Proposal Seeks to Shock Sea Lions into Compliance

By Erik Robinson, The Columbian, Vancouver, Wash.

Jun. 1–The Northwest Power and Conservation Council will consider underwriting an electronic barrier across the Columbia River to ward off salmon-munching sea lions.

However, the barrier faces a high budgetary hurdle with the four-state council.

Smith-Root Inc. of Vancouver is proposing to string an electronic barrier across the Columbia River, combining it with a sonar array capable of distinguishing sea lions from fish. The idea is to activate the electric barrier only when sea lions are present, although company representatives say the low-level electric field wouldn’t injure fish even if they happened to encounter it while swimming near sea lions.

“Based on preliminary results obtained on marine mammals in British Columbia ? pinnipeds are extremely sensitive to underwater electric fields,” according to the Smith-Root proposal.

Smith-Root’s application to test the barrier is among 59 projects vying for $2 million in funding for innovative projects intended to improve salmon survival, said Mark Walker, public affairs director for the four-state power council based in Portland. Smith-Root is asking for $1.4 million over two years.

“There’s a lot of competition for a small pot of money,” Walker said.

The council, formed by the Northwest Power Act of 1980 to balance hydropower against fish and wildlife habitat degradation in the Columbia River basin, will vet the proposals before a panel of independent scientists. Walker said the Independent Scientific Advisory Board will send its recommendations to the full council in August.

The proposal has the support of U.S. Rep. Brian Baird, D-Vancouver, who has pushed for federal legislation to shoot nuisance sea lions.

“We share a mutual goal in protecting endangered salmon,” Baird wrote in a letter last month to Jeff Smith, the company’s chief executive. “To that end, the legislation also supports the development of nonlethal measures such as yours.”

Officials with the Army Corps of Engineers estimate that sea lions have devoured about 3 percent of the adult salmon arriving at Bonneville Dam over the past couple of years. Sea lion predation has increased in recent years, despite various nonlethal measures to harass the creatures near the dam.

Smith-Root’s proposed electronic barrier builds upon previous applications of the technology. The company has installed a barrier across the 163-foot-wide Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal to successfully keep invasive fish such as Asian big head carp from migrating out of the Mississippi River to the Great Lakes. The Columbia River, by contrast, measures roughly a mile across in its narrowest downriver reaches.

The jolts would be delivered by a series of electrodes mounted on the river bottom.

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Copyright (c) 2007, The Columbian, Vancouver, Wash.

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