ABSTRACT
Salmon are a remarkable exception to the rule that valuable ocean fish are widely scattered and inherently expensive to harvest. Salmon breed in freshwater rivers, but migrate out to sea, usually as minnow-sized fish a year or less old; adults return from the ocean in a mass migration, years later, as fish generally weighing five to 50 pounds, to repeat the cycle. The Columbia River was once one of the world's great salmon rivers. It supported the predominant salmon fishery in the lower 48 United States. At the peak of the commercial Columbia River salmon fisheries, in the years around World War 1, annual production of the canneries was about 25 million pounds. The case of the Columbia Basin salmon is grist for the mill of the classic conservative critique of the Endangered Species Act. With the right spin, the story is one of heavy-handed federal intervention, enormous expenditures, and programs which failed to meet their objectives.
