West Coast Salmon Fishing Season May Be Canceled : Ecology: Stocks have dwindled to the point where government regulators will propose a ban or sharp cutback in the harvest.

SEATTLE —  It has taken everything civilization and nature could dish out, but the storied Pacific salmon may be able to take no more. Its numbers are melting away so rapidly that government regulators will announce today a proposal to cancel, or sharply curtail, the 1992 ocean salmon fishing season all along the West Coast, from the Mexican border to Canada.

While the bulk of the world’s commercial salmon comes mainly from Alaska, British Columbia and South America, closing the summer salmon season in California, Oregon and Washington for both recreational and commercial fishing would be without precedent--the result of a 100-year decline in a once vital fishery that ranged from Mexico northward.

Late today, the Pacific Fisheries Management Council in Portland will release three proposed options for the 1992 season, according to the commission staff. One would be its entire closure; the other two would offer different formulas to reduce the allowable catch by one-half or more to record or near-record lows.

A decision on which of the three to accept is scheduled to be made by the council April 10 after a brief period of public comment.

The federally empowered council regulates fishing in U.S. waters, from three miles to 200 miles offshore. Individual states control waters and fishing from the beach to three miles out, but in the past their regulations have mirrored the federal council’s action.

The California Fish and Game Commission will begin considering its response to the council’s plan at a meeting in Sacramento on April 16, according to Executive Director Robert Treanor.

State officials in California, Oregon and Washington said that salmon are so few this year that inland salmon fishing closures or reductions may also may be instituted.

“All the bad stars have come into alignment. All of our past sins have caught up with us at last,” said Bill Bakke, conservation director for Oregon Trout and a leading West Coast salmon conservationist.

The impending restrictions or curtailment of the 1992 salmon season have been under consideration for some weeks and advance word has spread alarm through small, fishing-oriented coastal areas.

“The outlook is dismal, both in terms of harvest opportunity and stock abundance,” said Phil Anderson, chairman of the 13-member fisheries management council and a charter boat fisherman from Westport, Wash.

It would be hard to conceive of tougher conditions than those facing the salmon this season. Experts said three things have come together simultaneously to ravage the fish:

The cumulative effects over time of coastal urbanization, logging and agriculture have spoiled habitat and severely disrupted the fresh river flows needed for the salmon to reproduce. Coastal floods and droughts of the late 1980s reduced spawning further. And the new emergence of the periodic El Nino condition--the warming of eastern Pacific waters--has diminished ocean food sources for salmon.

“Pile them on top of each other, and you have very depressed salmon resources along all the West Coast this year,” Anderson said.

Salmon spawn in freshwater. The young fish swim downstream into the ocean to reach adulthood, and return to their place of birth in freshwater to propagate. Of five species, two are of most importance to West Coast fishermen, the Coho and Chinook, also known as the silver and king.

Fish marketing experts said that the effect of a reduced or canceled commercial season along the West Coast is apt to have only minor effects on salmon availability and price at the marketplace, because most commercial salmon comes from elsewhere. Last year, fisheries in Alaska, British Columbia and South America actually produced a market glut.

But, the effects on the West Coast are certain to be dramatic and unpleasant for tens of thousands of sport and commercial fishermen, charter boat operators, bait shop owners, and coastal communities where fishing dominates local economies.

The total value of salmon caught along the West Coast has dropped as much as five times from historic highs. By the fishery council’s calculation, the value of salmon sold at dockside by commercial fishermen in California was $9 million last year.

In the last 18 months, two spawning groups, or runs, of West Coast salmon have made their way onto the U.S. Endangered Species list--winter run Chinook on the Sacramento River and Sockeye salmon that migrate up the Columbia River into the Snake River watershed of Idaho. The listing of some other Columbia-river runs is pending.

On top of that, Coho salmon from the Klamath River of California have not met the government’s minimum spawning goals for three years and now are at all-time population lows, according to the fisheries council. Hatchery-reared Coho from the Columbia River also are at all-time lows, and so are naturally spawning Coho in the Puget Sound region of Washington state. Oregon Coho runs are at near-record lows.

The council members and state officials said that in addition to a possible cancellation of the season, the other two alternatives will call for reductions in salmon harvest of 50% to 66% from the 1991 summer catch. This could mean a later opening day, a lower bag limit, two days of fishing closure each week and an earlier end to the season.

Fishermen, conservationists and fishery managers complain that the restrictions or closure mean fishermen will have to absorb the consequences of a problem that they did not cause. Scientists said that the salmon take is so closely regulated that over-harvesting is not to blame. Rather, they said, the demise of the salmon is the fault of the steady degradation of rivers in combination with unfavorable natural conditions.

“The fishermen are subsidizing all the other economic interests that are using the watersheds,” Oregon Trout’s Bakke said. “Cutting back on the harvest isn’t going to restore this resource, although it may give us a breather. We’ve got to focus our attention on maintaining productive habitat and populations. If we don’t, the salmon do not have a future.”