A.C, so if the indians are gonna kill their half of the fish, then you might as well kill your half too because it is lawful? Dont you get it...wouldnt you rather have that fish spawn and its offspring come back?

Lets say the Skagit has an escapement goal of 5,000 fish, and 7,000 come back. THe indians get 1,000 and sportsman get 1,000. The indians kill off their 1,000 right away. Bam, 6,000 fish left...sportsman go out and do the same thing, kill their half. Now you are at dead nuts 5,000 fish in the system. If river conditions suck or a huge flood hits you wont be fishing for thier offspring will u? BUT, if sportsman would have released all their fish, there would be more fish coming back four years down the road.

What im saying is, why cut everything to the wire. If there are 2,000 fish over the "escapement" goal, why not let that number keep growing? Why cut into it every year and screw our selves over in the long run?

Bottom line is; i would rather hook fish after fish than go the whole season hooking two because i could keep 1. Hatchery fish are for the table, thats why they are stocked throughout the fricken state . Let the wild ones go so someday we can have a reason for waking up at 3 in the morning.

Wonder if the North sound rivers will be open in the spring....hmmmm sure had fun this winter targeting hatchery fish...not!

enough from me.... Cowlitz, you did bring up some good points, even though i disagree on the theory that wild fish can be harvested some how, some way.

Blank walker

What good does it do to let an "over escapement" of wild fish return to a river system, if that river system itself can not carry or support surplus juveniles (I already understand the biomass thing)? Don't you believe that every river system has its own carrying capacity?

Redd on top redd, isn't good for natural production, don't you agree? So if a stream or river system can only support x amount of juveniles or smolts, why would you want to overstress or overpopulate the carrying capacity of that system?

Most wild steelhead smolts or yearlings reside in their stream of origin for more then 1 year before they migrating to sea, so when do you think enough is enough? Stream surveys that are made by professional persons who have been trained in that field can pretty well tell us what the carrying capacity is for that system.

So do the CNR fishermen think that more is always better? I known and feel their emotion for CNR, but where is the science that says harvest and CNR can't coexist?

Cowlitzfisherman

Is the taste of the bait worth the sting of the hook????


[ 08-17-2001: Message edited by: cowlitzfisherman ]

Speaking of cut down to the wire....this is exactly the reason why escapement goals can be rather artificial. A host of environmental factors affect the number of fish that would be considered sustainable for a given river. The data requirements to get good numbers are also high and likely beyond the means (funding wise) for WDFW for many rivers.

More illustrative is a look at the Canadian experience. Canada went 100% C&R of native steelhead in the 1980s (phased in between 1980 and 1987). BC found this necessary because of dwindling wild runs which approached crisis levels at several streams in the early 80s. And BC has fewer recreational anglers, lower total population (particularly compared to land mass), lower degree of development, agriculture, and logging; and more streams then we do.

During good years (i.e. good ocean conditions, no flooding, moderate temperatures) there is likely a harvestable surplus of wild fish in many streams, but on average, I would submit that the total fish catching capacity of recreational anglers in the state exceeds the present average reproductive capacity of our streams from year to year. Canada found it necessary to do it and they have far fewer problems and people then we do.

Obsessed

How does that theory work if WDFW sets the escapement goal at the maximum carrying capacity of the system? If the system can't support a harvestable fishery, then that's it!

WDFW does have the money. They just need to spend it in the right places!

Don't you believe that the sport harvest can be reduced or controled to accommodate these concerns that you have brought forth?

No one can predict flooding events that MAY occur at each river system, but WDFW can adjust future harvesting rates on that system once that event has occurred. Your response and opinion is a very good one and I hope that others will jump in!

Cowlitzfisherman

Is the taste of the bait worth the sting of the hook????

The topic of killing wild fish is sure to get a lot of attention, as it should. I think it's very safe to say that the more wild fish we all release, the more we can expect back, regardless of floods, biomass, nets, etc.

I'm not saying that releasing wild fish will ultimately solve the problem. Habitat, nets, irresponsible logging tactics and dams all play a large part. But, I think most of us are willing to do our part to save wild fish. Sure, we pay taxes to help with this - but why can't we make the small sacrifice of letting wild fish go? It's not the end of the world, or a bad day fishing when you catch a fish and have to release it. And if I ever bonk a nate just "to get my share," I should stop fishing.

