't just for us it's actually can you appropriate the money for you to fund yourself to do the things that you should be doing and then even you know looking at habitat restoration and you know the roads and culverts and irrigation intakes and everything we're just like out there looking for everybody to do the right thing of what we all should be doing for our environment and you know it's like a shared responsibility from all of us and like the combination they were we were involved with a dam removal project it didn't get as much media attention as like L. W.A. Dam but it's actually it was actually a bigger project and it took like 19 years for that dam removal and the only reason it got done it was because it was with the private company it was Pacific Corps and then it came down to the license for them to update the license they had to either provide passage or take it down and then they drug that out for five years the tribes Yakima and cryptic actually pitched in money together to fund the study the cost benefit analysis that showed that removal would be cheaper and then Pacific Corps finally breached it but it's like we have to hold their hand and walk them through everything and keep pushing all the time it's just more like pushing and paying to hold them accountable of things that they should be doing and funding things appropriately we could have these acts and permits and everything but unless we have the resources to enact them it's meaningless so I'm gonna go out on a limb on this one but I mean the way the Trump administration is playing out with their like conservation record I can't imagine there up any help on salmon issues it's got to be low priority to them it was actually the Trump administration that signed the permit for the the pinniped removal right during these firsts oh so really yeah but the thing that we get from congressional's and actually our our supervisor executive director actually just testified in congress last month on this pinniped issue and we're a republican witness because and we have our oh yeah I can see it be it that I was thinking of that being like an interesting trade off is what the administration is going to give you is probably greater latitude because like a like of a like of a general suspicion of some of these acts that were passed greater latitude for some things like removal of species was sort of just like generally less sympathy about river flows and things I would imagine yeah that's what we're after is that you know there's no management provision in the Rememorial Protection Act we'd like an amendment to add management provisions and so a way that you could analyze the problem and if it's river otters somewhere if it's California sea lions or sellers or whatever the problem is there would be a process you could go through to get some management in place and be able to do that the I guess I get quickly back to the to the sea lion thing what we talked about earlier was the the 120 removals and then there was an amendment that was passed in 2018 it was signed by Trump in his first administration that did recognize the co-management of the tribes so tribes our four tree tribes were able to be party two permits along with the states and then our tribes could delegate to crit fick to do that and we've been doing that since but it's you know red tape is a killer because that was passed in December of 2018 we immediately applied for a permit and our joint permit was finally issued in August of 20 so two years two years and then we start implementing it and then that provision and it's 120 F it allows area management so that was the above the 205 bridge if an animal's up there he's individually identifiable and he's having a significant negative impact so if you can collect that animal you can use nice it but it's very restrictive you can't go out and specifically you can't shoot them you have to trap chemically euthanized so there's still some burden to it but it isn't that the level that we used to do when it was individual sea lion management so it's a little better but it only applies to the Columbia so yeah on the on the question about the different administrations and I want to put you in a rough spot maybe maybe my assumption is wrong but like I just remember years ago I think the I came here for the first time Trump was running he was kind of using California he was like ridicule in the delta smell you know like why would you ever sacrifice anything for some little fish I think there's just like in that way like sort of a dismissiveness about some fisheries issues but I have you guys found that like have you gotten more done in during the Trump administrations and you do during the Biden administrations there's not that simple no it's not that simple a lot has to do with funding that's coming into the federal agencies the federal agencies now that we work with have been gutted right so there's less less people to do the same amount of work and with less money which which is a problem and so you felt the impact of like some of the cuts to land management agencies yeah in that and like but like a also a red tape reduction so less money and less red tape no it's still there it's just the process is just take longer now you know or you don't have somebody there to you don't have that human there to process this permit which we ran into last year on a tagging project like we couldn't access that area because there was no the person was doge that did wrote that permit for us I see and just things like that I think the around this predation thing is like the one crumb that we could actually get done during this time and because like I said we were a republican witness and resistance to change and we're mindful of you know ag and transportation and things like that but we're looking for responsible ways to do things there's beyond the status quo and you know there's a lot of interest in just protecting the dams so they're quick to point at sea lions they are a huge impact but that's not the only impact but if that's the only thing we could get right now then we need to maximize our effort and jump on that and get these things done now while we have the while we have the chance while the focus is on on that that that's a conservation gamble that just in the conservation movement at large that is a gamble that causes for people who like things simple that that's a gamble people have to live in that makes people uncomfortable especially people that want things to be very cut and dried good guy bad guy really simple but did an organization yourselves or any number of conservation organizations with a new administration comes in and you're like here's all the things we're not going to get but there's this you know and we could be friendly and try to get this one thing or we can dig in our heels and spend four years with nothing you know I mean and a lot of people want you just to dig in your heels and get nothing rather than look like you're cooperating you know and then it flips that then four years