Agreed. Doc is one of the good guys.

Sorry Doc.

I whole heartedly agree with your statement as some one who has been reading this forum and lurking since 1997, the aforementioned names plus some more I have really enjoyed learning a lot from...there are other greats in here on other levels but when it comes to policy your point is spot on.

Been really surprised at what I have seen on this board lately...like some people forgot things they said from 5 to 15 years ago, or those who weren't here and just come to naysay, it's just more work to wade thru the trolling and bullsh!t nowadays to keep with the real topics at hand.
Used to have a lot of great threads on here relating to policy, futures and data collection with some good jabs and good hearted light moods. I see more defaming attitudes lately, potshots and general childishness. Says a lot about even the super old school forums nowadays.

Hey, I resemble that remark! LOL. They call it old age!

Maybe I didn't qualify for 'old age' 5-15 years ago, but I do now!

You are 100% correct.

Today's world is overcrowded and has zero accountability.

Shut down the ocean harvest and plant fish.

If Canada gets in the way..............Cut their foot off in the shoe.

This is like an old boys forum where people follow blindly and are not open to change. I have yet to hear someone say that generating some natural selection in the hatcheries would be a bad thing.

Let me see if I can post some graphs demonstrating Hatchery returns being worse than native returns. Its limitation is that the native numbers are small so there is more room for error but it definitely shows the trend. The only one that it does not show it for is fall Chinook.

TPU Hatchery and Natural origin returns vs 10 yr average

[img]https://www.mytpu.org/wp-content/uploads/12-13-2019-Weekly-Graphs.pdf[/img]

Sorry having trouble uploading an image. It only gives me the option of a url

I'm pretty sure that for the Cowlitz River, "natural origin" = unclipped hatchery origin fish.

First off, hatcheries are full of natural selection. That is how they get to be different from wild fish; they adapt to the hatchery environment.

Hatcheries chief benefit is that they produce more adult fish per unit of water than the wild. To produce "wild-like" fish in a hatchery will reduce the productivity, giving less fish. If you want to produce wild-like fish to restore a population, then there isn't a real worry about overall return. Just get back "more" than nature, especially degrade nature.

Selection of spawners will always be unnatural because the fish will be allowed to choose mates. You can argue that big to big, age to age, etc. is better than totally random but there is now way to now if that is what actually occurs in nature.

Incubtion in gravel produces bigger fry. To incubate hatchery fish in gravel you have to use more water and space. So, you can do it, just not as efficiently and water is the single most difficult piece to obtain.

Some species, like steelhead, rear in riffles and at lower densities as they set up territories. To accomplish this means you don't use ponds and lower density. Many species feed benthically or at least in the water column so surface feeding selects for different characteristics.

The list goes on. We can certainly do better, but each incremental "improvement" in culture comes at a production cost.

I am more of the opinion that we need to separate hatchery and wild. Mixed programs (integrated stocks) merely reduce the productive capabilities of both populations.

It's interesting that we talk about the genetic damage done by hatcheries. How damaging is, for example, having a few hundred "wild" salmon in a population or 20,000 hatchery spawners? What is the inbreeding coefficient for 200 vs. 20K?

At the bottom of it, the fish are different and produced for different purposes.

Carcassman posted, "I am more of the opinion that we need to separate hatchery and wild. Mixed programs (integrated stocks) merely reduce the productive capabilities of both populations."

Yes! I think the only sound case for integrated hatchery programs are those where the hatchery effort is directed at recovering a wild population.

I agree.

But then there is the curious case of the Snake River fall Chinook…..

In the 2008 U.S. v Oregon Agreement, the Tribes were able to secure a provision to stock ESA listed Fall Chinook in the Snake River by the millions. Every year. The result was huge numbers of adults returned to the Lower Snake River over the past 10 years. Lots of fish. This program was intended to mitigate for the Lower Snake Dams, but it also had the effect of supplementing harvest (tribal, recreational, commercial) and helping with ESA recovery (abundance, not productivity or diversity).

In the recent past, the numbers of adults on the spawning grounds above Lower Granite pool has greatly exceeded the amount needed for recovery. And these are wild adults. They are likely direct descendants from the previous generation, which were all hatchery origin. But they’re wild fish nonetheless.

At some point, it’s not hard to ask whether we have achieved ESA recovery when the numbers of returning wild adults greatly exceed what’s in the recovery plan. NMFS would say that recovery means recovery in the wild (i.e., without hatchery influence). So to reach ESA recovery, the stock needs to be self –sustaining. That is, it must be able to persist without continued stocking. The Tribes immediate response is that we can’t stop stocking since the purpose of the program is to mitigate for the dams. And as long as the dams are standing, stocking will continue. They have a point.

So now we have a fully integrated stock that puts huge numbers of wild adults on the spawning grounds with no hope of recovery, regardless of their abundance. The bottom line is that these fish will be ESA-listed regardless of how many wild adults return to the spawning grounds. Presumably, we could achieve historical abundance on the spawning grounds (millions), and still not achieve ESA recovery.

