The Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife is closing two hatchery programs in southwest Washington and reducing releases at another as part of a settlement resulting from a lawsuit by two environmental groups.

The steelhead hatchery program on the Washougal River will end at the end of the year. The Deep River Net Pens Coho Salmon program in Wahkiakum County will close through April. In contrast, the Kalama River/Fallert Creek Chinook Salmon Hatchery Program will only release 1.9 million hatchery fish in 2025.

The settlement is the latest development in an eight-year battle over the hatchery’s role in salmon recovery as wild salmon stocks continue to struggle after decades of decline.

For government fisheries managers, hatcheries are key to balancing salmon conservation with commercial and recreational fisheries. Environmentalists instead see hatcheries as a direct cause of the potential local extinction of wild salmon.

Jim Scott, special assistant to the director of the state Fish and Wildlife Agency, praised the agreement, noting it would not change overall hatchery fish production from the agency’s expectations for the coming years.

Washington has the largest salmon hatchery program in the world, with more than half of the approximately 200 Columbia River Basin salmon hatcheries located throughout the state. Each year, Washington plants produce 200 million baby fish. Eighty percent of the salmon and steelhead that return to the basin as adults came from hatcheries.

Environmental groups — Wild Fish Conservancy Northwest and The Conservation Angler — have sued Lower Columbia River hatcheries for allowing hatchery salmon to be returned to spawn with wild fish at levels that violate standards.

The lawsuit names the Washington agency, as well as the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service and Clatsop County, Ore. The original complaint also alleged that the National Marine Fisheries Service failed to provide required annual reports.

In addition to the closures, the settlement provided defendants with protection from future lawsuits by plaintiffs in the same case through 2028; increased transparency of hatchery programs operated by the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife, including posting some data on the agency’s website; and increased communication between the Oregon and Washington Departments of Fish and Wildlife about non-tribal commercial gillnet fisheries, according to a WDFW release. Additionally, government agencies must cover environmental groups’ legal fees.

However, the settlement states that the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife “denies any wrongdoing, wrongdoing or liability.”

pHOS measurements

The conflict centers on a metric known as “pHOS,” short for proportion of hatchery spawners.

In 2017, a lawsuit filed by the Wild Fish Conservancy led to the National Marine Fisheries Service issuing a “biological opinion” on the Columbia Basin hatchery. Biological opinions provide guidelines to ensure that the proposed project will not harm the survival and recovery of species listed in the Endangered Species Act. Fourteen salmon runs in the Columbia Basin are currently listed as endangered.

The document sets limits on the maximum percentage of hatchery fish spawning with wild fish in locations around the Columbia Basin.

The latest lawsuit alleged that defense agencies exceeded both the allowable ratio and, separately, the number of hatchery fish that could be released into many Lower Columbia tributaries.

Wild Fish Conservancy executive director Emma Helvorson said 77 percent of spawning salmon were raised at hatcheries in Mill, Abernathy and German creeks in Cowlitz County, despite the 50 percent limit.

The congressionally established Hatchery Scientific Review Group determined in 2009 that the spawning rate of hatchery fish should be less than 5 percent of the naturally spawning population unless the hatchery population is integrated with the natural population.

Court documents show that the 5.8 million hatchery fish that accounted for the average release of Kalama fall Chinook in 2015-2016 – more than twice the norm – is an example of hatcheries far exceeding release standards. Meanwhile, Bonneville Fish Hatchery released about half of their allotted 5 million.

Hatchery vs. wild salmon

Although relationships between government fish managers and conservationists are often characterized by disagreement, they agree that hatchery fish are less adapted to survive in the wild than wild fish – a gap that widens over the generations.

“Evidence suggests that hatchery breeding may inadvertently select for traits that may be disadvantageous in the wild,” says a 2024 report from the National Marine Fisheries Service. “This could have downstream consequences for native stocks if these fish breed with wild fish after release.”

That’s why alleged violations have dire consequences, said Helvorson of the Wild Fish Conservancy.

“The Endangered Species Act is the most important tool for protecting biodiversity and preventing the extinction of endangered species, but the law will not be able to protect these species if we do not follow established protections and restrictions,” Helvorson said. “We believe this is unacceptable: these are science-based limits set by our agencies that (the defendants) consider important to preventing extinction.”

This is where the views of environmentalists and government fish managers diverge. For Scott of the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife, hatcheries are a key part of the toolkit for keeping salmon in the Columbia.

“These hatchery programs are just fundamentally important both to protect the environment, to provide for tribes, to provide prey for southern resident killer whales and, OK, to support sustainable fishing for all,” he said.

But in Helvorson’s view, outside of the hypothetical scenario in which the small hatchery program is used to save salmon farms from imminent local extinction, hatcheries instead pose an obstacle to the salmon recovery project, she added. Hatchery programs only support unsustainable commercial fishing, especially in the ocean.

Scott strongly rejects this view of hatcheries.

“NOAA analyzes (biological reviews) very carefully to make sure we are not using a higher harvest rate than natural stocks allow, and also sets allowable rates and fisheries,” he said.

But he noted that, in addition to climate change and salmonid predators such as seals and sea lions, “the legacy effects of the way we ran hatchery programs and the way we ran fisheries” contributed to the species’ struggles.

But for Scott, that doesn’t mean that hatcheries as they exist today aren’t part of the future of salmon recovery.

“Here at WDFW, we are leveraging our continuing evolution of hatchery programs to contribute to the conservation and restoration of resources and ensure sustainable fisheries,” Scott said.

While Helvorson sees hatcheries as a major cause of salmon problems — along with overharvesting, habitat loss and dams — he realizes they’re not going anywhere anytime soon.

“If we are to have hatcheries, we must manage them according to the best available science,” she said.

Whatever role hatcheries have played in the decline of wild salmon in the Columbia Basin or in the increasingly unlikely recovery that everyone wants, the decline has been dramatic.

A 2022 NOAA assessment found that the number of wild salmon spawning in Columbia River tributaries — measured by the “raw natural spawning bed count” — declined significantly for almost every salmon caught in almost every river measured from 1990 to 2019.