Tom ... Chambers Creek IS just one stream, BUT the stock they took from there accounts for the vast majority of winter-run plants across the west side.

We'll throw out in-depth data. How 'bout some basic observations:

1) They return in a timeframe of about one month vs. wild counterparts that return over many months.

2) They're about half the size of their wild counterparts across the board.

3) They can't / don't spawn worth a hoot on their own (not that we want them to anyhow).

Please Tom, let us know why this is??

PS ... as Jerry mentioned, this is not simply anti-hatchery fish, this day in age, I believe they do have their place, but hatchery practices need to be changed in many locations!

ok, ok, I admit it. Some hatcheries don't follow good spawning practices. However, most do. The answer to all of those problems you listed can be corrected by spawning with a bigger gene pool, i.e., using most, if not all wild brood stock. Sorry if i seemed mad, but i just hate to see hatcheries blamed for everything.

You really should read some of the literature that's out there. There is a compelling amount of information indicating that significant decreases in survival occurs when hatchery fish spawn in the wild or if there are hatchery/wild interactions--even if the hatchery fish are just 1 generation removed from the wild. These progeny just don't survive to adulthood to the same degree as wild fish progeny. So simply being more selective or increasing the number of fish you spawn doesn't help the situation.

With that said, I don't blame hatcheries for decreases in wild production. Like you say, the function of hatcheries is to provide fishing opportunity, both in the total numbers of fish and year to year consistency of runs. The latter is very important because wild populations can fluctuate by an order of magnitude because of natural environmental conditions; its the nature of the anadromous beast. And according to some of the data that Bill McMillian presented last night, you can have just as many good years with lots of fish as poor years with very few, and it's alll completely natural. It is definitively not the case where the poor year is the exception.

In this setting, I submit that you CAN'T manage for harvest at current fishing levels without hatcheries. The natural fluctuations of wild fish is such that during the good years there may be an adequate surplus for harvest, but during the poor years, which can be half the time, sooner or later you're going to fish a run into extinction or remnance.

So without hatcheries, you're left with either 100% C&R, or an ultimately failing attempt to manage wild populations for harvest. With a no hatchery scenario, managing wild steelhead for C&R would be the only viable way to go.

Throw in economics now. In Canada, when BC went to 100% C&R in the mid-80s, there was a substantial decline in license sales over the next 3-4 years. Only after BC began hatchery brood stock programs did angling begin to increase to historical levels. Without hatcheries, and 100% C&R, I think the same thing would happen here. There would probably be declines in local businesses, except perhaps on trophy rivers, and lower total state revenues from license sales and taxes.

Now throw in politics. Do you think there wouldn't be pressure to manage wild stocks for harvest if run sizes suddenly increased by an order of magnitude? You betcha. How quickly people would forget a previous poor year and think, whatever went wrong has been corrected. I don't think people will ever realize that things aren't wrong, during some years, but naturally, cyclically low. And the tribes will always be harvesting, and harvesting at MSY, which doesn't work.

Where am I going here? I believe hatcheries are necessary to keep fishing opportunities at there present levels. However, hatchery policy as it sits now will cause further declines in wild production. I think the solution lies in the retooling of existing hatchery policy such that a goal of minimal interference to wild stocks be achieved. I think Bill presented substantial evidence that temporal isolation of spawning periods (i.e., breeding for early returners) doesn't effectively isolate hatchery and wild fish. But unlike Bill, I believe that there is a threshold of hatchery interaction that will minimally affect wild stocks, and that this threshold can be reached with changes in hatchery practices.

Practices such as discharging smolts in hatchery feeder streams where excess fish can be collected. Thorough hatchery imprinting. Limiting the trucking of early returning adults . No smolt discharges in mainstems. Marking fish such that straying rates can be determined and monitored. Relocating/eliminating facilities proximal to rebuilding runs. Elimination of hatchery plants in small streams, etc.

Some of the above ideas are probably prudent, others maybe not, others would need to be studied. But the most important consideration is to produce a strong policy driven objective to keep hatchery and wild fish separate. That presently is not the case. Those that think that the temporal separation of hatchery runs is adequately protecting wild runs are either ignoring a body of data, misinterpreting those data, or are satisfied with the present level of wild production.

These comments from Bill McMillan's presentation at the Wild Steelhead Coalition Meeting last night courtesy of Nate Mantua the WSC's VP Science and Education:

I was also really impressed by the scope of issues Bill covered in last night's presentation.
While I struggled to take notes in the dark during Bill's slide show, I did get this provocative stuff down:

* Male steelhead as vectors for hatchery/wild interactions: the basic idea here is that buck steelhead are sexually mature from late fall through late spring, and they will attempt to spawn with as many hens as they can over that window of time. Even though hatcheries have bred hens to mature in Dec-Jan-Feb, the hatchery bucks still in the river can and likely do spawn with wild hens that typically mature in March-April-May-June. Bill has a published
study on this issue that's available on the Wild Salmon Center's web-site:
http://www.wildsalmoncenter.org/steelhead.pdf
The bottom line? You simply cannot use March 15 as a meaningful date for separating wild and hatchery steelhead populations. Yet our WDFW has attempted to do just that.

* Evidence from Kamchatka (in the 1990's) and Celilo Falls on the Columbia (around 1900) supports the idea that undisturbed wild steelhead populations have much more diverse spawn timing than our present populations. Among steelhead sampled at Celilo 1902, about 1/3 were mature enough that they'd likely be ready to spawn in mid-November or December, while the other 2/3's were not ripe at all and not likely to spawn until the next spring. Today we rarely see these early wild spawners in the Northwest. Bill labelled the NW data collected in the past few decades as part of a "curtain of misinformation, where we have volumes of accumulated misinformation from a tattered resource."

* In the Kamchatka streams he worked on, they found steelhead/rainbow populations with 3 main life history types. Anadromous types (steelhead) were 2/3 females; estuary types (half-pounders) were 2/3 males; and stream types (rainbows) were 2/3 males. Each "type" fills a different niche, and as nature thows a variety of curveballs at these fish (like floods, droughts, lousy ocean conditions, even volcanic eruptions), different components of the overall population boom and bust. It provides the kind of safety net required to survive over the long haul. And it's the kind of population diversity that we've largely (or entirely) lost in many of our heavily impacted wild steelhead populations in the Northwest.

* and here's another gem: "what you spend is what you get". That Washington's DFW is heavily invested in hatchery programs, much moreso than in habitat/wild stock programs. In the early 1990's, WA dept of wildlife was spending about $26 million a year on hatchery steelhead programs, but only about $1.5 M on wild fish programs.

And probably most disturbing was his belief that we aren't likely to recover wild populations without tackling the hatchery interaction problem. Even with 100% wild steelhead release, even with improving stream habitat, Bill feels that interactions with hatchery fish present a critical barrier to wild steelhead recovery. The good news is that he also believes we can recover wild fish populations, have quality sport fisheries, even some with harvest, if we ALLOW our wild populations to recover. He cited a few examples where mostly or entirely wild stocks have shown great productivity in the recent past. These streams include: the Toutle River 5 years after Mt St. Helens. The Salmonberry in Oregon, Satus Creek on the Yakima reservation, the John Day (with as many as 40,000 wild fish per year in 1985-1988), and Joeseph Creek (near the Grande Ronde).

Seems like he was pointing the finger back at us. Can we be bold enough to cut back on hatchery programs to give our wild fish a chance?

Nate