later it flips the other way around you're like you know killing sea lions is out yeah right but we might get some sympathy on this other issue you know it was it was really hard we're kind of a perfect storm we ran into was right we had that we've had this accords agreement since 2008 it's the Bonneville Fish Accords where was a 10 year agreement 2008 to 2018 where there was a set program we we said we won't sue you and you fund these programs and the benefit in that is we weren't having to justify and fight every year for funding for to do this or that we're really micromanaged even now today we're still really micromanaged as fish managers the expert micromanaged by the funding agencies of course because they control the purse strings and that's still a frustration for us but the accords gave us the ability to do non-ESA work and work on things like sturgeon and lamprey and and things like that kind of expand what we were doing and we made a lot of progress and since then we we never signed another long-term agreement we went through two three year extensions in 18 the and so we were just starting to negotiate that a new long-term agreement Bonneville rolled the dice on the election and they won we didn't get another agreement and they gave us another extension but in that and I mentioned the litigation on the hydro operations around ESA the ESA litigation and so we were in that state we were living good looking forward to a new another you know favorable administration and it flipped the opposite way we we lost that agreement it was terminated and then this Bonneville piece they have no the accords ended they have no written legal binding commitment to us except this really hard long process of you know the power council the Northwest Power Act their commitments to the Fish and Wildlife Program their responsibilities that's which is really tough the so the accord is ending and then there was money left over from that that was tied up in their years of red tape to build facilities or do certain projects well when the tribes signed to take the litigation back into court the state was ended okay let's re-initiate this litigation Bonneville viewed that as a negative action towards them and they said we don't owe you that money anymore you violated the of course it was 50 million dollars to the tribes that they're still our our tribes are having to go to DC to lobby to get that money back to like we have projects we've been working on for 15 years and they would have been 50 million bucks towards salmon mm-hmm not like for people to walk home and put their bank accounts no it was all earmarked for projects that we weren't able to get done on the ground because of their red tape no so I got a question about the clamace like the dams aren't coming down on the Columbia right at least not anytime soon but the you know a year or two ago when they took out the four dams on the climate it's like now seen as a success for salmon is like I know you guys are focused on the Columbia but is there like opportunities like the climate on other rivers besides the Columbia yeah that one I mentioned on the on the white salmon the one that we did with pacificor which is funny that was the same company that owned the clamace dams that removed them and it was a lot because of you know reservoir succession and things were so bad in that system they had no choice which we're seeing in the Columbia every year by a degradation of water quality sediment accumulation and things like that we're not we're not keeping up in the Columbia either and like like I mentioned that um the the dam on the little white salmon that was removed but it took 19 years to do that yeah they got the ones down on on the on the clamace pretty quick it seemed like no they were they were in the fight for decades as well you just don't hear about it until until like yeah they're taking them down yeah yeah and then always like I mentioned the only reason we got that dam removed is because of the licensing process that required fish fish passage was the same thing on the clamace they could have done fixes to maintain the dams but it was cheaper for them to take them out like how you were saying it's like things get costed out and it's never well it's not like yay we won they did the right thing it's like they did what was cheapest for the pocket yeah that that's always the tradeoff so I think how quickly do you see how quickly when it when a dam comes down like that like in the clamor through whatever how quickly do you see results in terms of fish passage the next year it was it was like that in in the white salmon when we removed that dam actually a few years ago I hosted the we had a 10 years returning salmon celebration there because they thought it would take like several years to rebuild but those fish have been coming back like you open the door they're they're gonna yeah they're saving that running the clameth this past fall I think yeah yeah so it was that very next year they're going up the places sweet yeah this is the place my grandma was talking about but yeah it's just when you when you reconnect you know have those openings then they're gonna find the resources and return to those those areas they find their niche yeah I see Doug has some pretty cool pictures of sea lions at S story I was and bring it out yeah I want to show you those I guess we don't have a great media for that but yeah oh we can share it with Bill and he can put them on the yeah yeah pretty good down he knows we're from 2015 when that kind of been the peak of the sea lion issue but they just like all the docs and the East Moring Basin and a story are completely covered with sea lions and they're yeah patrolling into water trying to find a spot to get out welcome to meet eaters 12 and 26 presented by mulch remobile and on x maps 12 of meet eaters biggest and baddest hunts from the last year released throughout 2026 these are long form episodes so you get more of what you love the first one up is my baited bear hunt in Manitoba if you've ever wondered what a baited bear hunt is like you'll love this episode my favorite part was watching a younger bear spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a tree check it out now on meet eaters youtube channel and be on the lookout for more 12 and 26 in the coming months I keep sort of asking this and I think brody has two respawn be clear on it in a century the big like in us in a hundred years the big Columbia dams will still be there it's hard to say because things are getting so bad now like you're starting to have um closures of parks and boat ramps and areas because of toxic algal blooms in the summer because of heat and I know right there in the tri cities there's been dogs that are dying people you know the dogs are running around in the water and so I think when it starts it's gonna start impacting people and those types of resources because of the degradation of water quality and we didn't do it for Sam and might do it for dogs oh yeah it starts very fast buddy in