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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stockman_scott who wrote (7337)	9/8/2006 12:51:24 PM
From: Skywatcher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36918

A fine example of how the GOP & Bush mis/administration works - if their policy does not produce the results they want...then just hide the results...God knows its the right policy - who needs facts?? ------------------------------------------------ Biologists first captured the wild chinook salmon along with hundreds of others in the Walla Walla River in the southeastern corner of Washington state. After nabbing the 3-inch-long fish in November 2002, they anesthetized it and inserted into its body cavity a half-inch-long tracker as part of a rapidly expanding program giving researchers new insights into the movements of salmon and steelhead in the Columbia River Basin... ...It was six months and 71 river miles later that biologists next heard from the fish, now known by a code starting with 3D9, as it followed spring flows downstream past McNary Dam on the Columbia River. It was headed for the Pacific... ...Meanwhile, the bit of data the fish's high-tech baggage contributed -- along with information supplied by similar tags in millions of other salmon and steelhead -- figured into a federal court decision in 2005 that went against the Bush administration. U.S. District Judge James Redden cited data from the Fish Passage Center in Portland in his decision to declare inadequate a federal plan for protecting salmon listed under the Endangered Species Act. His order to spill more water over dams to help young salmon reach the ocean, rather than running the water through turbines to generate electricity, cost an estimated $60 million in lost hydroelectric generation. Environmental groups say that court decision led Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, to make a legislative move to eliminate $1.3 million (the entire budget) for the Fish Passage Center, which interprets data from the tags. "Absolutely there was a correlation," said Bill Sedivy, executive director of Idaho Rivers United and one of the groups involved in the lawsuit that led to the ruling. "Instead of trying to figure out how to fix the problem of diminishing salmon returns, he sought to shoot the messenger." ... ...The center, which uses about 325,000 of the tags annually, remains open pending a lawsuit filed by environmentalists and Indian tribes... ..."Virtually anybody that is involved with fisheries in one way or another now uses this technology," said Earl Prentice, a Manchester, Wash.,-based fisheries research biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration... ..."Once you tag the fish, you only have to handle it one time," he said. And that is how biologists knew on May 10 of this year that salmon 3D9 was one of the 1 percent to 2 percent of salmon to survive their ocean odyssey and return to spawn. It had arrived at the Bonneville Dam fish ladder... ...The tag it carried sent a signal that was picked up by an antenna...It cleared the fish ladder at McNary Dam on May 17. On Aug. 4, it was detected by an instream listening post on the South Fork of the Walla Walla River in Oregon, about 375 river miles from the ocean. It was detected again the next day in the same area. "We haven't heard from the fish since," said Dave Marvin, a biologist and systems analyst at the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission. "We assume it has come back to its spawning ground." oregonlive.com