... male announcer: This program was made possible with generous support from the Open Rivers Fund, a program supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Patagonia Media Grants, the Maybelle Clark McDonald Foundation, the Freas Foundation, the Dalton Family Trust, and the North Umpqua Foundation.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Shane Anderson: The world has not lost an entire race of salmon since the prehistoric saber tooth went extinct over 5 million years ago.

♪♪♪ Shane: But now time is running out for the last wild runs of spring Chinook, arguably, the most revered Pacific salmon.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Deborah Giles: Salmon are the most amazing species on the planet, and really, if you're talking about one group of those salmon, the spring Chinook salmon are at the top of that list.

Silas Whitman: Spiritual importance, that fish is very pronounced.

Russ Thurow: Friend of mine calls them mariners and mountaineers, and that's really an apt description of these fish.

They're basically the best of the best, and these fish are at really high risk of extinction.

Mike Miller: Spring run's just a good example of a species that is so critical from an ecological, a cultural, and an economic perspective, yet it's just disappearing, and they've been disappearing for decades, and nobody's really done anything about it.

They're the lost salmon.

♪♪♪ Shane: I've spent the better part of the past decade documenting wild salmon, the places they live, and the issues they face.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Shane: The magic of wild salmon is their connection to place.

With every species, life history, and migration genetically designed and intimately connected to their home waters and ecological communities, there are still some places left on earth where you can see landscapes come alive during the annual migrations.

♪♪♪ Shane: But closer to home, the fabric that wild salmon weave throughout the northwest continues to unravel at alarming rates, with many species from many places at risk.

♪♪♪ Shane: As the first salmon to arrive home, the spring run of Chinook have one of the most fascinating migrations in the animal kingdom.

They're a species of desire for an entire ecosystem, but victims of the modern world.

They've been the sacrament and cornerstone for some of the oldest civilizations in North America and one of the most sought-after fish on earth that triggers a cult-like following of fishermen.

♪♪♪ Shane: Chinook have the largest range out of any Pacific salmon, but springers only exist in the southern end, where over half the genetically unique populations have already been extirpated.

♪♪♪ Shane: So, why has one of the most revered animals on earth been allowed to virtually disappear from the vast number of rivers they once called home?

And what does their future hold?

These questions led me on a two year journey throughout salmon country in search for the last wild springers, while exploring their connection to people and place and a new genetic discovery that could help save the king of salmon before it's too late.

Mike Miller: My name's Mike Miller.

I'm a genetics professor in the Department of Animal Science at the University of California Davis, and this is my genetics lab.

My goal as a geneticist is to use genetics to improve conservation outcomes for threatened and endangered species.

We've probably worked on more species than just about anyone else on the planet.

We've been pretty interested in the genetic basis of migration characteristics, and we've worked on that in a number of species from, you know, monarch butterflies to Pacific salmon.

In many ways, the application of genetics to issues in conservation have been pioneered in salmon for the last 50 years.

Salmon are always at the forefront of how to use genetics in the most efficient way to help conserve species.

And one of the reasons is that many salmon populations are threatened or endangered or are already extinct.

And over the last 20 years, as methods within genetics have changed, and some of these methods are methods that I was involved in developing, it became possible to really do high resolution genetic analysis of virtually any species.

And when that became possible, I knew what I wanted to work on.

Obviously, I wanted to work on salmon.

One of the most striking variations within a biological species of salmon is differences in adult migration timing.

So, spring Chinook verses fall Chinook, for example.

So, I wanted to understand the gene or the genes that were involved in that process, but then also how that genetic variation evolved.

David Montgomery: If you look at what happened in the period when the Pacific salmon diversified during about 20 million years ago and 10 million years ago, the whole physiography, the topography of the western edge of North America changed radically.

The Olympic Mountains came up.

The northern California coast ranges were up.

The Cascade Range got taller.

The mountains on the edge of western North America changed right in that period when the Pacific salmon evolved into the species we know today from the ancestral salmon.

The evolution of the topography shaped the evolution of the Pacific salmon.

In other words, the salmon evolved right along with the landscape that we know today.

Shane: Chinook are the largest and most diverse out of the five species of Pacific salmon, and evolved to have different seasonal migrations.

In Alaska, in the northern hemisphere, they migrate in the summer when rivers are free from ice.

And in the southern end of the range, they predominantly return in the spring, summer, and fall.