cattle the wrongs of bourbon nights dog and they're gonna be like this cannot stand yeah and then you know like when cattle end up in those toxic algal bloom situations it's like well if you would have just had this buffer from the stream to protect the nutrient loading in your creek then your cattle wouldn't have died but they're still up in arms about their cattle dying because so it could be like a broader like a broader litany of environmental degradations could bring up in the future more serious discussions about like doing something really radical yeah and that's the thing you know like I mentioned the six sovereigns and then we had that resilient Columbia basin agreement but our negotiating piece was the creation of the Columbia Basin Restoration Initiative that's an initiative that's created and vetted by the six sovereigns it's the tribes because our tribes we've had with cryptic we've had the Waikonishme Waikishwit you know for 20 years you know that set these these recovery plans and recovery goals well this was taking that to the next step and coming together with our co-manager it's our guiding North Star that we're still working towards and so that's what we're looking at today about you know habitat restoration in the mid-Columbia and also like I mentioned the it's cold water refusia the the through the migration corridor of the Columbia where you have the tributary mouths the deltas that are awful as sediment and you know have all the predation and water quality issues and things like that so we're able to like have this input of cold water to corral so that returning adults they have respite as they travel these hundreds of miles upstream and that's something that's doable today you know we just got a break through the red tape and get the funding to actually do it and that would be a huge benefit for salmon like we have all these recovery plans for the basins and you know habitat projects just waiting to be funded and then addressing these things you know predation I've been the squeaky wheel about predation over the the past few years like the pinnipid predation but also the avian predation and the picein the warm water predators but there's also invasives that are heavily impacting our river system and that's American Shad those were introduced in the 1800s and there was a very problematic I saw article from the Seattle Times on the Shad issue that they're just becoming accepted that was the title there's a new top fish in the Columbia and it doesn't mind the warm water where you have we've had years of 8 million Shad returning. Ro Shad yeah and so that's totally unnatural and that's that that feeds the predators when you know because their life cycle is opposite so when these warm water predators their the salmonis are out they're eating juvenile Shad and then you have all the pelicans that are feasting on on Shad and they're spawning in the mainstime so it's a huge nutrient load and so you have all this aquatic vegetation and algae growth because it's it's not meant to be there right you you have barren tributaries that don't get those marine nutrients but they're all piled in the the main stem and why the mainstimes green now and up and but due to oh go ahead broon one more um you hinted at how far these salmon will go earlier if those dams weren't there like what would be the terminal point for these these should look like how far would they go and where would they end up um I know like distance wise in the snake basin would be at twin falls because you have the the falls that was it's huge and then they went all the way up into the tributaries and the headwaters in in Canada you know that little piece of Montana where the kutni is and and um you know like you have the winachii the methal the the entiat and the yakima basin so all up into the cascades up in the Canada around the Montana how far it stretches Idaho and even Nevada right to yeah yeah it's incredible man yeah still had to go all the way up the the why he river there in the Nevada you'd get them up the salmon river uh up past Stanley uh almost to go lean a summit right at the headwaters the salmon which is like 40 miles north of sun valley so like twice as far as where you you were salmon yeah and and even like the other species like how I said we're you know a comprehensive and holistic in our salmon recovery efforts like lamprey I think you know we put you know their sacred food source to us and they were also medicinal you know like because they're so oily that that was your skin sav and your eardrops and stuff when you know before you could go to the drugstore and but the the benefit that they brought to the system and all of the nutrients in the forests and the animals and and you know like um forest habitat like they're lacking those marine driven nutrients to for the standing forests and then also like management I think back to I watched your your hunting show at Blue Mountain Blue Mountain Bulls and it was on fire right there was forest fire we're seeing that more and more its forest management practices but also you know like we don't have the same nutrients coming into the forest to grow but you know those that's the other side of the aspects we will touch all aspects of it and I think lamprey is a huge part of that Doug showed me a picture it's in the Bruno river that flows into Nevada it's they dewatered this this dam or whatever they're standing on the cement there's like thousands and thousands of lamprey and that's hundreds of miles from the ocean in this one little tributary imagine how many there were all throughout the basin um millions and millions and all of that's gone now and you there's a effect it's a ripple effect through the entire ecosystem and so us just to try to put all these building blocks back together to to create that better tomorrow because we can't restore the salmon back to barren streams even looking at you know benthic organisms and things like that so you know working with beavers and and and all of that stuff so we're coming at it from all angles and to bring it back to your simple paris fish see these fish died right they go up and they die and they brought all those nutrients it from the ocean back to the forest yeah and they get hauled out by bears and otters and everything else and brought in and so it's it the the whole thing has been cut off those forests have lost all of that nutrient input for a hundred years 150 years my brothers and fisheries biologist in Alaska and they've been tracking that by with marine isotopes so you have all these these like traceable elements yeah strontium is one that they you know came from the ocean yep and the way it got from the ocean into the mountains was on a fish right and then you look at how that stuff is used by vegetation and animals and it's like marine just a picture of like that fisher away of like wheel burrowing in nutrients into nutrient poor regions yeah yeah you pluck that out and it's like you're not fertilizing it anymore yeah I mean you get up like I said in