Even as local governments, businesses, and greenies hash out billion-dollar schemes to cope with new endangered-species listings of Puget Sound salmon, another big Endangered Species Act bomb is ticking away out in the Sound. Last June, nearly unnoticed by the public and media, a petition to list what were only lately some of the Sound's most abundant and commercially important fishes as "threatened" or "endangered" passed the first big hurdle. The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) announced that it had found "substantial information" suggesting that a variety of causes—most notably overfishing—had driven seven familiar species into extinction's docket.
Rick Dahms
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These are not glamorous, globe-trotting, anadromous salmon, famously vulnerable to human effects because they need both fresh and salt water at various stages. We're talking humble bottomfish—the rockfish, pollock, hake, and cod that are the stuff of fish-and-chips and surimi—and even humbler herring—bait, for chrissakes. These are regular marine species, living all their lives in salt water, and as such more indicative of the general health of the Sound than the salmon that pass through. Listing them wouldn't have the same effects on logging, farming, damming, and development that salmon listings bode to. But it could restrict not only fishing but development along the inland sea and provide conservationists the legal muscle they've long craved to set aside substantial underwater reserves.
This bombshell petition comes not from some powerhouse environmental group but from a single retired fisheries biologist, Sam Wright of Olympia. Wright is a rare apostate, an expert insider turned outside agitator. As a former head of harvest management at the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, he would seem to share blame for the parlous state so many fish species have fallen into. But Wright long chafed at the department's slowness to react to plummeting fish counts. "He argued for tighter catch limits than they allowed," recalls Ross Antipa, the Washington Senate Natural Resources Committee's staff supervisor and a seasoned observer of this state's long-running fish wars. "He's not a hypocrite."
In 1993, Wright was one of several DFW biologists who, on their own, put forth the historic petition to list Puget Sound chinook and chum. He then retired to Hawaii, then came back to spearhead the development of a pivotal wild salmonid policy under a new and more activist DFW director, Bern Shanks. Retired again, Wright still chafed. "The department's just not doing its job," he complains; despite meager catches and growing scientific concern, it continues to keep various rockfish fisheries open. "All those advisory groups [convened to oversee fish stocks] aren't worth the powder it would take to blow them up." No wonder the label "controversial" is still attached when Wright's name comes up.
But is he on spot with his boat-rocking ESA petition? "Sam Wright is a good scientist," says Antipa, "When he talks, scientists listen. He's on the high ground on this one." As indeed, NMFS's scientists have, as they undertake an intensive review of Wright's petition and all available data; their boss, the US Secretary of Commerce, is to decide on the listings by next February.
Wright actually petitioned to list 18 marine species as threatened or endangered in Puget Sound: Pacific herring, Pacific cod ("true cod" in the supermarkets), Pacific hake, walleye pollock, and 14 species of rockfish with such poetic names as "bocaccio" and "canary rockfish." Of the rockfish, NMFS accepted only three—brown, copper, and quillback—for review, not because they're any more endangered than the other 11 but because they're more common and so there's more data on them. It is an irony of the ESA process that species may escape protection because they're too rare to have been studied. Out of sight, out of existence.
Even as accepted, Wright's petition marks a big leap forward in federal protection of finny creatures. Garth Griffin, the NMFS biologist overseeing the review, says this is the first such consideration ever given marine fishes in the Northwest. Wright himself says it's the first on the West Coast; he knows of only one ESA listing of a marine species, an Atlantic tuna.
Marine species didn't get the attention anadromous and freshwater fishes have in part because they weren't seen as comprising geographically and genetically distinct populations (like different rivers' salmon runs). So what if cod are and herring collapse in overexploited Puget Sound? There's lots more of them up and down the coast.
But Wright's petition and a growing understanding of the Sound's isolated, enclosed ecology may change that thinking. A number of recent recent genetic studies support his contention that in such a "highly subdivided estuarine system comprising a number of distinct basins," even migratory species such as herring and cod have evolved into distinct populations. This is even more conspicuously the case with rockfish, the homebodies of the piscine world. They may live 80 years or longer rooted to small sections of underwater reefs (which are themselves scarce in the muddy South and Central Sound). Like other long-lived creatures, rockfish are slow to mature and much more fertile when fully grown. Fishing tends to lop off the big, fertile ones, hurting long-term viability more than short-term numbers.