♪♪♪ Shane: They're born in fresh water nests called a redd, where their home waters are imprinted into their DNA before migrating to the ocean where their body chemistry changes as they adapt to salt.

♪♪♪ Shane: Their ocean migrations are based off their rivers of origin as they travel thousands of miles over several years, foraging for food and utilizing internal compass navigation until a primal instinct calls them home, where they're able to smell their way back to the very waters they were born in.

Mike: Salmon populations become adapted to these very specific environments.

When I say adaptation, I'm talking about genetic differences that cause individuals to have distinct characteristics that allow them to be successful in the habitat, in this very specific habitat that they've evolved to utilize for thousands of years.

Shane: A spring migration allowed Chinook to reach habitats that no other salmon could by getting a head start on long migrations and timing spring runoff perfectly to ascend waterfalls.

Mike: So they migrate up in the spring over summer through really harsh conditions.

But the benefit they get is they get to spawn a couple months earlier than what fall Chinook would be able to spawn, and it gives them a competitive advantage.

♪♪♪ Shane: After returning home from one of the most arduous journeys in the animal kingdom, they will select a partner and pass down 15 million years of genetic information to the next generation, before making the ultimate sacrifice.

One of the few animals on earth that will never know their offspring.

♪♪♪ Shane: Just as salmon coevolved with the landscape, people coevolved with them.

Shannon Wheeler: The Nez Perce have been documented 16,500 years, the oldest archeological site in North America.

To this day, it is a Nez Perce site.

And so it pretty much crushed the ice bridge theory.

That relationship to salmon is part of our creation story.

Silas: Naco'x kuus, naco'x kuus, naco'x kuus is the generic name for the salmon, but usually it applied to spring Chinook, which were the first ones coming in.

They're probably the filet mignon of the fish world when they cook them.

The oil has got a magical propensity to do healing.

Salmon were the ones that said, "We will help to save these people.

And to make sure that their time on earth is spent wisely, we will give of ourselves.

Naka Williamson-Cloud: Because of that ancient covenant we had with the salmon as the first one that stepped forward on our behalf, and all those that lined up behind him, that it's the way that we also show the salmon that we still need him, we still appreciate him, and that's part of what's bringing him back is to fulfill his promise to our people.

Their spiritual well-being and our physical well-being is attached to these traditional foods, as well.

From that standpoint, you know, I think genetically salmon is imprinted on our DNA because if you think about the generations, thousands, going back thousands of years that our people have subsisted on these, and those are the foods that our bodies know.

Mike: Willamette Falls in this area was a hub for people long before people of European ancestry started colonizing the West, and it was a hub because it was such an important salmon fishery.

I wish I could've seen them in person before they looked like this.

The West was colonized through Oregon City, which was the end of the Oregon Trail.

I was born at Willamette Falls Hospital.

My great grandma worked at the diner for almost 40 years.

Her great grandfather came to Oregon on the Oregon Trail.

You know, just growing up, salmon was such an important part of the culture.

It's just what people talked about, you know.

It was just an area of blue collar, salmon fishermen.

Mike: I never planned to become a geneticist, that's for sure.

The only thing I'd actually ever thought about becoming was a fishing guide.

There's still a spring Chinook fishery.

It's primarily supported by hatchery fish.

The fishing's just not as good as it used to be.

It's inconsistent.

There's some years where the returns are really low.

And Willamette produced a large number of spring Chinook, certainly hundreds of thousands, if not millions each year.

Now all the major tributaries have unpassable dams on them.

You know, we've degraded the habitat so substantially that the Willamette barely supports any natural production of spring run.

Shane: Willamette Falls was the end of the Oregon Trail but the beginning of western expansion, where new ideology of manifesting destiny changed the ancient relationship with salmon.

Wilbur Stockish: We had a commerce system in place, and salmon was our economy.

And as soon as the settlers arrived, and they disrupted it.

They wanted to catch them all, because they thought it would never end, not realizing that our people never took more than we could use.

That's why there was millions of fish.

Shane: As unregulated harvest was in full swing, the West was being built on the backs of salmon.

Rivers were turned inside-out in search for gold.

Ancient forests were liquidated and entire watersheds dammed.

♪♪♪ Wilbur: Each one of these dams right now that are built here are built on village sites and are built on fishing places.