that upper part of the salmon it's just granitic soil there's no nutrients to speak about there's ultra clear water it's gin clear but the nutrients aren't coming from what's running on it's used to get millions of pounds of natural fertilize exactly you know exactly and the other thing you were like you honestly were asking is there a way to operate the the hydro system and still have salmon but like I said the ever changing goal posts and maybe things that would help would be like you know bringing on renewables and also battery storage so you're not depending on the river to be your battery that you turn off and on but then there's impacts there's trade-offs and everything you do but that's where the tribes come in and advocate to do things in a responsible manner like all of our tribes have their own you know utilities we're looking at different types of energy production and that was part of the the agreement and the litigation was funding for energy projects you know administered by the tribes like the Yakmination they're working on a solar over irrigation project and also a dry pump storage project using rail rail road cars that you lift up and down the hill and they're working at pump storage at several places one is a really big issue for for our tribes and especially the Yakmination is the golden nail pump storage project it's they want to withdraw withdraw water from the Columbia build the reservoir upon the hill and then you know they just pump it in a loop you know they generate power when when they need it and then pump it back up off peak when it's cheap and then so you have all these the for one they're boring through the mountain and then they want to tap into the John Day power line system to export that power and then there's also a super fun site below from an abandoned aluminum smelter that's never been cleaned up and it's one of our sacred sites it's like a pushpum it's like the mother of all routes it's a place where we still go and gather and they just like okay yeah you move aside and we're gonna do this here now and it's literally drilling a 30-foot diameter tunnel through the mountain and you'll see that also all in the surrounding area of the the windmills the wind generation which like why does it have to be all on our on our you know native lands open lands like isn't there like low value agriculture that they could incorporate agrival takes and things like that it's always looking at which cheapest and easiest and that's like these public lands that they get a 30-year lease from and you know once they go in and alter it it's you know it's never the same and it impacts the the withdrawals from the the river for these things and even the solar has huge impacts to the water table because they need water to clean the solar panels so there's a huge water usage even with solar production so what we're saying is we're not against all of these things but like let's not be in a rush to do it and let's do things right and we can't put all of these burdens on the backs of the salmon and all the users who depend on them the tribal people and the community members because we're the ones that these resources are extracted and all the burdens placed on us and it all goes outside it's all international companies exporting power to California into these industrial users and data centers and things like that it's like again and again the same story so let's do things slow down do things better like yeah we can we need to do better fine renewables but let's do it right so not just which cheapest which cheapest today may not be in the long run because even if they maybe they they would have put more maintenance into the hydro system now we wouldn't be we wouldn't have these billion dollar backlogs and things like that so yeah man also what you guys are gonna tell me something's gonna put me on a good mood they got some success stories they could go over yeah well there's two there's like speaking of bogeymen like I feel like we grew up in the lamprey was the devil of all the devil that's not native right yeah I know but still you know like I've never heard of a good lamprey and here you guys are trying to like promote it so can we just touch on that a little bit yeah because when we grew up in Michigan it was like when you went to the hatchery we had a I can't remember the name of the hatchery now they're in Kalamazoo but like every year you'd go on a field trip there and like it would just be nothing but placards on the walls about how the lampry is just killing off everything like a system that a system that's like any any invasive species story it's a system that had an adapted with it and then all of a sudden ta-da here's a bunch of lampraise and like every non-native species story it just explodes at great expense to native fish and so then you hear like oh you know where they are from but in your neck of the woods they coaxist yeah and they're they have that relationship right they're parasitic but not lethal you can see sometimes you catch salmon it has a little round mark with the teeth that's what like trout yeah but in the great lake system they were killing that yeah because again it was a fish that wasn't had an adapted with the risk you know yeah so they do they are parasitic they but they don't kill their host like they drop off and they can swim and migrate and everything and then the benefit that they serve to the salmon is you know they're spawning in these tributaries as well and then they're breaking down all the the detritus and things like that so they're the filters and the cleaners of in the tributaries and and so yeah and these are pacific lamprey that we have those are sea lamprey in the great lakes okay and you know that's like you said that's an an invasive in the great lakes these are these are native fish and so where's the sea lamprey originally from east coast yeah and yeah and the thing what happened was sea lampraids couldn't get past Niagara Falls and so then when they got moved eventually like that was a natural barrier and so the upper systems never had an eventually in ship ballast or whatever lampraids got moved above a natural barrier and then and just decimated lake trout you know and they started all those different programs of poisoning spawning beds and it still goes on in fact what other like you're talking about like another another doge cut was there was a big doge cut around like all this work to try to get lamprey is under control in the great lake system and then they were axing the people that run the program now is when I was going on I pointed out like on the show I pointed out did um there's a little bit of a like you said like paying attention to what the ramifications are we've spent millions and millions and millions of dollars getting them under control and then you and then you go to save a couple bucks by ditching some dudes it you know and then all of a sudden the whole investment goes out the window you know because you're trying to save a couple dollars right yeah but that's