BIOLOGISTS FEAR FOR FATE OF HATCHERY FISH

By CRAIG MEDRED
Daily News outdoors editor

ANCHORAGE- All around the rim of oil fouled Prince William Sound, young salmon by the millions are preparing to emerge from the streams of their birth into a sea that has become a manmade disaster area.

No one knows how many of these fish are destined to become victims of North America's largest oil spill, but the prognosis for their survival is far from rosy.

Some will be killed outright by toxic oil, fisheries biologists said. Others will be poisoned by eating contaminated food, or starve because the plankton and larva on which they depend have been killed by oil.

Managers of state and private hatcheries are so concerned about the current environmental conditions in the Sound that they are discussing holding hatchery fish in pens and feeding them fish food until the oil begins to dissipate.

"They can hang onto them for quite a long time, but it would be expensive," said Dave Daisy, the former hatchery supervisor for the region and now a private consultant on hatcheries.

"There's nothing you can do about the wild fry," he added. "It's a hell of a deal all the way around."

Salmon have an acute sense of smell that can help them detect and avoid oil, biologists said. But that might not be enough to save them.

"Fish can get away from it. They can go under it," Daisy said. "The problem is they have to come up to feed. They actually feed on the surface."

The surface is the active layer of the ocean, where the zooplankton and larva graze the phytoplankton that transfer energy from the sun to the food chain.

Disruption of this teeming complex of tiny, cellular life could doom the salmon entering the Sound for the summer, and it could have far reaching implications for the environment of the Sound in the future, said Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist Kevin Delaney.

Scientists studying the wreck of the Torrey Canyon, which spilled 119,000 tons of oil along the coast of England in 1972, found that it took more than 10 years for the shoreline plants and animals to recover from the damage, according to C. Peter McRoy of the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Whether the Sound faces a similar recovery time is hard to say. The complexities of the situation make it nearly impossible to predict, said Stan Rice, a research scientist with the National Marine Fisheries Service who specializes in hydrocarbon pollution.

"It's dependent on a big variety of factors," he said. "It's a very complicated little question."

Rice said some oil will kill plankton and larva. Some oil will be consumed by plankton and larva and be transferred through the food chain to kill juvenile fish. And some oil will be eaten and broken down by plankton and larva.

Oil, unlike such chemicals as DDT, does not accumulate in the food chain. There's even a bright side to an oil spill: "If you're an oil degrading microbe, it's heaven out there," Rice said.

For other microbes and larva and juvenile fish caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, however, an oil spill could be hell.

The young of pink and chum salmon are particularly vulnerable because they come to sea nearly starved. The yolk sacs which have supported them while they incubated in the gravel of streams over the winter is gone. They must feed in 10 to 20 days.

Each day they go without food moves them a little closer to death, Daisy said. He worries that the oil spill could kill vast numbers of these fry.

Rice doesn't disagree that could happen, but he worries that it will be hard to prove anything one way or the other. Scientists studying fisheries can't count carcasses the way scientists studying birds or animals can, and inchlong salmon fry killed by oil this year won't really be noticed until a couple years from now when they are supposed to return as adults.

Even then, Rice said, who is to say whether a weak return is due to an oil spill or natural phenomenon.

"It's gonna be in court for years deciding how much damage was done," Daisy said.

Fishermen are sure to blame any fluctuations in the salmon run on the oil. Fishermen know that the salmon particularly the pink salmon that are the backbone of the Sound's $90 million fish industry stay in inside waters all summer.

There, the fish face a long exposure to the oil that cleanup officials now say will never be cleaned up.

"I've got five or 10 rabid fishermen in my kitchen right now," said Heather McCarty of Cordova on Monday. "(The oil companies) are not going to get away with it this time."

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