Governor attacks salmon program> Federal gene studies flawed, says King

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A federally supported stocking program that has left many Maine rivers with inbred, inferior Atlantic salmon is at least partially responsible for the fish’s decline, Gov. Angus King said Friday in rebuttal to federal arguments to classify the fish in eight rivers as an endangered species.

In addition, the stocking program, which put millions of fish — many of which were from Canada — into Maine’s rivers, has left the state with no genetically distinct wild salmon worthy of federal protection, King said, summarizing comments the state filed on the last day for public comment on the listing proposal.

The governor called for an independent investigation of the fish stocking program and impugned the scientific studies the federal government used to conclude that the Atlantic salmon in the eight rivers are a distinct population worthy of protection under the Endangered Species Act.

Summarizing more than 75 pages of comments, King said: “We believe the science we filed today … utterly destroys the argument that this is a distinct population segment.”

The governor spoke to eight reporters for an hour and a half in a telephone conference call about the state’s comments before any of the documents he referred to were made available for review.

Based on studies by federal scientists, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service concluded that salmon in the Maine rivers constitute a distinct population segment, a subset of a species that can be protected under the federal act.

King said it was hard to believe that Maine’s salmon could be considered “reproductively isolated” — one of the criteria for designating a distinct population segment — when 100 million fish from a variety of rivers have been stocked in the state’s rivers.

King, who has long challenged this assertion, enlisted two scientists from the University of Maine and Texas A&M to review the federal study. Their findings are the basis for the state’s response to the federal proposal.

Irving Kornfield, a zoology professor at the University of Maine, said during the conference call Friday that he had found “extensive errors” in two genetics studies done by Tim King, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist, which are part of the scientific data the federal fisheries agencies relied upon in making their decision.

Tim King, who works in West Virginia, analyzed tissue from salmon from Europe, Canada and the United States, and found that fish from the eight rivers contain some unique genetic material.

Kornfield said Friday that errors were made in the way the samples of salmon tissue were collected and in the way the data resulting from analysis of those samples were analyzed.

“The basic data upon which everything rests is questionable at this time,” said Kornfield, who served on a 1994 governor’s task force that concluded salmon in the Penobscot River were genetic mongrels.

More importantly, he said, an alternate explanation for the genetic differences was overlooked. In small populations — only a few dozen salmon are known to have returned to the eight rivers — genetic variability is lost, a phenomenon known as genetic drift. The small numbers of salmon are the reason for the differences in genetic makeup that Tim King found between Maine and Canadian fish, Kornfield said.

Tim King refused to comment on Kornfield’s assertions, which were echoed in the state’s report by John Gold, a fish geneticist at Texas A&M who was enlisted by the state to review King’s study.

In addition to skewing genetic analysis, Kornfield said, the existence of such small populations of salmon causes bad attributes to come to the surface, which can cause decreased performance in the fish and lead to a downward population spiral.

The current river-specific stocking program, wherein brood-stock fish from a specific river are taken to federal hatcheries to produce salmon that are put back into that river, is compounding the problem, the governor said. Not only does this program cause inbreeding, but when it was begun in 1991, scientists warned that only a small number of fish would return to the rivers in the late 1990s, King said.

The state should not now be penalized with a federal endangered species listing when it was known that few fish would come back to Maine’s rivers, King said.

For this reason, King said, he was asking for an independent investigation of the stocking program. He said he did not know who could do such an investigation because there are a limited number of people with expertise in the field and many of them are already aligned on one side or the other of the Atlantic salmon debate.

King said it was too late to change course for this year’s stocking program, which will soon be under way.

At an Atlantic Salmon Commission meeting two weeks ago, a federal scientist was asked by Maine’s commissioner of marine resources if it was time to review the stocking program. It was too early to tell if the program was successful, the scientist said.

On Friday, Paul Nickerson of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s endangered species division, reiterated that sentiment.

“To blame this on river-specific stocking, when it hasn’t been tested … is quite a stretch of the imagination,” he said.

But, Nickerson said, a review of the stocking program is welcomed.

In addition, he said, his agency and the National Marine Fisheries Service will review all the public comments and if they find that they have made mistakes in their scientific analysis, they will re-evaluate their proposal to list Atlantic salmon as an endangered species.

The agencies have until Nov. 17 either to move forward with listing the fish or to withdraw the proposal. The deadline can be extended for six months if there is substantial disagreement among scientists.

“I’m comfortable with our position,” Nickerson said.

A business-oriented group calling itself the Maine Salmon Rescue Coalition filed its own scientific analysis Friday. It also concluded there is no distinct population segment because of stocking. The group includes the Maine Chamber and Business Alliance, Maine Wild Blueberry Commission, Maine Forest Products Council, Maine Pulp and Paper Association, Bangor Hydro-Eectric Co., Penobscot Hydro and FPL Energy.

“How can a reasonable person not conclude that these rivers have been hit hard by stocking?” asked Alan Spear of Bangor Hydro, a member of the coalition.

He said his company’s opposition to the listing proposal is motivated by concerns about the economic well-being of its customers. Spear said declaring salmon an endangered species won’t augur well for the blueberry and aquaculture industries.

On the other side of the issue, Trout Unlimited’s comments filed Thursday are strongly in favor of the listing proposal because the group believes the state has not done enough to protect the fish. This is evidenced by the fact that all salmon fishing was just halted in December, and then an emergency bill to reopen Maine’s rivers to it was passed by the Maine Senate last week, said the group, which last year joined a federal lawsuit calling for an emergency salmon listing. The bill was not supported in the House and ultimately died.

“Maine has clearly demonstrated that it has neither the will nor the ability to protect her salmon without ESA oversight,” said Charles Gauvin, the group’s president. “With salmon on the brink of extinction, it’s time to use the best tool for species conservation: the Endangered Species Act.”