So if we are going to use hatchery fish to help recover an ESA listed population, at some point we gotta stop stocking, and see what happens. But in some cases, I’m not sure that ‘stopping stocking’ is even possible.

Why has the Snake fall Chinook program been successful but we can't seem to replicate it elsewhere? Honest question.

I can provide some ideas on why the SRFC Program has been reasonably successful, but I can’t compare it to programs that haven’t been.

Here goes:

The habitat in the Lower Snake has improved considerably. The huge flow fluctuations from Hells Canyon have been moderated so that the habitat isn’t flooded and dewatered on a daily/hourly basis.

Dworshak Dam is being used more to reduce temperatures in the Lower Snake to help out-migrating juveniles in the summer, and upstream migrating adults in the fall.

Perhaps most importantly, the spill program in the Lower Snake dams and the mainstem Columbia projects is a huge benefit to juvenile subyearling fall Chinook. So their survival through the hydropower system has improved considerably.

To some degree, these fish are less susceptible to harvest. The returning hatchery adults are clipped but if those adults spawn in the Lower Granite pool, and they do in large numbers, their progeny are not clipped (duh) since they are not hatchery origin. Unclipped fish are not subject to recreational angling in the Columbia River, although they remain subject to commercial fishing in the Lower Columbia, tribal fishing above BON, and harvest in the ocean.

And to a large extent, for this specific stock, it appears to be a 'numbers game'. That is, if you stock more hatchery fish, you get more adults back, those excess adults are allowed access to the spawning grounds, they appear to be spawning successfully, and the resulting recruits also return as adults. Not every population responds this way. But this one does.

Also, my apologies for hijacking my own thread. This was supposed to be about spring Chinook........

Somehow, I took us off track to Fall Chinook.

If you have ever spent time watching spawning salmon and steelhead in the rivers you would realize that the big bucks almost always win over smaller males. Spawning randomly removes this crucial aspect of natural selection and slows the process down. It has the potential of slowing it down to the point that it has difficulty keeping up or getting ahead of the changing environments. The primary genetic damage that hatcheries do is a result of spawning randomly.

Not sure I understand your sentences. Just get back "more" than nature, especially degrade nature.

Selection of spawners will always be unnatural because the fish will be allowed to choose mates.

Are you also stating that using broodstock native fish for Hatchery production results in a reduction of productivity?

"Almost always" is not always. There are more reasons for successful spawning than size, and humans can't duplicate that. Plus, it is well known that ancillary males successfully participate in spawning. And, of course, resident mykiss produce anadromous young and vice-versa.

Random spawning is certainly not the most natural way to go but any sort of artificial choice is similarly not natural.

The purpose of most hatcheries is to produce fish to harvest and they need to be bred selectively to optimize production in that environment. When you try to make hatchery fish "wild" or wild fish "hatchery" you lose productivity. The environments are different and require different adaptations.

In parts of the world, they raise fish in large net pens. Thousands of them. They build walkways around them for people to walk out and “catch” the fish using a rod and reel. It’s famously popular in a lot of places, and the fees combined with the sale of excess fish is profitable.

Perhaps WDFW and the Commissioners should take some very serious consideration to this. After all, it would solve a lot of problems. Commercial fishermen could own the pens and profit from the operations. The Tribes could have all the “real” fish. And sportsmen could have as much fish to catch as they want.

After all, isn’t catching fish and saving salmon the real goal after all?

I’m sure with current management practices, were all headed to fishing planter trout...why not net pen salmon and steelhead?

Hmm. High fence hunting....

Lowland lakes, prior to the problems with using rotenone, was essentially this. A created fishery designed to sell licenses. Or, high lake trout. Plant, grow, take.

Georgia has what they call delayed harvest trout fisheries. Plant fish in streams in the fall and have a C&R fishery through mid-May, I think. Then, C&K before the water gets too warm for the fish to live. I can tell you that by November, those trout (planted) are not dumb enough for me to catch.

I’m sure with current management practices, were all headed to fishing planter trout...why not net pen salmon and steelhead?

[/quote]

Already exists over on the East side. Done that many times and it's a hoot on a 5wt.

I suspect that private landowners will create hunting and fishing opportunities. It will be a crop. Lots of areas are now "private-fee" and this will probably expand.

At one time, WDFW had lots of access to lakes, launches in both fresh and salt, and so on that were well maintained and popular. They also had a program, I think there were iterations in the 50s/60s and then 70s/80s that got access to walk rivers for steelhead. They used to work with landowners for access.

Seems so strange to me that the general consensus is that salmon and steelhead are going away along with our opportunities but no one is willing to change.
Random spawning is much worse than selective spawning if selective spawning is done correctly. Your stubborn attitude to continue on the same path and not admit wrong prevents things from getting better. Are you sure that you do not work for WDFW?
The other change that I advocate for is nutrient enhancement with dead hatchery carcasses. To decrease cost I would suggest spawning the males and then releasing them back into the river ALIVE (and as late as possible to minimize any interactions with native fish) after milking them out.
Productivity is different than efficiency.