Kill the hatchery fish if you want the meat. Otherwise, do your part, show that you care more than the people controlling the dams and nets and don't sink to their level, let the nates go...

I just don't think you want people moving toward a C&K mindset in regards to native steelhead. With the increased population, increased development, degradation of riparian zones, and all the other negative factors facing these fish, why add ourselves to the list of obstacles for them to overcome?

If the run size exceeds the maximum carrying capacity of the system, then natural forces will dictate how many fish migrate out and return. We are an "artificial" force, with seasons and run sizes estimated by ever-so-faulty humans. We have shown our inability to forecast runs sizes and survivability rates numerous times. I look at C&R regs as sort of a "savings account" of fish. Spend your savings in times of plenty, and there's nothing to pay the piper with when times are tough.

As for the notion that we should go ahead and kill "our" half because the tribes are going to kill "their" half is pure nonsense. An eye for an eye, and sooner or later EVERYONE is blind. Let the tribes figure their own strategy out, we can't tell them what to do. But we also can't criticize them if we are out there whacking natives ourselves. Hello pot.....meet the kettle.

I am concerned about the anti-hatchery stance adopted by many C&R advocates, though. Hatchery fish aren't a bad thing.....the WAY our hatcheries have been operated in the past is the bad thing. Without any harvest opportunity, I could see things getting pretty sparse for the WDFW. The loss of license sales revenue would surely lead to cuts at WDFW, most likely in the form of eliminating essential personnel. Enforcement is already virtually non-existant, any cuts in personnel would be detrimental to all of our fisheries.

Old habits are hard to break. We're just now getting people into the habit of releasing native fish. Let's not give ourselves a chance to step backwards in our ateempt at breaking the bad habits of the past.

JMHO

Bingo! Dan.S pretty much said what needed to be said.

CowlitzF, How many rivers around here "exeed maximum capacity" in terms of wild steelhead? NONE!!!!!

Like Dan said, Wild steelhead need to be a "savings account" for our future fishing opportunities.


-Bank Walker

Dan,
I sure don't want anyone to think that I am leading them into killing wild fish, but I also believe that we can have our cake and eat it to!

I believe that CNR can harvest can work together. I know that you are a long time CNR advocate so don't take my comments to personal.

You make some very well stated point. But is it science, or is your personal passion for wild steelhead that makes you think this way?

Like it or not, people are a huge part of the echo-system just like steelhead are. What science tells you that "If the run size exceeds the maximum carrying capacity of the system, then natural forces will dictate how many fish migrate out and return"? Is not man one of those "natural forces"? Isn't conservation a man made force also?

We are finally getting down to debating the true issues between CNR and harvest! It's hard for some people to swallow, but many fishermen believe that steelhead and salmon will be on this earth long after mankind has gone! In my mind, there is no question that we are part of that equation, I just don't know what part of the equation we play when it comes to wild steelhead management. That's why I, for one, want to see the science behind these opinions, instead of just the passion, or emotion. I am not saying that your reply is all emotion or passion, but there appears to be a tint bit of it there.

I have worked with many biologists over the last 15 years and have found that many are full of BS! That is pretty much true about all professions. Just like you, I don't agree that we should go out and "kill" our half. But there is some logic in Ac's posting. One could certainly make the case that if wild fish got harvested, the Indians share would get so small that they too would have to change there own ways management or they too would have no fish just like everyone else. I am not saying that is the right thing to do, but I can sure understand why they may think that way. Sometimes things just have to get really bad before they get turned around (and I was the one who said "let's leave the Indians out of this issue").

One last thing, you said "We have shown our inability to forecast runs sizes an survivability rates numerous times" That is true, but as humans, we also have learned how not to make the same mistakes twice. They said we would never put a man on the moon, but they were wrong weren't they, and that wasn't that long ago. I am not saying that we should kill or harvest all wild fish, but I am saying that we need to look at, and understand every body else's point of view. After all, the recourses belong to everyone, not just to us, so everyone should have the same opportunity to voice there own preference about wild steelhead.

Cowlitzfisherman

Is the taste of the bait worth the sting of the hook????

Bank walker

Look ahead down the road! That is what this posting is all about. How many times have fishermen been short sighted? Think about the future now, not when it gets here. No one has said that wild fish are over escapement levels, but what about tomorrow or 5-10 years from now? I can see your logic, but fishermen are always late to the table aren't we?


Cowlitzfisherman

Is the taste of the bait worth the sting of the hook????

