Fisheries committee  I would support harassment of seals to prevent them from taking advantage of human-created bottlenecks, but not lethal removal.

Fisheries committee  I think harassing is adequate to protect those fish runs.

Fisheries committee  Going back to the Ballard Locks, we installed acoustic barriers that kept seals and sea lions away from the fish ladder, and that allowed the fish to successfully enter Lake Washington and spawn in the Sammamish River system. I think that if we want to have enough fish for ever

Fisheries committee  My knowledge is not as good for that part of the country. I think we need to keep in mind that there was a long period of sealing and whaling in the Atlantic, and predators on those whales would have had their population severely depleted. If we had been having this discussion

Fisheries committee  There are two aspects to the seal issue. The kinds of seals you're talking about are targeting specific runs and taking a high proportion. That's actually a small percentage of the seal population. If you addressed those seals, you would protect those runs, but it would not make

Fisheries committee  I think what happens is that the chinook have parasites and pathogens that they co-evolve with. It's like how if you leave your fish in the refrigerator, it will stay fresh until you're ready to eat it, but if you leave it out where it's warm, then those pathogens start growing f

Fisheries committee  I don't think ocean ranching's going to be a good solution. Chinook don't do very well in crowded conditions. Also, we've seen from the Atlantic salmon farming that there are a lot of environmental consequences to concentrating fish. Perhaps luring them inland would help meet hum

Fisheries committee  Well, they'll eat what's available. With chinook, it's size that's the big difference. Historically we had chinook that were 150 pounds or 90 pounds, and a lot of the wild chinook now are down to around 30 pounds, with a lot of the hatchery fish returning at only five pounds. A f

Fisheries committee  Well, we select on them differently. The first fish back are the ones that get to reproduce. A hatchery chinook does not need to travel hundreds of miles up a river and does not need to defend a redd, so it can put a lot more into egg production and less into commuting. That mean

Fisheries committee  I think we can let the transients take care of it. I guess the problem from the residents' perspective is that the seal populations were able to grow about 10% a year once they were protected, and killer whale populations only grow about 3% a year, so the seal populations explode

Fisheries committee  Yes.

Fisheries committee  It seems to be a seasonal thing. Most of the year they rely on chinook, but there are times that chinook densities are quite low. It seems that they eat a lot of coho in the Salish Sea in September, and then in October and November they take advantage of the chum run and eat a lo

Fisheries committee  Yes, they do compete directly, but they also prey on predators of those salmon. They'll eat hake and they'll also eat salmon, so it's not clear what the overall balance would be. We do have places like the Ballard Locks in Seattle where the pinnipeds find the salmon a lot faste

Fisheries committee  So far they haven't been a direct threat to killer whales, but they do modify habitat. There are predatory fish that are introduced into aquatic systems that prey on juvenile salmon. That of course reduces in-river survivorship. We have a problem with green crabs in the state of

Fisheries committee  Thank you. Southern residents have been separate from other killer whales since the ice age. They're genetically and culturally distinct. They share their diet with other residents, the northern residents, but they differ in diet from the transients and offshore killer whales wi