Originally Posted By: Wild Chrome
Originally Posted By: Fishyfeller
wouldn't it be beneficial to rear wild fish in hatcherys ?


That's impossible. Wild fish are wild. Once they are put in hatcheries, they are hatchery fish and the genetics that they will propagate are the genetics that benefit them in the hatchery environment. ie the offspring they produce survive better if they have genes that benefit the hatchery life, not life in the wild.

When people learn the biology of this stuff, It all boils down to 2 camps:

1) The people that want to recover the wild fish

2) The people that want to pump the rivers full of hatchery fish

That there is a happy medium is probably a fantasy, though we are constantly trying it seems. The latest effort appears to be setting aside certain rivers as gene banks and planting others. I think it might work better than what we have now, but it's certainly not perfect.





So you are saying even when both parents are wild the young are no longer have wild DNA. I kinda find that statement to be absurd. So if a Chinese couple move to Italy and have children they will produce children with Italian DNA. Just because it was born in a hatchery doesn't ruin the DNA. (granted natural selection is less of a factor in hatcheries)

So I guess the basic equation is can a hatchery take wild pairs and create more surviving young then can be produced in nature. If the answer is no we may as well stop kidding ourselves and wild salmon WILL go extinct. Maintaining the same numbers and never seeming to increase populations sounds like a failure equation.
I guess the solution to not having hatcheries is to have 0 harvest by anyone.
No catch and release , no sportsmen, no commercial, no tribes.