Any idea how many times I have had this conversation? The gun is to my head, I wish I had a thick skull like some on this board. What is the real issue here? Just the thought of whacking a Wild Steelhead makes me want to PUKE, as well do some of the ideas I hear on this board. "If we don't kill 'em the natives will" total BS, unfortunately I know I will hear it a thousand more times.

COW, You fish in a totally oversprawled populus. Your vision of the good old days where everybody on the river treated everyone else fair are GONE-GOT IT?
Now, YOU have to collect yourself, listen, and realise; You have a drianfield to your north and to your south and it's plugged. Plugged with what you ask,? Total city scum and you have to realise that in no way, ever, will native harvest work, even with a new, upriver, late spawning, nate. PERIOD!
Where you live HAS changed for the worse and it ain't gonna get any better. Try to open it for native harvest to sport fishers and the run will be decimated in three years. Keep it to yourself and TRY to enjoy cnr or lose the vision in your mind of a long red stripe and blue back forever. I don't plant sweet corn next to the rasberries either.
Bus showes up, rasberries are picked, and guess what?, corn's gone too!!!!!!!!!!
IT'S REALLY QUITE SIMPLE, you'll have to move to the peninsula because cnr is here for good.----thank god.
Sorry if I got to emotional.

O.K. Lets hear it sheeeeeez!

cowlitz,

Your points are well taken. You are right that emotion plays a part in my opinions and actions, but that's the kind of value I place on these fish.

We may have put a man on the moon, but we can't cure the common cold or forecast the weather more than 2 days out. I still have reservations about the "science" being used to study these fish. The whole fish/ocean/river cycle is not a simple math problem with a known solution you can get applying provable methods. There is much guesswork in fisheries management, and I think we should always err on the side of caution.

Of course we humans are a "natural factor", but only to the extent that we CHOOSE to be a factor. We can choose to be a big factor in losses of returning adults, or we can choose to be a smaller factor. That choice is up to us.

I understand where you're coming from. My opinion is based, at least partially, on my experiences on the Satsop river. When I was a kid, my dad would take me there, and even as a ham-fisted kid, we caught native fish regularly. We also bonked them, because we thought the run was "healthy". As steelheading became more popular, and more and more fish were taken from the river, the numbers began to dwindle. After several years of poor returns, WDFW enacted a C&R only regulation on wild steelhead. After several years, the fishing rebounded to the point of being like it was in the "good ol' days" (maybe not THAT good). Every native in the Satsop had already run the net gauntlet, and the only thing standing between them and their spawning gravel was US. When we started releasing "our share" of the nates, they were able to make a pretty fair comeback. I believe the C&R regs helped to rebuild this fishery. Now that the numbers are better, should we go back to C&K regs? I don't see why.

I think the broodstock program on the Satsop could be a great opportunity to have a fishery where C&R and C&K could coexist. That keeps everyone happy, as long as there are enough returning wild adults to maintain the broodstock program. The C&R regs on natives will help to ensure this happens.

I appreciate your feedback, as it's wise to know what your peers are thinking. Sure I let emotion play into my opinions, but who doesn't. Decisions at all levels of government are based on emotion, as well as science. If you're accusing me of having some weird kind of "love" for native steelhead......what can I say? GUILTY AS CHARGED

Dan

I agree with you about the wild brood stock program. Basically that is what WDFW is doing on the Cowlitz with their late winter steelhead program. One thing that still brothers me, is why the CNR advocate people think so much about releasing wild steelhead, unharmed, and yet they think nothing about bonking a hatchery steelhead. Did not that same "hatchery" steelhead that they just bonked originally come from someone's wild stock of steelhead? Is it OK to kill there progeny, but not the parent?

How do you feel about hatchery fish spawning naturally in our streams? Don't wild fish stray all the time and inter-mix their gene pools with other wild stocks and hatchery fish? If a hatchery fish spawns naturally, and their progeny return, why shouldn't they be given the same treatment as wild fish? Like Flickyourjig said the good old days are gone forever, so why not adjust to reality and let the science guide our wild fish management instead of our emotions?

I am glad to see that people can discuss different points of views on this BB without getting really ****** off at each other. Maybe CRN is the way of the future, but most of the fishermen that I have talked to about it don't really fully support it. The ones that do support it, usually only support it in the rivers that truly have long standing history of wild fish, and where WDFW has not stocked them with herds of hatchery fish yet. Down this way, it is pretty darn hard to fine any such rivers that have not already been heavily influenced by herds of other hatchery genes.