different watershed different problems do people ever eat these non-acidic lampraids yeah yeah and actually I've I meant to bring some today but I didn't get to meet up with my with my friend that she had some that she had put away that um it was we we dried them you know you know you don't fresh get roast them and um they're really really rich it's I'd say it's acquired taste all I'll send some to you guys you can taste it some dried lampraid but yeah it's really oily fish and you know like that was highly sought after right you need those calories to they're in a scoffiae's cookbook one of the things that when I was doing uh scavengers guide to oak cuisine one of the things I bombed out on was getting lampraids but that was in the scoffiae's cookbooks like French French prep rate French lampraid preparation is it a bit like a mac like a regular eel right it's a eel it's like you could tell I'm looking at eel yeah and they're crazy just the biology of them is pretty crazy their carl aginist fish they're an ancient fish jolis they're 400 million years old I mean and they were here that long ago and when that was when you know the continents were all connected and they've been able to figure out how to survive until man put enough dams on the river that we you know they went down to critically low numbers in the Columbia probably down to 20,000 or so it's we've had lampray programs going for a while now it's tribes and it is coming back and we've got lampray that we've got coming back to Idaho and another higher tributaries they're really they're weak swimmers so getting over dams is a difficult thing there's been a lot of technology stuff to try and figure out how to get a move it's getting better like the Yukon Costco quim cold block river that's like an indigenous subsistence fishery still with lampraids yeah it was 50% at each mainstream project that you'd lose of adult lampray returning so that's why it was the tribes that took the initiative to start the lamprey trans location so collect that want to build down and then take them up to the tributaries and that's how we're starting to see fish returning so we want to do more of that and also installing passage for lamprey like a wedded wall you know for them to work their way up because they can't go up the fish ladders because there's you know perpendicular surfaces yeah so they're trying to swim up they they can't make it but they could go all the way up that wedded wall and so we're looking at adult passage at the dams trans location another hard thing is a lot of the juveniles get sucked out into irrigation because you know it's like a little worm in the the slats on a screen you know they would have to be outrageously small to to keep the lamprey out so they want to go through sprinkler systems and up in all the irrigation canals and whatnot and we do salvages when they shut down the canal we'll go in there and try to salvage as many of the juveniles and they're super complicated so the life history of them and so everything you learned about salmon doesn't really apply so it's it's trying to relearn all these things they don't hone like a salmon if you get it in a particular area they're going to come back to that spot to spawn and lamprey don't so it's well they don't have like sight fidelity they just go wherever they go they're like American heels like they're just distributed by currents yeah I was agree yeah there is some that come back and they do have a a pheromone that they give off and with there's juveniles there they'll come back to that location but it wasn't necessarily be where they were born so it's it's complicated to try and restore them and really it needs a broader coast-wide effort then if you need to improve it in a lot of streams not just you can't just do a stream like you do a salmon and expect that that homing is going to help you out and they'll come back isn't gonna happen and they're an adjermist but not the word I was saying earlier they're not similar paris they're an integral paris yeah they can repeat spawn although not that much and we don't know so much of it we just don't know about it because it hasn't been a sexy fish to study no right yeah well there's a lot going on with them now and what's crazy it's funny but it's not we're at the the dam right Bonneville dam where they have the fish viewing windows and that's where they count right back in the 90s the core actually used to have an air blast system those dam lamp ray getting in the way they would air blast them off oh really yeah it looked like a series of moss you know or they'd be attached to the window and it would obstruct the view to count salmon so they blast them off every 10 or 15 minutes and they push them down the ladder so you know my brother Danny who is a salmon biologist in Alaska he works on that stable isotope issues and a bunch other stuff a lot of like warm water issues and other things but impacts warm water one of his first I think his first paid fisheries gig was he was in wall of wall of Washington and he was paid to sit there looking off that window come fish this one is first paid gigs man yeah sit like living it's basically living inside the dam counting fish in the window and writing it down yeah welcome to meet eaters 12 and 26 presented by mulch remobile and on x maps 12 of meet eaters biggest and baddest hunts from the last year released throughout 2026 these are long form episodes so you get more of what you love the first one up is my baited bear hunt in manitoba if you've ever wondered what a baited bear hunt is like you'll love this episode my favorite part was watching a younger bear spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a tree check it out now on meet eaters youtube channel and be on the lookout for more 12 and 26 in the coming months well man feel like we could go on all day but we need to hit success stories for more success story we can conveniently give us some success stories uh well we can just read them off and have them give us the short version steel head reconditioning yeah so that's a thing I have been working on for 25 years uh along with a really good group of people but basically so steelhead are itteral paris they repeat spawners their rainbow trout so they can spawn they can spawn again they'll go up to whatever river they're in and then they spawn and they try to go back downstream and go back to the ocean and in a totally natural system the number of repeat spawners that you have in your population will range anywhere from you know five to six percent up to maybe 30 or 40 percent is kind of dependent on how close you are to the ocean closer to the ocean the higher you get of these repeat spawners through the hydro system they don't don't make it I mean it is definitely not set up for large fish to pass downstream and a lot of them will go through the bypasses the juvenile bypass system and there they get screened off and we collect those fish collect them at lower granite other places we take those fish then into a hatchery put