Shane: To mitigate for the loss of salmon, fish hatcheries were seen as the silver bullet.

By creating a factory production system, it was assumed that salmon would no longer need rivers to provide fisheries.

Wilbur: That was the promise: we will supplement and rebuild.

You'll have more fish than you have previously had.

♪♪♪ Tasha Thompson: Genetic advances have happened really, really rapidly over the last few years.

This is being called the golden age of genetics right now.

Genetics basically says how you inherit different characteristics from your parents.

We have one copy of our DNA from our mom, right, and one copy of our DNA from our dad.

And salmon are exactly the same.

That DNA contains this instruction manual to build everything in the organism.

If you're a fish it says how or where to put scales.

It tells you what you're supposed to eat, if you're supposed to be afraid of the killer whale or not.

It contains everything.

I joined Mike's lab right as they were working on the initial discovery, and that was life-changing for me in so many different ways.

Mike: So, geneticists are interested in variations.

So, when you're looking out in nature, and you see a variation within a species, genetics is about understanding that variation.

Tasha: A species can be incredibly diverse within that species, and that's the case for Chinook salmon.

Mike: If spring run Chinook were to disappear, it was thought that they could re-evolve rapidly from fall run Chinook.

Tasha: We took spring Chinook, and we took fall run Chinook, and we compared their DNA across large sections of their genome, and we found that there was this one single region that had this gene called GREB1L that was different between spring run and fall run Chinook.

And the difference we see between spring Chinook and fall Chinook is just screaming.

Like, it's a huge difference.

Mike: I thought it was really cool, you know.

We figured out the spring run gene.

I know that at least five Endangered Species Act petitions that have been submitted directly based upon our research.

Four were in Chinook salmon, and one was in steelhead.

Steelhead also have early and late migrating form, and it turns out it's the exact same gene and evolutionary mechanism that produces summer run versus winter run steelhead.

That genetic variant at the single gene is so important to protect, because if that disappears, we might have to wait a million years to get it back.

Tasha: That risk is what's going to end up being factored into the Endangered Species Act.

♪♪♪ Richard Nixon: These problems will not stand still for politics or for partisanship.

Shane: The Endangered Species Act is one of America's bedrock environmental laws that was enacted by the Nixon Administration in 1973 with unanimous support from the Senate.

And today, 28 distinct population segments of salmon have been listed as threatened or endangered.

Mike: The Endangered Species Act doesn't just protect distinct biological species, but there's a clause in it that also legally protects what are called distinct population segments within a biological species.

That distinct population segment clauses is the reason why most species are protected--for example, grizzly bears or bald eagles.

If the Endangered Species Act only protected distinct biological species, Chinook salmon could go extinct in California, in Oregon, and Washington, but the overall biological species wouldn't be threatened or endangered, because there'd be some healthy individuals in Alaska.

It's important to conserve this diversity, this subspecies level diversities, adaptations to distinct geographic areas.

The question is, well, what constitutes a distinct population segment of salmon?

Our results show that spring run do warrant some kind of protection under the Endangered Species Act.

But right now spring run populations and fall run populations are grouped into the same conservation unit.

Shane: Current management can be problematic in rivers like the Klamath, where tens of thousands of fall Chinook still return and provide a harvest opportunity for local communities, compared to the spring run that's on the brink of extinction.

Shane: Right now, the driving force behind the conservation policy has been that if spring run disappear, they can easily come back.

We found that that's not the case, right?

If spring run disappear, they're gone forever.

I thought, well then obviously the conservation policy would change, but I was really naïve.

I didn't realize the power that politics can have on science.

♪♪♪ Shane: The Columbia Basin was once home to the largest Chinook population on earth, before 60 dams wiped out two-thirds of their genetic diversity.

But one of the greatest races of salmon still exists and travels over 800 river miles past eight dams and climbs over 6,000 vertical feet into Idaho's middle fork of the Salmon River.

♪♪♪ Shane: Since fall Chinook are unable to make this epic migration, this is one of the few populations of spring Chinook that are listed under the Endangered Species Act.

Russ: It's the largest wilderness area in the lower 48.

A lot of the drainage is still intact.

So, the Middle Fork is particularly unique, because it supports one of the few remaining wild populations of spring, summer Chinook in the entire Columbia basin.

We assessed populations across the whole drainage, and only 4% of the existing spring, summer Chinook habitat still supports wild Chinook like we have here in the Middle Fork.