So I guess the debate will go on until enough fishermen decide one way or another, what they prefer. Will it be a total CNR fishery? Will it be CNR for only wild fish? Or will it be a mixture of CNR and Harvest? Time will tell!


Cowlitzfisherman

Is the taste of the bait worth the sting of the hook????

I read in STS a few months back that wild fish have the same genes now as they did 200 years ago? I tend to agree with Cowlitz that some stocks do mix. Today on my favorite river i landed a "wild" 6 lb hen that had some coloring to show that it had been in the river for a while, BUT it was right below a major hatchery and not 50 miles away with all the other wild fish. It lead me to believe this was a hatchery offspring. Wether it was derived from hatchery/hatchery offspring or wild/hatchery will never be known. I thought hatchery fish were pretty much sterile? What do u guys think??

I believe we can have both C&K and CNR fisheries where everyone is happy. Bonking wild fish should never be an option in this day and age.

CNR wild fish....

Bank walker

Hatchery fish are just as capable of naturally spawning as wild fish are. As example, for the first few years while WDFW was trying to gets its act together and figure out which run of steelhead they wanted to use for the upper Cowlitz River BPA Reintroduction program, they only allowed male steelhead to be transported above the dams because they were afraid that whichever stock of steelhead they were to going to use would likely succeed. The wild salmon policy forced them to create this new "wild gene" stock of Cowlitz steelhead. That way, WDFW could keep their other hatchery programs going at full speed. The reality is that those special late-run winter steelhead have inbreed so much by now, that they have created their own new set of genes that is unlike any other lower Columbia river steelhead stock. That fact alone was a concern to many biologists. No other hatchery on the lower Columbia has produced more steelhead then the Cowlitz. All Cowlitz gene stocks were mixed together to create large or smaller run of steelhead depending on who was doing the steelhead management in Olympia at the time.

WDFW claims that this stock is from a unique set of genes. That's almost imposable to believe when you know for a fact, that WDFW never did any genetic testing at that time, and their own records show that all of these fish were killed and spawned by hand and the eggs and sperm were mixed by WDFW staffs little hands.

In fact, we were told by top WDFW management staff, at the time, that the habitat was a natural for summer run steelhead. In fact, it was do darn good for natural production that WDFW was afraid that if summer run were used in the reintroduced program in the upper Cowlitz that it would eliminate the need to use the Cowlitz Trout hatchery for rearing of summer run fish. That would mean that some of WDFW people might loose there honey-hole jobs. You know how far that one went!

Some wild trout do still have there original "pure" genes but lots of wild trout genes have been hand mixed with hatchery genes just like what's been going on at the Cowlitz Trout hatchery for over 30 years

Cowlitzfisherman

Is the taste of the bait worth the sting of the hook????


[ 08-19-2001: Message edited by: cowlitzfisherman ]

Hatchery fish are certainly just as capable of spawning as wild fish.

However, the adult return from their spawning is almost zero.

If hatchery fish spawn, their progeny compete with wild smolts, eat the same food and utilize the same habitat. While on the way out to the ocean and while there they almost all die. (Not all, but almost all).

The result is reduced native fish returning, and almost no "wild" hatchery fish returning, for a net result of less fish.

Also, fish born of a hatchery x wild pairing fare not much better than those of two hatchery fish.

It is a responsible act to bonk a hatchery fish so as to assure it does not spawn in the river.

Now for my own personal opinion. I cannot understand the harvest-oriented mindset of some steelhead fishermen. Why is it so important to kill a native fish?

Is it required to justify the money spent on going fishing? If you add up the money spent vs. the pounds of fish taken, steelhead probably costs us about $90/lb. If that's justification, then why not just buy some fish and save $83/lb.?

Is it part of the experience? For me I'll admit that sometimes it is. I love eating steelhead and sharing it with my non-fishing friends who wouldn't otherwise get it. But that's what hatchery fish are for.

The concept of "over-escapement" is such a transparent justification to kill a fish that I'm surprised to hear it still.

