Budget woes could change hatchery operations

Emphasis could shift from recreational to restoration efforts

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Federal budget cutbacks along with a lawsuit by an environmental could change the direction of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hatchery operations from providing fish for recreation to providing fish to restore native fisheries.

A recent FWS report outlines fiscal challenges for 70 federal fish hatcheries. No closures are expected, but Creston hatchery manager Mark Maskill said he expects to see less fish propagation for recreational fisheries and increased efforts to restore native fisheries in the future.

The hatchery system has been impacted by congressional sequestration curbs on spending. If continued into 2014, the agency estimates it will have lost about $6 million in hatchery operations funding since the 2012 fiscal year.

To maximize limited resources, the FWS report proposes five priorities for the hatchery system — recovery of species listed as threatened or endangered; restoration of imperiled aquatic species; living up to tribal trust responsibilities; propagation programs for native species; and finally, propagation programs for non-native species.

“The Service is moving away from rainbow trout production,” Maskill said. “If they go to the priorities for recovery and restoration, we will produce less fish for recreational fisheries.”

The FWS report acknowledges that a reduction in support for recreational fisheries could have substantial economic impacts. An economic analysis conducted in 2006 found that FWS stocked a about 123 million recreational fish which generated more than 13 million angling days, $554 million in retail sales, $903 million in total angler expenditures, $256 million in job income and 8,000 jobs.

This year, the Creston hatchery produced 1,109,576 fish, of which 838,909 were rainbow trout. The rest were westslope cutthroat trout. Over 13 years, the hatchery has produced 11 million fish, including more than 7 million rainbows.

Maskill said the hatchery could move toward raising bull trout, which are listed as a threatened species, but it’s a more complicated process.

According to Wade Fredenberg, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s bull trout recovery coordinator, the Creston hatchery raised bull trout for about 15 years as an experimental project. The project ended by 2007 largely because of resistance from Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks and a lawsuit filed by Friends of the Wild Swan prior to bull trout being listed in 1998.

“Basically, the concern was that we would jump into some kind of program that would ignore the real problems,” which include habitat issues and competition from nonnative lake trout, Fredenberg said. But the hatchery experiment succeeded “beyond our wildest expectations,” he said, and the question of whether to raise bull trout still comes up.

Fredenberg said discussions about a bull trout stocking program in Glacier National Park’s Logging Lake following a lake trout removal effort. He described the bull trout stocking as a “genetic rescue” effort that would require a public review process under the National Environmental Policy Act.

“The bottom line from our perspective is that hatcheries could still have a role in bull trout recovery, but it will have to be developed with some strong planning and rationale for what we intend to do,” Fredenberg said.