Interview Transcript from Galen Johnson Interview: 1. How is the Boldt Decision related to your work?

I work for the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission which was founded by a group of people who were helping with the organization of the law suit that went to the Boldt Decision and as soon as their was agreement that the tribes would comanage with the State of Washington, they started helping to coordinate that comanagement, so doing the biology and making sure that there was a unified voice when possible from the tribes with the state about management decisions. So it basically helps to organize the tribal side of the co-management. 2. In the documentary Treaty Indian Fisheries and Salmon Recovery by the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, it says that most salmon from Washington go out to open waters and then swim north to Canadian waters. Do biologists (or fisheries managers) have to take careful calculations to determine how much fish will return to Washington? How? There is different ways of managing each of the salmon species but I can talk to you in most detail about Chinook. We would like to make careful calculations and we make them as carefully as possible but because salmon are small relative to the size of the ocean and because there are so many of them and the ocean is so big, its really hard to figure out how many of them there are and when salmon are caught on boats in Alaska its hard to know where they are from so we make the calculations as carefully as possible but there are so many big gaps in our knowledge that its hard. But one of the ways that we do it coded wire tags. So, in the hatcheries, when they let the fish out of the hatcheries, they put this tiny wire thats literally about a millimeter apart that has this number on it and they stick it on the nose bone of the fish. And on that coded wire tag, there is a number and that number is unique to that batch of fish is going out so they know what the birthday of the fish is and how long they stayed in the hatchery, because that is all in the notes that go along with that number, and what day they left and the length that they were at that point and what kind of food that they had in the hatchery and so all those fish go out and in a lot of commercial fisheries, they have a little wand and they run it over the fish when they come in, and itll beep if the fish has a little tag in the nose and they will measure how long the fish is, make a note of where they caught it, what day they caught it, what fishery they caught it in and then they take they put that note with the fish nose and then they send it to the lab and the lab takes it out and reads the number so that they know what fish are caught in which fishery, so very slowly we get more and more information about which fish end up where, what year, what time, and we put that into a modem that helps us guess like: okay if this hatchery and this natural fish are upstream in the same river, they probably behaved the same way. If we guess that this so many are going out in this year, and another guess at how many fish are already out there from previous years, because the Chinook will live about six years, we can

guess how many will be in one area based on this computer model and we try to make the fisheries reflect that. 3. What happens if the populations of the fish are down? Are fishermen told to stop fishing at that area, or are they told to take less? It depends on how many are down and which fishermen it is, so if the population is down then we know at the beginning of the year that it looks like the population is down then there tends to be a lot of heated discussion and/or argument about whose fisheries will be lower, its been agreed upon for a long time how many fish or what percentage of fish will the tribes get compared to the state, the states the sports fishermen and commercial fishers, and so if it looks like it is going to be a bad year, there will be lots of discussions leading up to the decision making of which fisheries will be but if the summer goes on and we see lower numbers of fish then anticipated, in the fisheries of the fish coming in from the Sound to spawn, then sometimes theyll make emergency closures or lower the quotas, which are the set number of fish that can be taken, and sometimes some of the tribes will just decide that they feel like there arent enough fish and that too much fishing has gone on already that they just wont fish certain streams of fish returning and often that means that they get a lot less money and even though the state and the other tribes would allow them to take those, they just decide that they would rather not. So it really comes down to there are regulations, and there are laws that say if x number of fish lowers then they can only fish this much, but there are individual tribes that make the decision thats not a law decision, thats just their decision. 4. What are the biggest things that effect the population of fish today? There is a good amount of science about things but theres also a good amount of extrapolation or leaps of faith you have to make about things so some of this comes down to more opinion. So, my opinion and the opinion of a lot of people at the commission is that bad habitat like the fact that were changing habitat and destroying habitat both on the coast and in the rivers in streams, is probably affecting the fish more than anything because there is cases where theres been a big lowering fishing effort on the fish and were still not seeing that many more fish coming back so its probably that theyre habitat limited and that could be that theres just not that many good places for them to spawn in the streams or that the character of the sediment changed and not as many eggs survived, or it could be that the area in the estuarys where hey might fees when they were juveniles is worse. So just because of that we think that there just arent as many fish making it all the way out to see to begin with. But the fisheries are definitely part of it, I mean if there werent fisheries, there wouldnt be any more fish coming back, but we dont know how much better they would do depending on the habitat and then also, weve seen a big increase in a lot of marine mammal populations, sea lions, and seals, and they also like to feed on salmon so we are

probably losing more salmon to sea lions when there populations are up but by no means is that the biggest thing affecting them.