If you accept these as true: A river has been studied sufficiently and models exist to set the carrying capacity of the river in terms of smolts; the amount of adults needed to produce exactly that amount of smolts can be determined with certainty; the run size can be determined with certainty; the tribal fishermen only net exactly their half of the "surplus"; the non-tribal fishers only catch exactly their half of the surplus; and landslides, weather, logging, and hundreds of other variables can either be completely controlled or predicted with certainty; then you can convince me that there is such a thing as over-escapement.

The obvious fact is that none of these things exist.

If somehow they all did and there is over-escapement, meaning that the "surplus" adults will not create more smolts now or more adults later, then isn't it still better to have more adults in the river right now so that we all have the opportunity to catch (and release) more of them? How much money goes into towns like Rockport, or Darrington, or Monroe, due to gas, food, lodging, gear, etc., so that people can cnr those "surplus" fish, perhaps over and over again?

When the parents of the adults returning last spring were in the Skagit, Snohomish, and Stillaguamish systems, fishermen were killing them until Feb. 28. How could we have plenty to kill then, and four years from then not have enough return to have a season? Good thing we didn't let them over-escape back then.

Lastly, no one who intentionally kills a native steelhead has any right to complain that an Indian net catches and kills native steelhead. No matter how we feel and act within the sportfishing world, those who don't fish DO NOT think we are any better than the Indians. Fish die in a net, or die in the bottom of a drift boat. What's the difference?

Thanks for the opportunity to chime in.

Fish on...

Todd

Hatchery fish are certainly just as capable of spawning as wild fish.

However, the adult return from their spawning is almost zero.

If hatchery fish spawn, their progeny compete with wild smolts, eat the same food and utilize the same habitat. While on the way out to the ocean and while there they almost all die. (Not all, but almost all).

The result is reduced native fish returning, and almost no "wild" hatchery fish returning, for a net result of less fish.

Also, fish born of a hatchery x wild pairing fare not much better than those of two hatchery fish.

It is a responsible act to bonk a hatchery fish so as to assure it does not spawn in the river.

Now for my own personal opinion. I cannot understand the harvest-oriented mindset of some steelhead fishermen. Why is it so important to kill a native fish?

Is it required to justify the money spent on going fishing? If you add up the money spent vs. the pounds of fish taken, steelhead probably costs us about $90/lb. If that's justification, then why not just buy some fish and save $83/lb.?

Is it part of the experience? For me I'll admit that sometimes it is. I love eating steelhead and sharing it with my non-fishing friends who wouldn't otherwise get it. But that's what hatchery fish are for.

The concept of "over-escapement" is such a transparent justification to kill a fish that I'm surprised to hear it still.

If you accept these as true: A river has been studied sufficiently and models exist to set the carrying capacity of the river in terms of smolts; the amount of adults needed to produce exactly that amount of smolts can be determined with certainty; the run size can be determined with certainty; the tribal fishermen only net exactly their half of the "surplus"; the non-tribal fishers only catch exactly their half of the surplus; and landslides, weather, logging, and hundreds of other variables can either be completely controlled or predicted with certainty; then you can convince me that there is such a thing as over-escapement.

The obvious fact is that none of these things exist.

If somehow they all did and there is over-escapement, meaning that the "surplus" adults will not create more smolts now or more adults later, then isn't it still better to have more adults in the river right now so that we all have the opportunity to catch (and release) more of them? How much money goes into towns like Rockport, or Darrington, or Monroe, due to gas, food, lodging, gear, etc., so that people can cnr those "surplus" fish, perhaps over and over again?

When the parents of the adults returning last spring were in the Skagit, Snohomish, and Stillaguamish systems, fishermen were killing them until Feb. 28. How could we have plenty to kill then, and four years from then not have enough return to have a season? Good thing we didn't let them over-escape back then.

Lastly, no one who intentionally kills a native steelhead has any right to complain that an Indian net catches and kills native steelhead. No matter how we feel and act within the sportfishing world, those who don't fish DO NOT think we are any better than the Indians. Fish die in a net, or die in the bottom of a drift boat. What's the difference?

Thanks for the opportunity to chime in.

Fish on...

Todd

Todd,

If what you say is true, why then aren't these native streams thriving with "wild" fish returns now? Does WDFW still stock those wild fish streams with hatchery steelhead? Like I said in one of my earlier replies on this thread, the upper Cowlitz River has watched its reintroduction program of hatchery mixed steelhead that have naturaly spawned almost triple in its returns in the last three years. The hatchery coho have also been allowed to spawn naturally above the dams in last 2 years and the natural production of coho has gone crazy. They have already captured, this year, over 432,000 coho smolts and that's only with a- 48% capture success rate at the Cowlitz Falls fish collection facilities.

