I am well aware of why people like and dislike hatcheries. but would there be advantages to
gathering fish that were wild (to its home river)
and hatch its fry and let them go on the same river.
I cant help but think of all the work that went into saving the skagit river kings. (I have seen some of the biggest kings of my life in there) I was hoping some day they would open a season for them once again. Its a shame that the flood is going to endanger them once again. Would the fry still be wild or would they be hatchery.

There are several strategies like this that can be helpful. The issues that make them harder include:

1) There may not be carrying capacity in the stream, due to ecological issues. Planting the fry may just result in dead fry.

2) Hatchery 'races' of fish have been bred because some of the wild fish don't rear well in hatcheries. It takes some docility, something like the difference between cows and elk, to allow large numbers of fish to grow in a small space.

BC has done some neat things with spawning channels, which provide spawning baitat, without the crowding issues associated with a hatchery. There are definitely options out there.

I think your opening the broodstocking can of worms and I feel your pain concerning the Skagit. Under your scenerio, if I've got it right, you want to capture wild adult chinook for your egg take, incubate the eggs thus eliminating the mortality that normally occurs in the gravel, then releaseing the fry as wild fish. I would think that this would be a good plan and don't feel that the released fish would have time to aquire any of the negative traits that fish reared to smolt in a hatchery would take on. Many programs that utilize remote site incubators are basically doing what you want. One problem on the Skagit with chinook would be legally gathering your adults with all the ESA restrictions on them. Another consideration for any system would be whether the system can support (carrying capacity) all the fry your sending out if your doing a big project. It wouldn't make much sense to put out a ton of fry if there is not enough habitat to support them.

Beezer

Ah, the broodstocking debate. Here's the thing...The whole notion of boodstocking as a way of supplementing "wild" fish is a great idea, but you have to understand that the method in itself introduces unnatural components into the fishes genome.

First, for efficiencies sake, eggs and milt from relatively few fish are taken, much much fewer than the number of naturally reproducing adults. This automatically makes the gene pool of the brood stock less robust then naturally reproduced wild fish. Second, there is significant natural selection going on (or unnatural selection) when you dramatically increase the egg to smolt survival rate by rearing the juveniles in a protected environment. Many of those naturally reproduced juvenile fish that don't survive for whatever reason--predation, competition, disease, etc.,--would survive in the hatchery, thus lowering the genetic fitness of the stock if they return as adults. In this sense, only a single generation of broodstocking can introduce genetic changes.

That said, I'm still a proponent of brood stock programs with hatchery reforms in place. Collecting fish for broodstock should be conducted with a goal of maximizing genetic fitness and diversity as oppose to merely getting enough eggs to fill the raceway with smolts. I also don't believe you have the same potential for population declines when broodstocked fish and wild fish interact and reproduce naturally, compared to when you have traditional hatchery fish and wild fish interact. But realize that the broodstocked fish are not genetically "wild" for the above reasons, so interaction should be kept to a minimum. There is a potential problem in this, because brood stock fish are not separated temporally from the wild fish (i.e., early returners), so there is more difficulty in keeping the stocks from interacting.

I'm not familiar with the mechanics of brood stock programs, but there should be a component of true wild fish taken out of the river each season and added to brood stock returns to keep genetic diversity as high as possible, while keeping the efficiencies of hatchery production.

DJ,

WDFW does have a wild broodstock program for Skagit kings, summer fish from the upper river as part of an indicator stock study, and now, summer-fall broodstock are also collected from the middle river specifically to enhance this most depressed segment of the Skagit basin chinook population. Maybe a good thing, too, with the egg loss from recent flooding likely exceeding 90%.

Sincerely,

Salmo g.

Let's just hope they all didn't get wiped out

Obsessed

You say;
Can you tell us a little more about this issue? Are you saying that just one major event of changing of genetics will have a major effect on the gene pool of a native speice?

Cowlitzfisherman

Major change, minor change....I don't think anyone really has the answers to that. But are broodstock fish one generation removed from wild fish genetically different than their wild counterparts? Yes. Whether its enough to cause some of the problems believed to be caused by traditional hatchery stocks interacting with wild stocks is not clear.

Mark Chilcote, an Oregon Fish and Wildlife biologist has a draft paper that looks at population trends in OR rivers with and without hatchery supplementation. His conclusions were that population declines of wild steelhead unexplained by other factors occurred in rivers supplemented by hatchery stocks. He also didn't find a difference in the type of hatchery stock, whether it be traditional hatchery fish bred to different timing, or brood stock programs--population declines in wild steelhead were found when interactions occurred with both types of hatchery fish.

What he also found was that there appeared to be a threshold of interaction, below which there were no apparent effects to wild steelhead populations. This threshold appeared to be around 10 percent--below this, hatchery fish had no effect on wild populations. I don't have the paper with me right now; what immediately comes to mind is how one defines interaction as a percentile. I'll have to dig it up and review it again.

Now, he used a lot of statistics and there are datagaps in his assessment, but I don't believe there's an agenda here. The paper's not an ODFW report, but one that I believe he wants to publish in the refereed scientific literature.

I don't know what kind of guidelines Oregon uses to maintain genetic diversity and fitness in their broodstock programs, but the Chilcote paper seems to indicate that wild and brood stock fish are different enough such that the production of wild fish may be affected if they interact too much.

Certainly more study is necessary; I'm not a geneticist, maybe Carl O. can provide some input here. Despite these preliminary findings, I 'm still a proponent of brood stock programs because I believe many are not run with an objective of genetic diversity (and not just lip service). And if there is a threshold of interaction below which there are no effects to wild fish, it could be a management goal to have such programs in watersheds where you can remain below it.

My opinion of todays hatchery programs will firm up in the next few seasons, I think. Last years summer and winter runs in Puget Sound streams were the worst in my recollection. Something is going on in Puget Sound that is not conducive to either hatchery or wild steelhead, but the hatchery fish got clobbered. If it keeps up a few more years, than the fish have likely lost the fitness to survive except during the most optimal of conditions (and everybody knows how unimpressive those Chambers Creek brats are, as well).

The alternative of severely curtailing hatchery production I feel would invite either the eventual stressing of wild stocks by overfishing, or a reduction of overall recreational fishing effort for steelhead if there were no fish to keep. The anti-hatchery folks would argue against the latter, but this isn't what happened in BC. During the transition between C&K and C&R, total fishing effort declined, and it is believed that a subsequent rebound in fishing occured because of substantial increases in hatchery production.

Thanks to obsessed and salmo g. you 2 guys know your stuff....I cant help but think about the small creeks that run all up and down the skagit. In 1962 michigan traded lake trout eggs with washington for salmon eggs. Michigan never opened a hatchery, they just dropped smolt into all the creeks and rivers along the highways the salmon scented the the creeks and took care of the reproduction cycle on there own......by the way the lake trout were put in the highland lakes and are called Mackinaw after the hatchery they came from on the tip of the lower pennisula of michigan (the mitten)........PS.. its just a sick feeling knowing that this years eggs either were washed away or covered in mud, add a few comorants and boom there go all the perspective adult returners before they ever make it out of the river.