Coleman is the only federal hatchery operated in California, and it’s also the closest to Tuiimyali, the Winnemem’s village. Established in 1942, it was meant to help mitigate the effects of the Shasta Dam on the California salmon populations, but, like many hatcheries, it’s success has been extremely limited.
(Ironically, the tribe the dam most devastated, the Winnemem, are not allowed to receive salmon from the hatchery after the fish have been harvested. Other tribes regularly receive 300-400 salmon at a time, and I was told the Redding Rancheria had just picked up a big load the day before.)
The artificial nature of hatcheries will always inevitably lead to muddied and weakened gene pools for the salmon that are released. After hatching and becoming recognizable as fish, the salmon are called smolts. In the natural world, they would wander their birth streams feeding on insects and small fish as they grow and prepare for their migration to the ocean.
At Coleman the smolts are confined in 150 by15-foot raceways where they feed on pellets that are dispersed by automated white cylinders above the water. The hatchery workers said these were installed so the smolts didn’t get in the habit of racing toward the shadows of their feeders, a habit that would serve them poorly in the wild.
They also exist in water that’s been ozonated, the use of ozone to clean the water of disease. This process also strips the water of oxygen, which must be re-introduced through another chemical reaction.
The spawning process is also remarkable to watch and difficult not to see as a form of cruelty. The returning salmon are doused in water rich in CO2 to drowse them and make them easy to handle, and then they’re clubbed over the head.
“We very humanely club them over the head,” the deputy project manager assured me as if clubbing something over the head after it’s been drugged could be anything but inhumane. I don’t want to bust his chops too much; he seemed like a good guy who cared about salmon and was trying to help.
Workers then twist the salmon, many of which weigh more than 30 pounds, to expel the milt and row, mixing the two in a plastic drawer.
There are myriad ways, large and small, that the hatchery process favors fish that wouldn’t naturally make it to the smolt stage, and it also ingrains them with bad behaviors and weakened fitness.
But I won’t belabor that point. Hatcheries like Coleman aren’t the root of the problem, they’re a symptom.
Like many problems facing our society, we have looked at the dying salmon populations and devised solutions in the very narrow context of the present.
Rather than trace the decline of salmon back to its roots (the widespread damming of rivers, the destruction of habitat from mining, etc.,), we’ve built hatcheries and tried methods that interfered with the status quo as little as possible.
No doubt that tearing down dams and restoring habitat is no easy proposition in California, where water equals might. But the hatcheries are a stark reminder of our hubris, and how badly we will fail if we try to mimic or replace nature’s original plan with our own short-sighted machinations.
Here are some photos from the tour I took today.