So in 2 years, we will see what the most recent studies may say about hatchery fish survival rates vs. wild fish rates. Remember that there are no Indian nets on the Cowlitz or lower Colombia, and the commercial boys can't keep the wild unmarked coho either, so we should start to get a pretty good idea on what natural spawned hatchery coho survival rates really are. You may be right, but then again, you may be in for a real surprise! Time will tell.

I believe that when more unbiased research and studies are finally done, we will find out that these dumb "hatchery fish", if given the same opportunities and protection as "wild fish" get, and that's including harvest protection, that after a couple of brood cycles have been completed, that the old "dumb hatchery fish" theory and image just might change. It may be as simple as just adding wild fish genes to the hatchery adults, either by natural means or by man made techniques. Who knows for sure! Thanks for writing such a well written reply. Your points were well made even those I may not fully agree with all of them.


Cowlitzfisherman

Is the taste of the bait worth the sting of the hook????


[ 08-20-2001: Message edited by: cowlitzfisherman ]

Cowlitzfisherman,

I haven't seen that data from the Cowlitz, but I'd appreciate any information you could post about getting it, especially in regards to the steelhead.

The data that I was referring to (and hopefully remembering fairly accurately) was from fairly recent studies of hatchery/wild interactions of steelhead on the Kalama
River. (Carl, if you see this, could you post the citation to those studies? Thanks!)

I also seem to remember that hatchery coho are much more successful natural spawners than are hatchery steelhead. Perhaps it's because hatchery coho are generally from the same river or river system as their wild counterparts, while hatchery steelhead likely derived from either Skamania summer runs or Chambers winter runs that are more dissimilar from their wild cousins in the same stream?

I certainly did not mean to sound anti-hatchery, because I am certainly not. Without hatcheries we would have no opportunities to summer run fish and almost no opportunities to winter run fish. I'm just anti- to letting hatchery fish spawn naturally. Hatchery operations and hatchery fish spawning are only two of a myriad of factors that may limit the natural productivity of a stream.

Besides harvest, tribal or non-tribal, dams, hatchery operations, loss of habitat (everything from channelization of the main river and estuary to blockage of tributaries by bad culverts, etc.), ocean conditions, and weather conditions during all phases of the river life cycle all may affect how many wild fish are in a river.

Wild fish harvest on the Cowlitz is prohibited, and there is no direct netting of Cowlitz steelhead (some are surely caught in the lower Columbia netting), so harvest isn't likely to be the big problem there (except for trout fishermen who catch smolts).

Look at all these other factors, though. The river is pumped to the gills with hatchery smolts of all varieties. The river is used for hydropower. I've seen lots of little "trout" (i.e., steelhead and salmon smolts) caught in the Tilton River by worm and power baiters. Logging in the tributaries has destroyed miles and miles of spawning and rearing habitat. Supposedly the ocean conditions have been poor, but that's turning around now.

In short, there are lots of reasons why upper Cowlitz wild steelhead are not thriving. I doubt that there are hardly any left, for starters. The few that are have all the battles listed above to fight.

Another interesting twist is that there are small coastal streams that have fairly robust runs of native steelhead in the winter/spring. These streams are not stocked with hatchery fish, or are stocked very sparingly.

Do you think that the natives are doing all right because of no hatchery fish, or because no hatchery fish means many, many less fishermen fish those streams? I'd probably say a combination of both, but that the lack of fishermen is more important.

Since these are little, short streams I'm thinking of, they either have all their habitat intact, to a point, or it's all gone from logging. That means the ones I'm referring to are in pretty good shape habitat-wise. The weather and marine conditions can't be controlled, but they're the same for all the rivers in the same area. There are also no dams or tribal harvest on these streams.

These little streams are so different from fish factories like the Cowlitz, Lewis, or Skykomish that it's hard to compare them. However, they sure seem to be doing better, relatively, than the big rivers are.

CF, thank you also for your well written and thought out opinions. We may not agree on everything, but it's nice to have a civil debate every once in a while!

Fish on...

Todd.

Wow! What a thread! Facts, opinions, ethics, and morals - a mixture that has no correct conclusion. If you want to get in a debate that cannot be won, debate religion. Many of the steelheaders I know treat their personal fervor for steelhead with all the reverence of a religion, especially if the subject is about wild steelhead.

