October 24, 2003

Greetings. Sis and I hope this finds you all well, in good spirits, and content.

Over approximately the last seven days, the temperatures in Steamboat Creek have dropped back into the comfort zone for steelhead in Big Bend Pool. This zone is water from 47° to 57° and the waters of Steamboat Creek are within it all day long now. It has been almost two months temperatures in Steamboat Creek were at or above the incipient lethal temperature of steelhead, 75°. Temperatures did reach 81° several times this summer.

About five weeks ago in the middle of the afternoon a bat came out over the pool to fly around for some reason. It may have been thirsty because, after apparently examining me, it looped down to the surface of the pool and left a six-inch-long crease on the surface from drinking or taking a bug. It flew up over the pool again and then again looped down to the surface on the far side where it landed suddenly. I have seen bats do this before and perhaps it was an attempt to drink. Bats can swim handily and it has to be easier to drink while sitting on the surface of the water.

A steelhead immediately swam out towards the bat from the pod and turned away when about five feet from it. Right after this first fish had turned, another steelhead accelerated from the middle of the pod and grabbed the bat, taking it down explosively. There was water everywhere and big waves and a sound like dropping a grapefruit in a rain barrel. Through this commotion I saw the steelhead scoot away downcreek and I, dumbfounded, was wondering what had happened to the bat.

Ten seconds later the bat bobbed back up to the surface in the center of the rings and struck out for the bank using the bat variant of the breast stroke. It climbed the rock, Rock 6, and spent an hour drying, occasionally licking itself. Then it flew off.

About a month ago now, I saw what I thought to be fresh fish bone on Rock 5. I donned waders, told Sis to stay, and forded the creek well below the fish. The bones were on Rock 5 and were the lower right mandible and a set of gill plates from a fish that had been eaten in the past few days. The past few days I had been noting that the fish seemed quite skittish.

Rock 5 is a territory marking rock of the otters that use this part of the creek and there was a loose dark scat a few feet over from where the bone rested on the moss. This type of dark scat is usually associated with having eaten fish, a much different diet from the crawdads that they ordinarily eat and which loads their scat.

While this evidence is circumstantial, I think that this is the first good data I have gotten at the pool that the otters will occasionally prey on fresh steelhead. Of course they do, but I simply have not been able to document this behavior prior to this. Several years ago, in April, I found a steelhead on one of the pool rocks that had been turned inside out in the process of eating it. When I it back outside out, the lower fins had been worn to nubs, indicating that the fish was weakened or dead when taken by the otter. Jeanne Moore has a tale of an otter pulling a steelhead out on a rock in the North Umpqua below the Inn .

The tip of the steelhead jaw had a dark kype between the stout recurved teeth there making it clear that the fish had been a male.

Later that same afternoon an osprey dove into the packed center of the pod. I have no idea what its intentions were, but an osprey is a three to four pound bird and there are only one or two of the steelhead presently in the pool that the bird would have had a prayer of lifting.

After burying itself to the wing tips, the osprey came up empty and flew downcreek, shaking and shuddering itself.

There are about 425 wild steelhead in the pool, down from more than 600 prior to the ten-inch early September creek rise.

The short piece below is something I put together during the summer.

ADAPTIVE CRUCIBLE

Earlier this season, on one of the hot days, a thoughtful friend mentioned that the artificial and the wild summer steelhead were the same creature, they were a single species.

Yes . . .?

It wasn't until Sis and I were driving back up along the river with me trying to roll the window down and turn off the heater and angle the wing window at the same time that I realized what my uneasiness with that the same species observation stemmed from.

Yes, these two quite distinct fish, distinct by the very fact that artificial anadromous Pacific salmon have been shown to be damaging to wild local breeding populations—or demes—in every way that damage can be measured by those researchers who publish in peer-reviewed journals . . . yes, they are the same species. But what does this systematic fact mean?

It means that when artificial and wild steelhead mate, they produce fertile offspring . It does not mean that those offspring are adaptive and capable of surviving in the natural environment. Artificial steelhead have shown themselves capable of surviving—sometimes, when the conditions are better than average—in the ocean environment. The ocean is the simplest of the natural habitats used by steelhead. It is where steelhead basically feed and get large. Yes, of course, there are predators there, but 95% of the mortality of a generation of wild steelhead has already occurred before they enter the marine environment as smolts. It is the streamflow environment that is the complex one and it is where all the critical life stages of steelhead occur.

So, saying that all steelhead, artificial and wild, are a species isn't saying much, if anything, from an adaptive standpoint. The significant population units of steelhead and other Pacific salmon are the locally adapted demes to which only the wild, naturally propagated steelhead can possibly belong. The functional genetic diversity contained in the gene pool of a local breeding population of salmon varies within certain fluid adaptive bounds that are rich in alternative alleles and have fitted these wild fish to the dynamic uncertainties, biotic and abiotic, within the stream reach natal to them, within the fluvial pathway to the ocean, and within the marine environment itself. It is exactly these dynamic uncertainties of the gently indifferent Nature that made the wild gene pools diverse and the fish that belonged to them strong and resilient.

The functional gene pool consists of those naturally propagated—or wild—fish that have survived to maturity, have migrated to the spawning gravels in their natal streams, and have successfully and naturally spawned. On Steamboat Creek, around the time of the vernal equinox, the eggs of the wild summer steelhead begin the process of maintaining their portion of a strong adaptive gene pool as soon as they are dropping through the gentled currents and a cloud of their father's milt into the redd excavated by their mother in the bed of the stream. This sexual reproduction has been happening in the headwater reaches of the thousands of Pacific Northwest streams each year since long before the height of the last glaciation, or more than 5,000 steelhead generations ago.

The six to ten local breeding populations of wild adult steelhead holding in Big Bend Pool make up perhaps less than 3% of the naturally propagated eggs fertilized by their parents. The original 100% of the fertile eggs have been refined in the adaptive crucible of natural selection so that the dross, the maladaptive genes—perhaps maladaptive for that season only—have again and again and again and again been subjected to natural selective pressures. This happened during the spawning process, as eggs and alevin in the gravels, as fry and parr in the stream, on their way to the ocean, in the estuary and ocean, on their way back to their natal stream reach, and over the spawning gravels that originally sheltered them. The interactions in the natural environment have been inconceivably uncertain and numerous, complex, and interdependent, far beyond our ability to figure out. The result is a gene pool and individual steelhead as fit and strong as Nature can make them with as few maladaptive genes as possible.

The adaptive crucible of the artificial steelhead is not so complex, its uncertainties have been minimized. It is controlled by humans who appear to pat themselves on the back for this comparatively profound simplicity, a simplicity that is dysfunctional in that it ensures the survival of a maximum number of maladaptive genes in each hatchery generation.

So, what do locally adapted demes of summer steelhead and their gene pools get out of the hatcheries? Nothing, only gradual degradation. They are damaged in every way that damage can be measured . . . measured by researchers who subject themselves to peer review in the professional journals.

And what do artificial summer steelhead and hatcheries get out of the diverse adaptive gene pools of wild fish? Continued artificial production. Artificial steelhead have again and again shown themselves to be unable to produce continuing generations of artificial anadromous steelhead: for that, apparently, the wild fish with diverse gene pools are necessary.

Hatcheries and artificial production are, thus, obviously an unlit one-way street leading to the eventual and unavoidable end of steelhead and of steelhead fishing as we now know it . . . yet, yes, the artificial and the wild steelhead are the same species.

As ever,

Lee and Sis

For information on how you can help preserve this wonderful river please email us or write to:
The North Umpqua Foundation
P.O. Box 238
Idleyld Park, OR 97447-0238