A surprise awaited salmon swimming through the fish ladder at the Ballard Locks this week.
As they traversed the ladder’s 21 steps, three men hovered, waiting. Working together, the men scooped each salmon out of the water, placed its flailing body in a black sleeve and dropped it into a tank of water on a nearby boat, where it joined other captives.
Instead of the expected freshwater swim, an around 40-mile truck journey to the Cedar River Hatchery awaited the shiny, grayish fish.
More than ever, the sockeye salmon’s survival could hinge on this lifesaving trucking operation by the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe and state Department of Fish and Wildlife, said Mike Mahovlich, of Muckleshoot’s fisheries department.
This year’s sockeye salmon run through the Ballard Locks could be the lowest ever recorded, said Aaron Bosworth, a fish biologist for the state. As of Friday morning, he estimated only 8,000 to 10,000 fish would come through for the whole season, down from more than 23,000 last year, though it’s too early to know for sure.
This year’s cohort also arrived slightly later than usual. Viewing windows stood empty for much of June, with most salmon trickling in at the end of the month. Bosworth said this week and the next will be decisive in estimating how strong the run will be.
It’s a crucial period for the Ballard Locks Adult Sockeye Transfer program, launched in 2021, Mahovlich said. The program seeks to reduce sockeye salmon mortality rates by trucking them directly to a hatchery. This year, the program aims to transfer 3,200.
“It’s not every day you save a species,” he said, watching the fish squirm as they left the fish ladder. “And that’s what these guys are doing, they’re saving a salmon species.”
While sockeye salmon counts have dwindled for decades, this year is particularly concerning. Mahovlich said so many zeros in the daily sockeye counts in June “just doesn’t happen” usually.
That’s despite multiple initiatives to protect the sockeye population, including Seattle Public Utilities’ more than $30 million Cedar River Hatchery project.
Bosworth explained there are varying reasons for the struggles of the sockeye — a species which, during some years in the ’80s, arrived to the Locks in numbers topping 400,000. Young fish encounter nonnative predators in Lake Washington, ocean conditions can vary, high disease rates kill salmon before they can spawn and seals and sea lions prey on adults as they enter the fish ladder.
So far, the reasons for this specific year’s slowdown are hazy. It’s too early, with too many variables still at play, Mahovlich said.
One hypothesis is poor ocean conditions. But Laurie Weitkamp, a research fisheries biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said coastal water temperatures were favorably cool in 2021, and there were plenty of crab larvae for sockeye salmon to feast on in Puget Sound in 2022.
Marine heat waves in 2022, 2023 and 2024 in the Gulf of Alaska — where sockeye migrate during their life cycle — could have hurt the salmon count. A record-breaking sockeye run to Bristol Bay in 2022 may have created more competition for finding plankton to eat.
But overall, Weitkamp said ocean conditions for this year’s sockeye run were “not too bad.”
The other theory is residual effects from the 2021 heat dome that warmed up Lake Washington, she said. Many of the fish coming back to the lake now would have reared in those warm 2021 temperatures, losing fellow young fish to the harsh conditions.
News of falling sockeye counts is particularly devastating for the Muckleshoot, who have strong cultural ties to salmon, said Leeroy Courville Jr., chair of the Muckleshoot Fisheries Commission and a Muckleshoot Tribal Council member.
“We’ve actually lived off this fish for years and years, and for us to not be able to get it, it’s just heartbreaking,” Courville Jr. said.
Lake Washington was last open for sport sockeye fishing in 2006, when the run topped 400,000 for the year.
Frank Urabeck, an activist who fought for construction of SPU’s hatchery and the trucking experiment, remembered it as “the last great fishery.”
He said he’s concerned by this year’s sockeye outlook, but remains optimistic that “it’s an outlier.”
Elsewhere in the state, sockeye salmon at Skagit County’s Baker River have been returning in record numbers.
Against the backdrop of falling sockeye salmon counts at the Locks, the BLAST program has amped up its operations. Created so that salmon wouldn’t have to pass through the warm, pathogen-ridden Lake Washington before spawning, the program went from transferring 300 salmon in its first year to transporting 2,400 last year.
So far, no salmon have died en route to the hatchery, Mahovlich said. This year’s plan to transfer 3,200 will put the facility at capacity.
Lake Washington fisheries co-managers — with support from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — also launched a new iteration of their seal-deterrent strategy this year. They throw firecrackers from a boat to scare seals away from the fish ladder.
SPU has now spent around $35.5 million on sockeye mitigation projects affiliated with the hatchery since 2001. Despite this, environmental conditions and water quality issues that resulted in lethal diseases continue to contribute to the species’ decline, according to the agency. Last year, only 41 out of the hatchery’s 138 incubators were used.
But summer isn’t over yet. Perhaps with the warmer months will come droves of sockeye rushing past the windows of the Ballard Locks viewing room each day, instead of the lonely six meandering through on Tuesday morning.
Meanwhile, Mahovlich said “failure is not an option.”
“We’re not going to let this run go extinct,” he said.