them in in tanks we've got specialized fish culture or fish care and we'll feed them to where they survive and then they'll remiture and this has been concentrated on wild fish so this is a fish that successfully spawned there were no eggs in it when we collected them in the dam they go up we we've reconditioned them release them either that fall or some of them will skip and they won't spawn again till the following fall we'll hold them for 18 months keep feeding them we let them go downstream or where we had collected them and then they go back upstream and spawn and they skip their whole return to the ocean right so we circuited that yeah yeah so you've cut out whatever mortality happens out on the open ocean exactly our communications director he made a a little pamphlet and it shows like the steel head spa where he's kicked back no kid really yeah and so we'll take care of everything brother yeah and then when you're ready to go again we'll let you go and they home back to the same stream and we have how many fish can you actually do that well it's a it's a it's a safety net thing right I mean you got these low of number numbers of fish in certain populations and you can target it to those streams by having a weirder some way of collecting to that stream and especially in a place where you really word about them blanking out or you get bigger collections more generalized like lower granite has the whole snake river we release them though and the fish how many fish a hundred maybe or 150 we've been concentrate we've been doing it a research scale you know this is this is now yeah I'm not trying to dog yeah no I'm trying to sense now we're gearing up to do this as a production scale it's in this first tried project that a production scale that's cool but there's fish that go back to the Imnahah the upper salmon river the the grand drawn the clear water the sea sash everywhere this is but it'll like it's great it's wild fish and I know we're looking for positives it's great but it's like that is sort of like definite you know the term conservation dependent that is like like the poster child of conservation dependence right you know I mean we have the fish because we literally handle it and care for it you know yeah it's it's great but it but it we you know I don't want to be Debbie Downer it's great but it's like holy shit has it come to that do you know what I mean that's the problem is that wild stillhead recovery nothing's really worked yeah you do supplementation some things that have worked we've been able to pull off with salmon hasn't worked for steel head we get hatchery fish but getting more wild yeah all this conversation about how do you get these big ass fish out of the ocean with their spawning grounds and with steelhead it's like okay let's get these big ass fish out of the ocean up to their spawning grounds back to the ocean right yeah and you're like oh that's tricky yeah right they're not going back down yeah what about like snake river fall shanook and then sake and coho we've got those on the list for your success stories yeah so in about the early 90s snake river fall shanook were under a hundred fish at lower granite and niz perst tribe had a hatchery program for fall shanook and that stock has rebounded to where the peak was about 90,000 fish in the snake river I think it's hovering now around anywhere from 30 to 50,000 with some natural reproduction yeah yeah so you get some natural so the idea there is to to collect the fish and then out outplant those juveniles so that they'll return to the so there you're helping on you're helping them get back to the ocean yeah kind of that hatch it's integrated hatchery program so you're taking in wild fish as well as the hatchery fish trying to to maintain the genetic you know your genetic integrity and stuff and those are getting back home on their own fins I mean they're going back up to the later make it up on their own yeah there's fisheries now there wasn't a fall shanook when I was in college there wasn't fall shanook fisheries in the snake river there are how big is the fall shanook there on that river 25 20 25 pounds 20 to 30 and and its fisheries all the way down as well as off the coast oh yeah dude yeah do you catch those fish all the whole fish I'm everywhere what about Saka and coho it says you had some reintroductions yeah and that was a tribally led effort like how I had mentioned a lot of the the hatchery production being in the lower river which was a natural you're just feeding your your sport and commercial harvest and totally excluding the tribes and everybody inland so it was we started the coho reintroductions back in the 90s and taking juveniles from the lower river and taking them back into their tributaries like in the metao and the wanachi the yakima and that was highly successful and so that was replicated by the nesperch tribe and it was actually the state Idaho has a law against reintroduction programs and it was by by night that actually it's our tribal chairman now Gerald Lewis he he worked in fisheries for a number of years and it was back when he was in fisheries he drove the truck in the middle of the night of taking those coho up to the nesperch tribe so that they could reintroduce them because it was becoming legally it was illegally yeah so under threat of arrest by the state tribal land and because more because they don't want to then create like new esa issues for themselves yeah more responsibilities for maintaining and and all that type of thing so I don't know where you see like the level of cynicism dude is this unbelievable yeah so yeah like like don't put some there because then we'll be advocated like do something to allow them to live so that the co-huntering introductions were we're highly successful we brought we started out bringing in juveniles and would hold them in acclimation ponds for a month or so and then release them from there and then as they started returning then we started building things out into a full supplementation program where we're getting getting our own brood to spawn and all these generations and and then we're still incorporating some of the lower river like as needed but yeah it's almost becoming a self-sufficient program and but also you have the the anti-hatchery group but we're leading on the genetic side where we're incorporating you know trying to have that genetic diversity and we use stocks that were like similar to this area in distance and things like that but you know we're just being mindful of the work that we do so there wouldn't be there wouldn't be co-ho above Bonneville Dam if it wasn't for the efforts of the tribes and I was credit our senior most biologist Tom Scribner with Yakima and he hates that I I'd call him out all the time but that was his life's work he did years and years of advocacy and then also fighting with our state co-managers because they were against it because there was worries because you know cohort amor voracious eaters and they were worried about them eating the spring