In all those other drainages, they've either been extirpated, or they've been altered by hatchery fish introductions.

These fish are still the native wild genetic population.

And we have diversity both within tributaries and across tributaries.

♪♪♪ Russ: There's an account in the Lewis and Clark journal where they write, "Salmon numbers are almost inconceivable."

They were talking about Chinook.

How many salmon?

The historical account suggests somewhere between 10 and 16 million adult Chinook entered the Columbia each year.

Two to six million of those came into the Snake Basin that were part of here in the salmon.

♪♪♪ Shane: Finding wild spring Chinook today in the Snake Basin is no easy task, and at an average of one adult salmon per river mile, the Middle Fork is the last bastion, where Russ has been monitoring these unique populations for over four decades.

Russ: Just keep a low profile.

You might want to get your tripod set up in case she turns and starts digging.

Russ: A lot of the fish will spawn in the same riffle where they came out of the gravel as fry.

Our fish produce a lot of eggs.

The average female produces about 5,000 eggs.

Some people call these the ultra marathoners, the mariners and mountaineers of the salmon world.

These fish are migrating over 800 miles to here, and they're climbing close to 6,600 feet in elevation at this spot, and there's no others in the world that do that, so they're the best of the best, the rarest of the rare.

Basins like the Middle Fork that are very high elevation are going to maintain cold air refugia, even in the face of a changing climate.

And so the fish here have a better chance of surviving as lower elevation areas are warming.

Shane: Don't they have different characteristics where they select the strongest mate?

Russ: Yeah, and I mean what we're witnessing here right now is natural selection here on the spawning beds today.

The dominant males are driving off the lesser males, and they're jockeying for position next to the female to get their sex products in the mix, so that they're part of the next generation.

That's what all the fighting and driving each other away and stuff is.

All those things are an adaption that has been developed over millions of years to make these fish the strongest they can be.

And if they weren't, we would not have them anymore.

They'd have been gone decades ago.

It's hard to predict how long they have, but some scientists have said probably about four generations.

Mike: Those fish are so unique.

If those fish are lost, they're not gonna come back in any kind of timeframes that humans think on, which I think it is tragic, when you consider how unique and how amazing they are.

And, you know, that's not even considering what that would mean to the tribes that have relied on them for thousands of years.

Nakia: So, we're here today practicing our tradition of coming to catch the salmon.

This area we call Yawwinma or Rapid River, which means the cold water.

And right with the junction with the Mu'lpe or the Middle Salmon River, which was a traditional campsite of the Nez Perce people going back thousands of years.

Many of our families originated from this area along the Salmon River.

This has become a more important fishery for Nez Perce people is because the Salmon River doesn't have any dams on it.

One of the largest Chinook fisheries for the Nez Perce people are sitting behind Dworshak Dam currently.

♪♪♪ Nakia: We have only a few places that have remained good enough to still continue our fishing practices.

♪♪♪ Nakia: So, the supplementation efforts that happened right here, the ability to try to mitigate for those dams that have been built on many of these rivers, but still we find us at the point where maintaining those genetics or maintaining the stock that originated from these places, which is important, it don't look like it's sustainable without us taking another step.

♪♪♪ Russ: Honestly, every time I see these wild fish in this high-quality habitat spawning, it gives me hope, because they have overcome a whole lot of obstacles to still be here.

We're about 2% of what was here in the '50s and '60s.

We, as humans, tend to judge a resource's condition based on our current experience of that.

And so a lot of people really don't comprehend what the historical Chinook runs were and what the true potential is.

So, there's a long history of studying Chinook in Idaho.

Really starts back in the 1940s.

In about 1957, Idaho Fish and Game standardized surveys in six different Middle Fork tributaries, including Marsh Creek.

The Middle Fork supported close to 50,000 adults.

That was through the 1950s, '60s, before the precipitous declines.

Shane: The collapse of the Middle Fork spring Chinook directly correlated with the construction of four controversial dams on the lower Snake River that would have unintended consequences for migration.

Russ: The migration corridor in the Snake and Columbia has been dramatically altered.

There are now 325 miles of reservoir in what was once a free-flowing river.

And those reservoirs and the dams that create them have dramatically increased the mortality in migrating smolts, in particular, but also adults.

Within the Columbia Basin, you know, there have been efforts to recover salmon steelhead for close to 40 years now.