Fundamentally, there is nothing inherently good or bad about killing a wild steelhead. Once killed, it won't reproduce. That may make a difference to the population in the subsequent generation, or it may not. Just as killing a particular wild chinook, coho, deer, or elk may, or may not, affect population abundance in the next generation. Oh, but there are some differences. Differences that can be explained by certainty - or the lack thereof.

Game managers usually have a fair idea of the size of deer and elk herds, so they don't have to "guess" about things like ocean survival before setting seasons, the the big game harvests are somewhat (I said somewhat!) easier to control. Managing a migratory fish population like wild salmon or steelhead is a lot more difficult. For most rivers, the manager has to start with a scientific estimate (guess) about how many smolts migrated to the ocean, then estimate (guess) the smolt to adult ocean survival, then set the harvestable number, assuming there are any over and above the spawning escapement goal (assuming there is a spawning escapement goal), then regulate the fishery in the ocean, Puget Sound, lower Columbia River, Grays Harbor, etc., and every bay and river mouth and recreational fishing section of every river, so that precisely the correct number of fish of each species is caught in the right fishery (treaty and non-treaty), and still have the proper number arrive at the spawning grounds to satisfy the losses due to floods, excessive sedimentation, poachers, and have enough fry emerge from the gravel the following spring or summer to fully seed all the available juvenile rearing habitat to keep the river at its maximum productivity. Heck, Microsoft couldn't write an algorythm that would actually accomplish that. Oh, mark me, many fisheries managers have written such formulas and programs clogging up tons of computer space, but they all fail. They fail because they cannot account for variability and the lack of certainty in natural ecosystems to predict the harvestable number of fish with any consistent reliability. But so strong is our faith in math and models, and so strong is our desire - or rather our collective demand - to harvest as many fish as we possibly can, we choose to tolerate consistently poor performance in the area of harvest management, rather than err on the side of caution. Caution that would nudge us to harvest fewer and send more fish to the spawning grounds from most runs.

I used to favor allowing the harvest of wild steelhead over and above spawning escapement requirements. I did so in part because I was choosing to ignore that aspect of human nature that propels us to push every system we control - or believe we control - to its absolute limit. As a consequence, we have overharvested just about every fishery of consequence in the world. Worth repeating - every fishery of consequence in the world.

For that reason alone, I'm willing to support wild steelhead release, and waste those surplus spawners on the various spawning grounds, wherever and whenever they may occur, scattered in a very few rivers worldwide, even though they probably won't contribute directly to an increase in the population of the next generation of steelhead. The amount of waste that will occur is trivial, and in an ecological sense, not wasteful at all. The ecosystem will absorb all that is there, just as it did for thousands of years before we improved on things with modern fisheries management.

A few other random points:
Yes, it was the Kalama River studies that indicated steelhead spawning by hatchery X hatchery and hatchery X wild crosses produced almost no adults in the subsequent generation. The hatchery winter runs perform most poorly, probably because they are so out of synchrony regarding spawn timing. Summer runs only did slightly better, even though hatchery summer run spawn timing is fairly close to wild spawn timing. I don't know if there is any other plausible explanation.

Hatchery coho do spawn quite successfully in the wild. Reasons include: the hatchery fish are often from their native river. More important, probably, is that the hatchery coho spawn at about the same time as the wild coho.

Another point to consider in trying to effectively manage the harvest of wild steelhead: most would agree that even in the best of circumstances, the number of harvestable wild steelhead in any one population would be relatively small, compared to say, salmon populations. Not always, but usually. At the same time, the population of steelhead anglers grows larger. It kind of reminds me of some recent commercial fisheries, where the open season - which used to be measured in weeks - was not specified in days even, but rather it was open for a certain number of hours. Imagine a wild steelhead kill fishery open on your favorite river for 4 hours! And since good management dictates that harvest occur throughout the timing of the run, we have just committed bad management if the run could only withstand a 4 hour season, and we didn't spread it throughout the many months that the run actually occurs over.

Like I said, the "waste" from the loss of a wild steelhead harvest fishery is trivial. I've more important things to be concerned about, but that's just me.

But ain't it a gas seeing those upper Cowlitz steelhead and coho numbers climbing up and up like that? And when smolt collection gets really good, ain't we gonna' be some happy campers then?

Sincerely,

Salmo g.