shanook it's like these things is co-existed for millions of years it's like we just need to get them back and they'll work out their areas and where they live and you know like it took us to mess them up let's help them recover and the same thing with the Sakai reintroduction you know we we're working with the Okanaganation Alliance in Canada collecting fish at Wanupum Dam which is just upstream of the snake river because the snake river Sakai are listed so that's what that has all the ESA restrictions and concerns so we're collecting above the snake and then so we're did reintroduction programs into the Yakima into Lake Clellum and we just completed a passage project at Lake Clellum because that was used as a irrigation reservoir you know it was checked up and so there was no passage and that's how that's how the Sakai were extroverted and the tributaries was from irrigation to the error reclamation you know these dams these diversions without passage no fish greens and dewatering events and things like that so you know the tribes have really been working together with BOR and the local irrigation districts to be able to to get fish like how can we work together the Yakima Basin integrated plan is a great success story of that they got this like 30 million dollar fish passage structure at Lake Clellum for juveniles to out migrate they'll still have to truck the adults over the dam but they could go up into the tributaries and spawn rear in the lake and have access to get out so that's been a huge success story and we've been talking working with the Nizpers tribe they want to do reintroductions into Lake Wallawa for Sakai as well oh wow yeah but that's really complicated because you know like with the ESA listings and what poor shape the the snake river Sakai are in so they're collecting at Bonneville Dam and they actually utilize our genetic technology they collect that Bonneville Dam and then they screen out and you know they could see you kid me you can screen out the ESA ones from the non yeah so like you we can move you body you got to stay put no kid yeah and I think that's one of the the big success stories too is collaboration I mean through the the six-overns stuff that that Denella was talking about with the other with states of Oregon Washington and the treaty tribes we work great with and at Bonneville Dam that's an integrated crew that we have with the C. Lion project it's got people from state of Idaho Oregon Washington and Critfic that we have the all working together it's under the same permit and it's all jointly done so from the dark times that you talked about earlier it's it's we're not all the way there but it's better it's looking it's a lot better than when I started it's improving and it gives you hope that I think you know it can get better yeah that and one of the things I appreciate about the conversations I've always looked at the whole issue being that like I always looked at like binary to be that the dam stay and the fish go for the dams go and the fish stay and it's encouraging to think that there could be I mean as much as it is like becomes like very conservation dependent very expensive but you could see some level of progress you know and like at least hang on and wait for like a better day you know like just to have something to save right I don't have mentioned the cult times right but my brother was the fisheries guy in Alaska he had this really interesting perspective about Alaska versus Alaska versus the lower 48 you'd said that conservation the lower 48 is it's all recovery do you know what I mean we're like we're in recovery mode up there they're still in almost like a classification mode there's still trying to go like what's here right like what is here trying to count things describe things get a sense of what's there and down here it's like we just look at like what's gone you know I mean how do we try to fix our mistakes so hard because it's salmon our international issue right even the harvest of salmon because that's why we have the Pacific Salmon Commission Pacific Salmon Treaty and looking you know when things really taint back in the 80s and the the numbers were in dire straits and the Columbia basin and that's when you know those court cases were happening and our tribal fisheries programs were really being established and the tribes started their supplementation efforts that's when you could see the rebound in the in the the curve on the graph of when our tribes started doing that that we're to get us here we haven't even gotten into all that stuff with like high seas drifts nets and dudes out in almost an international waters peeling off American salmon man like we need to get into that stuff and in the bycatch of salmon and other fisheries is he yeah and then they go dig in into Kansas salmon it's full of canned steelhead that they're catching out on the high seas you know it's just like unbelievable man big the year the odd years with the high pink numbers that's being seen and we're seeing decreased signal in Chinook and other lower 48 fish and you know those are Alaska as well as as Japan and in some of those Asian countries that are putting out a lot of pinks so it's going to go and start to do those nets man and that's all they're it's done just for corporate interest right that's not anything natural it's not a natural population it's not a public service it's these groups putting out all this pink catchery production just for this commercial fishery low value commercial fishery in comparison to what they could be having in Sakai I sent you on in the air day do you have that text message pull up that text message I sent you on some fish price stuff we'll close out almost close out with this and we can't forget about where to go if you want to donate yeah but we're talking about just relative value here when you talk about like pink like the pink industry you have that niggle this is paid at the dock yeah Steven I exchanged at times a lot of text so it's taking just a second I think it was six cents six yeah and then compared to like a Sakai or king hopefully Yani could find it there's there's been years that when I grew up fishing we were getting two and a half cents a pound for Tuleys on the Tuley it's the it's a different stock of fish like that runs in the the lower ever you have upriver brights that were for their upstream or Tuley Tuley yeah yeah yeah but two and a half cents a pound yeah these were overall average prices paid to fishermen in 2025 this is the Alaska fishing game department Chinook took six forty a pound next down this is paid to fishermen at the dock six forty a pound next down the line was coho at one forty one Sakai at one seventeen surprisingly to me Choms were eighty cents and then the pinks came in at thirty well thirty cents okay but like just a relative picture the the way that the values on these fish are perceived you know and like the amount of like yeah the other thing about the and this is such a rich subject you go on and on but like the hat the