PNNL

Abstract

Gas bubble disease (GBD) has been recognized for years as a potential problem for fishes in the Columbia River basin. GBD results from exposure to gas supersaturated water created by discharge over dam spillways. Spill typically creates a downstream plume of water with high total dissolved gas supersaturation (TDGS) that may be positioned along either shore or mid-channel, depending on dam operations. We obtained spatial data on fish migration paths and migration depths for 228 adult spring and summer Chinook salmon, Oncorhynchus tshawytscha, during 2000. Migration paths were compared to output from a two-dimensional hydrodynamic and dissolved gas model to estimate the potential for GBD expression and to test for behavioral avoidance of the high TDGS plume in unrestrained fish migrating under field conditions. Consistent with our previous estimates using single-location estimates of TDGS, we observed salmon swam sufficiently deep in the water column to receive complete hydrostatic compensation 95.9% of time spent in the Bonneville tailrace and 88.1% of the time in the Ice Harbor tailrace. The majority of depth uncompensated exposure occurred at TDGS levels > 115%. Adult spring and summer Chinook salmon tended to migrate near the shoreline. Adults moved into the high dissolved gas plume as often as they moved out of it downstream of Bonneville Dam, providing no evidence that adults moved laterally to avoid areas with elevated dissolved gas levels. The strong influence of dam operations on the position of the high-TDGS plume and shoreline-orientation behaviors of adults suggest that exposure of adult salmonids to high-TDGS conditions may be minimized using operational conditions that direct the plume mid-channel, particularly during periods of high discharge and spill. More generally, our approach illustrates the potential for combined field and modeling efforts to estimate the fine-scale environmental conditions encountered by fishes in natural and regulated rivers.