I think the estimate now is over 18 billion dollars have been spent on those efforts, and yet our fish are still at very high risk of extinction based on the most recent National Marine Fisheries Service Recovery Plan.

Shannon: Turn those bigger dials.

Breach the dams.

That's the one we can control now, let's do it.

I'm pretty sure it's going to work.

Science says yes.

Russ: The Comparative Survival Study reaffirms it again, and essentially says that if the Snake is restored, we'll see at least a threefold increase in run sizes, and if the Snake restoration is coupled with maximum spill at the remaining Columbia dams, that would result in a fourfold increase.

You get another 1,000 adults back in here, and that's just going to keep building each generation, and we're going to have fishable populations again, and the whole ecosystem is going to respond.

This is a spent female, which means she's dug her redd, and she's deposited all of her eggs, and that's really good news.

With the warming climate, we've had an increase in what we call pre-spawning mortality, and a lot of that's due to high temperatures and the temperature stress that they're facing coming through the big reservoirs.

So, she has done the ultimate act of giving back to your kids, and her nutrients will go back into the stream, and those nutrients will help create the food chain that the young salmon will feed on.

The marine drive nutrients that these fish bring back are really the foundation for the whole ecosystem.

There's about 137 species that rely on salmon during some portion of their life history.

Deborah: The whale's fate is very closely intertwined with the fate of Pacific salmon.

There's a saying that says no fish, no black fish.

Specifically, when we're talking about spring returning salmon that would've been heading for the Snake River, those are the fish that the southern residents are desperate to have.

Killer whales worldwide are considered one species.

They're all Orcinus orca, just like humans are all homo sapiens.

But the fact of the matter is, is that there are different subgroups of killer whales that are distinct, and the southern residents are one of those groups of whales.

They don't outbreed from their distinct population segment.

They have not had a common mating with another population of killer whales for 700,000 years.

I fell in love with these animals more than three decades ago.

I just feel a deep responsibility to try and recover them, because they're amazing animals and because on a personal level I've come to know them as individuals.

♪♪♪ Deborah: It's not just studying a population of animals.

It's studying families of animals, and they care for one another by feeding each other, literally, sharing a fish.

♪♪♪ Deborah: Southern resident killer whales co-evolved with Pacific salmon, 95% plus of their diet is made up of Chinook salmon.

There is clear evidence from our research that the spring salmon are the most important for the whales.

Those fish make sense for the whales.

They're the biggest fish.

They're the fattiest fish.

They're the oldest fish.

And as the salmon decline, so do the whales.

♪♪♪ Deborah: Sixty-nine percent of pregnancies are lost before the baby is born viable.

That's a huge number for a population that's really small.

When we're talking about 72 animals, each needing to eat, on average, 350 pounds of salmon per day, that's a lot of poundage of salmon, and it's not out there where the whales need to find it, when they need to find it.

We're not moving fast enough in fisheries management overhaul.

Pumping a bunch of hatchery salmon into the system is not the answer in the long term.

Mike: Hatcheries are not a solution to the problem of biodiversity loss in salmon.

Hatcheries have very distinct characteristics from wild rivers, and what happens is fish become adapted to the hatchery environment.

That's also referred to as domesticated.

They become domestic.

Deborah: Not only the quantity of salmon, but the quality of salmon.

Salmon are shrinking.

You used to have 100-pound Chinook salmon.

A killer whale only had to catch three of those a day to get their nutritional needs met.

It's really hard to have a killer whale trying to make a living foraging on 10-pound Chinook salmon.

♪♪♪ Shane: It's not just the size of salmon that humans have influenced.

Recent genetic work has highlighted a rising problem with increases in interbreeding between spring and fall Chinook.

Matt Sloat: It's a kind of a nuance problem, but it turns out to be a really big deal.

Fall Chinook have fared fairly well, compared to spring Chinook, so there's many more of them now.

Mike: These increases in interbreeding have been caused by human modifications to habitat.

If you build a big dam on a river, it prevents spring run from getting up into the upper headwaters, and then the fall run migrate up and spawn right on top of them.

In some places, humans have blown up these small waterfalls and barriers.

Fall Chinook are now able to ascend them.

And when spring Chinook are directly competing with fall Chinook, they will lose.

So, what happens is when spring and fall Chinook interbreed, they create these offspring that have one copy of the spring variant and one copy of the fall variant.