pink hatchery stuff as you think like you think when you're running cattle when you're running cattle and you want to raise cattle on public land you pay a grazing fee you have a contract and pay a grazing fee a canary runs a pink hatch they're grazing for free that stuff goes out in the open ocean and grazes for free and then it comes back and you sell for thirty cents you know I mean you sell for thirty cents a pound dude it's competing with wild fish and then compared to the market I was looking at just pike place fish prices as a v yesterday and of course it's probably more expensive but thirty to forty pounds for wild dollars and thirty to forty bucks for wild pound a wild Chinook yeah and then that's that was an average then pike place was fifty five for fillets um sock eyes about fifty dollars a pound for fillets and coho is twenty eight or pinks on there uh nope sterred white sturgeon was like average ten to thirty depending upon you know you know what else we didn't get to we didn't get the bitching about killer whales who I guess can go into a school of pinks if there's a king in there they go into that school it could be thousands of pinks and they're gonna grab the king dude they know they know the price yeah yeah isn't that wild yeah they could they'll sort through they'll sort through and find kings because like that's the good one that's the bad anymore right there well that's like with sea lions right Doug was talking about the Stellars that sturgeon they were primarily going after the big females and eating out the buildings yeah animals well it gives me hope like you're you're uh aha moment story of seeing those giant fish in that pool I feel like the stuff you guys are doing if at the minimum you're giving the opportunity for future generations to have that moment hopefully we can keep the whole thing going and then to think that we could have like what Alaska has like literally right here or within a half a day's drive we're we're sitting right now and that we don't and then we're not putting more effort in and doing it could have walked across the river on them it's kind of crazy it's the the resistance to change and moving beyond the status quo of that's the way we've always done things like you have this old car that's all beat up and I'm barely keeping it running but yeah refused to to trade it in to what's the baseline syndrome too right um we none of us here in this room have ever would ever know see have seen or wouldn't know what it was like to have those kind of fisheries right here yeah like my little kids like if think if we don't turn things around on Sam and my little kids would be like man 2025 was bitch and dude we got three kings yeah you've never see that now well there's a lot of miscarriage that was the good old days dude yeah there's a lot of misconception to people don't understand that like what are they complaining about like they see those reels and those videos of all those fish coming back to those paint catcheries you know and that that's what they're showing the that's not what's going on in the in reality and having fish coming back to the rivers and the spawning grounds and and things like that that's more natural but they see these these outrageous things and think that's not a big deal and there's also a lot of misconception and we call it the numbers game right they're looking at the total number of salmon that pass bought Bonneville down that's kind of what the outsider's view is success of the health of the river like you know we're around two million now but a lot of that is still lower river hatcheries you have a little white salmon and and and a sprinkish-knuck catcheries but we're they're not whereas wild wild shinnok wild spring shinnok in the the upper and mid-Columbia you're only getting like a thousand yeah I got you of that so you can cut the numbers you make them you can show what you want to show the numbers and then also understanding that harvest is limited by those weaker stocks because you have ESA restrictions on on a sprinkish-knuck all throughout the basin so you have very little access to harvest-springs-knuck and you know the numbers are solvable sea lions are eating most of them before they get to us and then we bite over the what 17% harvest that shared between the the states and the tribes and and then also in the summer because of the ESA listed sock high concerns and we we can we can access we can't fish those on on the successful Okanagan fish or you know upper Columbia fish because of ESA restrictions and the same thing happens in our fall fisheries we have mesh restriction sizes because of beer and steelhead limitations so it's like things are great but like no it's not you have to look at the real picture of what's going on throughout the basin well well said man we go on all day but this has been great talking you guys about I've learned a ton and I'm just one person we have a ton of great experts on any subject you want to touch on and it would be really awesome to you know like focus more on the CBRI the Columbia Basin Restoration Initiative and you know that's what we're continuing to work for towards and advocate for to get get these actions done to continue the success and also you know looking for partnerships of you know how we could work together because you know the only time we make actionable changes when we set aside our differences to focus on our commonalities and that's when we connect and also connecting his people like how I said about you know salmon it's the heart of our culture it's cultural it's spiritual you know like and even things don't have to be religious to be spiritual it could be that way for you or anybody else like I talked to a lot of our staff I shared my aha moment of that seeing that fish 800 miles away and they've talked about sitting alongside the stream bank and seeing that fish jumping to get over this barrier or things like that like we can all feel that connection if we get out there and it's there's you can't put a value on that so take a first step audience members if you want to donate can you guys plug your website I know there's a donate tab there yeah yeah on our on our webpage the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission it's at www.cripfick.org so c-r-i-t-f-c dot org yeah well all you non-Indian fellers are here these are the fish same old fish thanks for coming out guys thank thanks thank you welcome to meet eaters 12 and 26 presented by mulch remobile and on x maps 12 of meet eaters biggest and baddest hunts from the last year released throughout 2026 these are long form episodes so you get more of what you love the first one up is my baited bear hunt in manitoba if you've ever wondered what a baited bear hunt is like you'll love this episode my favorite part was watching a younger bear spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a tree check it out now on meet eaters youtube channel and be on the lookout for more 12 and 26 in the coming months this is an iHeart podcast guaranteed human