Orca report

[Sandberm]

And to add to the anecdotal evidence...

A few years back I shot a round at a 3d archery shoot with a gentleman  who worked for the Bonneville Power Administration. I questioned him about the relationship between the dams and the wind turbines. He told me that weather models have gotten so good at predicting when the wind would blow that they are able to, in essence, turn the dams off and turn the wind turbines on with great efficiency.

However, wind turbines are NOT a replacement for dams, they just compliment them.

[7mmfan]

One of the big problems as I understand it, is the competition for forage out there (especially in the Gulf of Alaska).  Alaska has a huge hatchery pink program that is supposedly consuming a crazy amount of the salmon food.  So.....with ocean feed limited, if you send a bunch more Snake river (Columbia system) chinook out to sea, then you have Puget Sound chinook being outcompeted.  Result being that fewer chinook would return to Puget Sound, and the killer whales will have even less to eat.  So, removing the snake dams would be detrimental to Puget Sound whales.  Anyone else hear anything similar to this?

Ocean conditions play more of a roll in food availability than actual competition amongst salmon species. Even at elevated hatchery production levels there is nowhere near the biomass of salmon in the ocean today that there was historically. The biggest threat to young chinook salmon in the Gulf is Pollock trawlers. Mile long nets scoop up everything in their path, including entire schools of juvenile chinook. If you want to hear horror stories about nets being pulled up that have more chinook in them than Pollock, head to AK and talk to some trawlers.

[WSU]

Wild Fish Conservancy and the Center for Biologic Diversity just sent NOAA a notice of intent to sue.  The threatened lawsuit is based on NOAA conducting ocean fisheries that remove a large percentage of the orca's food.  Basically, with the knowledge we have now, NOAA permitting the harvest of the orca's food is allegedly illegal under the ESA.