Well, it turns out those individuals migrate at an intermediate time, so they're kind of like a summer migrator.

Matt: Migrating in summer is a really bad idea, when stream flows are really low and really warm.

Unfortunately, they're creating a fish that is what we call maladapted, so it's expressing this run timing that really is not going to be very successful.

Most of those fish don't survive.

Larry Lestelle: This particular project that we're looking at, it really was triggered by concern of the Quinault Indian Nation over the prospect of a new dam going into the upper Chehalis and what that might do to salmon runs.

And then the second thing is the concern over the status of spring Chinook.

Hybridization is a threat, and the data that's being collected here on this project will be very informative about that.

Dave Bingaman: And we expect this to be a three year project.

This is year two, generally trapping from January to maybe early May, looking at the emergence of the Chinook fry out of the redds or the spawning grounds.

These samples are then sent to UC Davis for genetic sampling to determine which of these fry are spring Chinook, which are fall Chinook, and which has been a hybrid between the two.

So, trying to identify the ratio of them is going to help us in management and some other issues in the future.

Mike: It's an example of how genetics can just help us understand some basic things like how many spring Chinook there are left in a location.

What the results of that study told us is that there are hardly any spring Chinook left in the Chehalis.

We've been actually overestimating the number, and this is during a time when there's a proposal to build a large new dam in one of the most important habitats.

The process of considering whether this new dam should be built or not will fundamentally change if spring Chinook are legally protected.

Shane: About 40 miles to the north of the Chehalis, the Queets River flows out of the Olympic National Park wilderness.

It's often referred to as one of the wildest rivers left in the lower 48 and where I first became concerned over the plight of spring Chinook over a decade ago.

Shane: The Quinault Nation has been conducting annual spawning surveys in the upper Queets for over 40 years.

So, I jumped on the opportunity to tag along and take the easy way in this time.

♪♪♪ Shane: The Queets River, in particular the upper portion of the basin where a lot of these spring Chinooks spawn, it's a very remote area.

To hike up here, you would have to get an entire fisheries crew to hike in, you know, nearly 20 miles to do this monitoring.

It's a very narrow window to get up here and observe this spawning population, so we utilize helicopters to shuttle crews up to these areas, so that we can get the work done efficiently.

Shane: Did you already get it in your notes?

male: No.

Shane: Okay.

I'll write it down in my notes while you're flagging the redd.

Two, three, four, five, six.

We enumerate all the Chinook nests that we encounter, the redds in the gravel.

We flag the redd, and then we document its location, time, and any live or dead fish associated with that redd.

There's no good estimates of historical abundance on these rivers hundreds of years ago, but Private Harry Fisher, he walked down this river basin in the month of September, when these spring Chinook were spawning in like, 1890, and described sleeping near the river as this constant ruckus of fish splashing through the ripples.

I think that speaks to the abundance of these fish then.

♪♪♪ Shane: The habitat is certainly here to support some very large populations.

We are covering approximately 15 miles of river today through the prime range that spring Chinook utilize for spawning in the upper Queets Basin.

♪♪♪ Shane: We have three separate Quinault Fisheries crews that are surveying today.

Per fish, we invest more money, time, and effort in monitoring these spring Chinook than almost any other salmon stock on the coast, and the tribe doesn't harvest these fish anymore.

They're just protecting them, and they're protecting them for future generations.

Albert Lewis-Hawks: The numbers are dwindling, and it's just sad to say that I'm a part of the generation that sees that.

I've only seen one new redd and one old one.

Shane: The spring Chinook population in the Queets has been chronically depressed for a long time.

In the '70s, we had run sizes up to 4,000 springers.

Now we're seeing average abundance around 300 to 500 fish.

The big Chinook that old-timers talked about catching 50 pound, 60 pound, 70 pound, 100 pound Chinook were the older-aged fish, age six and seven year old Chinook.

We've all but seen those fish disappear.

We rarely encounter fish older than 5 years of age.

♪♪♪ Matt: It seems like the habitats are changing more rapidly.

There's more instability in the upper basin.

Historically, there was substantial glacier ice.

We've seen these glaciers recede way back up into the upper portions of those glacial basins.

There's much less glacial ice feeding these systems.

We've completely lost glaciers in the Quinault system.

