Everyone knows the Snake River sockeye that came back from sixteen fish. Fewer people know that Puget Sound has its own version of that story — and it's happening right now, an hour north of Seattle.
The South Fork Stillaguamish fall Chinook fell so low — fewer than a hundred fish — that there weren't enough adults left to spawn a hatchery run the normal way. They should have been a footnote in the extinction column. Instead, the Stillaguamish Tribe reached in and pulled them back.
By 2007, the South Fork run was as close to gone as a run can get and still be counted.
South Fork Stillaguamish natural Chinook spawners averaged around 111 a year — a run hovering at the edge of viability.
In 2007, fewer than a hundred adults returned — too few to run a conventional hatchery program, and far too few to trust to chance.
At those numbers, the standard playbook doesn't work. Saving the run meant doing something more drastic — raising the fish themselves in captivity.
Beginning in 2007, the Stillaguamish Tribe launched a captive-broodstock program at its Brenner Creek Hatchery — taking the few young South Fork Chinook that remained and raising them all the way to adulthood in captivity, so that even a handful of survivors could be spawned. The first captive brood spawned in 2014.
Since then, the program has released more than a million South Fork Chinook back into the river, and the number of fish coming home has begun to climb. It is the same rescue that saved Redfish Lake sockeye from sixteen fish — carried out quietly, in Puget Sound, on our own home ground, by the tribe that has fished these waters since long before there was a Washington.
A run of under a hundred fish, left to the hands-off approach, is a run you are choosing to lose. There is no closing a fishery hard enough, no habitat plan patient enough, to conjure adults out of a population that small in time. The only thing that saves it is someone stepping in and carrying the genetics through, generation by generation, until the numbers recover.
The Stillaguamish Tribe did exactly that, and a run that was nearly gone is climbing again. That's not a theory about what active recovery could do — it's a Puget Sound Chinook run that still exists because of it. See the rest of the record, read about how we work, or get involved.
South Fork Stillaguamish Chinook are still a small, at-risk run — rescued from the brink, not yet recovered. And the river has a hard problem the hatchery can't solve alone: enormous loads of sediment, worsened by the 2014 Oso landslide, that smother spawning gravel. The broodstock program buys time; it does not, by itself, fix the watershed.
But buying that time is the whole point. Habitat work takes decades to pay off, and a run of under a hundred fish does not have decades. The captive-broodstock rescue is what keeps the run alive long enough for the rest of the recovery to matter.
The figures on this page are drawn from public, authoritative records:
Questions about our facts and figures? Contact us.