The Anderson glacier has melted away, and the steepest decline in the runs here are on the west side of the peninsula, is in the Quinault system.

In 2020, we estimated the spawning population was 65 adult spring Chinook.

Once you get down into less than 500 fish in a population, you're sort of talking about pseudo extinction levels.

Our Chinook stocks in the Washington north coast are far north migrating, certainly, a gauntlet of fisheries that they pass through.

We know through our coded wire tagging programs, the overall harvest on our fall Chinook stock is somewhere in the realm of 50% to 60% on average.

If we assume spring Chinook have a similar distribution in the ocean, they're likely being harvested at a similar rate, and the commercial fisheries that operate there are, you know, what we call mixed stock fisheries, so they're catching Chinook.

But in most cases, they don't know which populations they're actually harvesting.

And so it creates a situation where unintentionally you could be harvesting an endangered Chinook population.

Deborah: And so when we are working hard to recover these salmon runs, it's challenging when the bulk of those fish are being caught in another state, branded as that state's fish, and sold literally around the world.

That's one of the biggest problems.

♪♪♪ Shane: In addition to mixed stock fisheries, factory trawling fleets targeting bottom fish encounter an enormous amount of by-catch, and it's currently unknown the impacts on spring Chinook.

Mike: Now, with genetics, I think we can understand the impact that these fisheries are having, and if necessary, reform them to decrease their impact.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Barry McCovey, Jr.: Historically, this was the third largest salmon-producing river on the West Coast.

There's spring Chinook and fall Chinook on the Klamath, and historically the spring Chinook were the dominant run.

There were more spring Chinook.

Deborah: We know from satellite tagged southern resident killer whales that K pod in particular loops around the mouth of the Klamath River.

There's institutional knowledge in that pod reminding them that those would've been important rivers for salmon in the past.

Matt: The runs that we have now are nothing compared to what we experienced in the past.

One of the main reasons is those dams that were put in and basically cut the water shed in half.

Shane: The four Klamath dams block over 400 miles of spawning habitat.

And after a 20-year effort driven by an Endangered Species Act listing of coho salmon, the dams are finally slated to be removed.

Tasha: I analyzed these archeological samples of Chinook bones that were collected from archeological sites in the upper Klamath.

We found both spring run Chinook and fall run Chinook in this location above where these dams had blocked fish passage, and the 5,000-year-old sample was a spring Chinook sample.

Matt: The habitat in the upper basin is like some of the most climate resilient habitat you could think of on the West Coast.

It's these huge, massive cold-water springs that bubble up, providing reliable cold water year round, which is so rare.

Mike: I'm an extreme optimist, and I'm going to do everything I can as a geneticist to try to help this process of restoring Chinook salmon in the upper basin.

But to be honest, it's going to be tough.

There are consequences of causing the populations that were adapted to that unique habitat in the upper basin to go extinct for the last 100 years.

As we're losing populations around the basin, we're losing that diversity that will let them thrive in the future.

So, in a case like the Salmon River, what we're trying to do is hold onto what's left.

You know, those are the building blocks for recovery.

♪♪♪ Karuna Greenberg: Thanks, everyone, for coming out.

We really, really appreciate it.

This is the 27th year of Cooperative Spring Chinook Summer Steelhead Dives.

We've had six years in a row of less than 200 fish return.

I'm really hoping that you guys can go out there and see at least more fish than we saw last year.

Hopefully, we can break that 200 mark.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Nat Pennington: We've gone a couple of miles at least so far, and we haven't seen too many salmonids.

We've seen a couple of steelhead, no spring Chinook, yet.

This is my 26th year in a row doing this specific survey.

One of the larger runs that we saw, we had 1,800 fish.

The last four or five years have been almost nearly record low.

Good things are in the works.

Got dam removal which, you know, actually will help the Salmon River fish a lot, too, because they have to travel, you know, through the Klamath.

Shane: The dams don't just block fish passage.

They also harbor toxic algae, release lethally warm water, and exacerbate Ceratonova shasta, a disease that kills juvenile salmon.

Kenneth Brink: All right, can I help some more people see some more fish?

Karuna: How's it looking so far?

Not so good?

Kenneth: This whole culture of Karuk people who depend on the salmon, it's a way of life, you know.

It's a part of our ceremonies, and I've never in my time been able to participate with the shaman, the medicine man that fought the wind and was able to go out and catch that salmon, because they've been declining so much that we've literally lost that part to our ceremony.

That means that hurts my heart, because, you know, my kids didn't see that ceremony.

I didn't see that ceremony, you know.

male: Finally got the final numbers in, and it's not great.

Karuna: We're looking at 79 adults on 6 jacks, for a total of 85, just another year of not-so-great spring Chinook out here.

Mike: Yeah, obviously, this is a horrible count.

I came optimistic.

I was hoping maybe there'd be a few hundred fish.

I thought it can't be as bad as it's been the last few years, and to have it be even worse is horrible.

So, I think there is a lot of reason to be hopeful with the dams coming out, with the listing.

This listing acknowledged that there's a serious problem that needs to be dealt with.

Shane: After years of petitioning for the protection of spring Chinook under the Endangered Species Act and failed attempts at the federal level, the state of California recently listed spring Chinook as a threatened species, utilizing research out of the Miller lab and traditional ecological knowledge from the Karuk Tribe.

Kenneth: Thank God this genetic work came through for us.

Like, who is to say if the springer didn't get listed, this could be the last year we ever count them up here.

Now we know this is our last stronghold, and we've known this for a while.

Now the bureaucrats gotta realize this is true.

So, we've gotta go from here and start rehabilitating this river.

Mike: The springer issue is not an issue just in the Klamath.

It's an issue all up and down the West Coast, throughout the entire range of spring Chinook.

And this listing that was driven by the Karuk Tribe and the Salmon River Restoration Council, it's because of, you know, this, what's going on here.

But that listing, I think, will set the precedent that will lead to protections for spring run all up and down the West Coast.

So, I mean that's huge.

♪♪♪ Shane: A testament to the resilience of wild spring Chinook came by surprise in what I considered the most unlikely location on a tributary of the Sacramento River in California.

Mike: There's a couple small creeks where no dams were built, and the spring run are still able to access habitat that the fall run can't easily get to.

And one of them in particular kicks out a decent number of fish.

It's not a coincidence that the place with the most wild springers left in California is really, really hard to get to.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Shane: After a rugged hike into the canyon, it was nothing short of amazing to witness more salmon than I'd ever seen in one place.

♪♪♪ Shane: It's likely we had stumbled upon the largest single population of wild springers left on earth, and their story was different.

These salmon don't migrate north in the ocean through the gauntlet of commercial fisheries.

There are no dams impeding their migration, causing indirect effects.

There's no hatchery influence.

They have good habitat, and they remain isolated from fall Chinook and hybridization.

♪♪♪ Shane: If over 18,000 wild spring Chinook can return to Butte Creek, they can recover anywhere if given a chance, but climate impacts are mounting.

A week after we were at Butte Creek, a record heat wave ignited a disease outbreak, and over 12,000 fish died before spawning.

But 6,000 survived and will pass down those resilient genes to the next generation.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Shane: These remaining wild populations are the guardians of a unique genetic lineage, and we have a chance to build on the salmon's powerful instinct to survive.

Will policy catch up with science before it's too late?

And will this new genetic discovery lead to further protections under the Endangered Species Act?

Saving spring Chinook will take 21st century solutions to 20th century problems.

Like on Washington's Nooksack River, where tribes, agencies, conservation groups, and municipalities work together in the removal of a century-old dam, while still providing drinking water to the city of Bellingham, giving the last few hundred wild spring Chinook a chance.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ male: Fire in the hole!

Here she goes!

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Shane: The ultimate fate of these fish lies in the public's hands.

If they want to recover 'em, we can do it.

Deborah: If we recover Pacific salmon enough to have southern resident killer whales not just surviving, but thriving as a population, it means that we've done amazing things to recover ecosystems, and, ultimately, that's a good thing for the planet, and it's a good thing for humans.

Shannon: Now, more than ever, our voice needs to be heard, and it needs to be amplified for salmon.

Tasha: In conserving biodiversity, conserves the keys to the puzzles and the questions of the future.

Mike: I am hopeful that the data we've generated and our new understanding will prevent their extinction.

Russ: There's magic in these fish, and I want to keep magic on this planet.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ male announcer: This program was made possible with generous support from the Open Rivers Fund, a program supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Patagonia Media Grants, the Maybelle Clark McDonald Foundation, the Freas Foundation, the Dalton Family Trust, and the North Umpqua Foundation.

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