Easy there, Lunch Time. Don't even remotely associate me with some poorly thought out excuse for a law. That would be Sparkey's Law, thank you. I am very much against that stupid proposal.

Uh oh, here we go again.

In commercial fishing, gear selectivity is defined for size, not species. Gillnets are the most selective fishing gear to be used. Small holes catch small fish. Large holes catch large fish. Medium holes catch fish in between. That is the definition of gear selectivity in fisheries.

The only real way I know how you can select for species is management, as I don't know of any fisheries gear techniques that can select for species (effectively). IE, don't allow selective gear fisheries to fish when endangered (or ESA) fish are present.

Stop saying gill nets are not selective. They are....just not for species..especially if your species are all roughly the same size!

As a fisheries dude, that's just one of my pet peeves....

Ok, back to the topic at hand - very knowledgable and enjoyable I might add.

One of the questions asked of me this week is the snider creek broodstock fish punched on your retention card as a native or a hatchery fish anybody know the truth? Here are some more statistics, the bogey hatchery this year is looking at about 10.000 fish returned, one of the better gillnetters in the Quilleyute had 24 fish for 284 # in one day! looks like big fish native wise this year for sure as I have experienced this week every boat had killed fish,natives that had caught fish and it is pretty slow with alot of boats catching zero but was kind of surprised by the catch and kill mentality already usually this time of year that is not the case you would think everyone has enough dead fish to satisfy that urge but guess what not. The best part is I don't personnelly think it is going to be a great year for natives on the pennisula this year so there is probably some changes on the way that will impact the fishery as Rich G has been saying all along it was only a matter of time

I would like to apologize to TwoDogs and any other person I may have offended on my previous post regarding this topic. I must say it was a very poor choice of words. I will attempt to keep my offensive, cynical comments to myself in the future. I am truly sorry.

LT

LT,

You're a bad boy...

Anyway, go ahead and post that pic...I don't look too stupid in the picture, do I? I seem to remember that there were a few dead soldiers in the bottom of the boat by the time that picture was taken.

Fish on...

Todd.

Smalma, You took the words out of my mouth. same goes for the selective waters on the peninsula streams. Attitudes are different.

Parker, With all your public outcry, I hope you sent in a letter in regards to Sparkeys Law. I have to at least give ol' Sparkey credit he's an advocate for the fish whether you agree with that proposal or not.

Yup, already did that DH. All I can do now is razz on Sparkey!

You should have heard the amount of crap I was flipping at him during the Snoopy Rod Classic when he landed that wild fish.

Ya know, to the (previously) uninformed you guys provide a heck of an education on a given topic.

The whole issue is much clearer now, but some things are stil a bit muddy...those will come in time.

After reading the entire thread there seems to be some commonalities..

1) Having hatchery fish and wild fish in the same waters, at the same time, is not always (maybe never) a good thing.

2) A potential exists for the spawning of a wild/hatchery pair...this potentially reduces the quality and strength of the gene pool in that particular strain of fish.

3) Almost all agree on complete non-retention of wild fish.

4) CnR fishermen typically show the wild fish more "respect" in handling and releasing. Those with "fishing pox" (like us) will provide the wild fish much more respect and care in handling and releasing, while the two day a year armchair fishkiller would be more likely to damage/harm the wild fish...public education is needed here.

A Question or two:

A) Would there be a benefit to have a much increased hatchery run in the rivers, but with a distinct time separation from the wild runs. Hatchery run in Nov./Dec. when the wilds are returning 2 months later? See if we can get the law changed so that all caught hatchery fish must be retained at any time, so as not to even take the chance on the gene-pool issue.

B) Increased awareness campaign for the (non-fishpox) public. Maybe a Public Service Announcement (aka PSA) funded in part by PSA (Puget Sound Anglers), TU and ?? and general donation AND WDFW funds.

A 30 second PSA can go a long ways towards gaining respect and awareness of the Puget Sound Anglers group and the increased respect of the public towards the resource.

I can think of numerous ways to raise the funds for this.

Benefits? The sportfishers gain greater respect from the WDFW, the resource gets far better treatment (we hope) and ultimately the steelhead populations (both wild and hatchery) will increase.

I am sure there are "issues" with both of the above suggestions...but, nothings going to change unless we make it happen. Setting a commonly agreed upon set of goals, and working towards them (vs. letting the ignorant, non-fishing public and ??? take the lead) seems to be our only option.

Mike

Mike, Good comments and you obviously have been doing your homework. The issue about having distinct hatchery and wild runs is an interesting one. Some will point to the fact that generally WDFW has managed to that philosophy and tried to seperate the runs as the reason that several rivers "early" wild runs are now virtually gone. One river that I fish, the Skookumchuck, has both an early and late run of hatchery fish that comingle with the wild fish returns. I guess the bottom line for me is that every time that we think we can control nature, she throws us a curveball. So many unintended consequences.... Todd started this thread with some questions about retaining hatchery fish, I retain most hatchery fish but there are some I let go - for a variety of reasons. I would hate to be a lawbreaker for letting a fish go. My $.02

Salmo g, could you provide a link to the paper that summariizes those findings. It would be interesting to know if these observations would hold up for other salmonid species. I am particularly interested in how hatchery/wild interactions affect the productivity of chinook salmon populations.

Alaska's Kasilof River is "enhanced" with early run kings. Last year the fishery went to WKR (wild king release) until ADFG can get a better handle on wild stock numbers and productivity. There is a perception that the wild component is in serious decline.

However, the glitch in the whole works now is that all surplus hatchery fish will be passed upriver thru the weir and allowed to spawn "naturally". The observations from Kalama steelhead would suggest this practice would be detrimental to long-term wild productivity of Kasilof kings. Does that assessment hold water?

TRBO, this issue is right up your alley as well. What do you think?

FNP,

Link? That's computer geek skill that I've not acquired. I can barely touch type. I've got the Kalama papers or excerpts somewhere in my sedimentary filing system, but I honestly couldn't put my hands on them right away.

Frankly, I'm somewhat baffled by the results. It's almost intuitive that Chambers Creek winter runs don't survive simply by being so out of sync timing wise. Timing of emergence from the gravel is a critical component of survival. The early spawn timing of CC fish has them emerging from the gravel at the end of the spring "bloom" instead of the second late summer bloom that normal timed steelhead encounter, so there feeding opportunities become limited before they achieve early critical growth.

What I don't understand is the poor performance of hatchery steelhead with appropriately timed spawning. A fry emerging from the gravel doesn't know he had poor parenting, and he eats anything that looks like it might be food, and by trial and error figures the process out. Why that fish doesn't subsequently survive to adulthood, I don't understand. Nonetheless, the evidence indicates that survival is poor for the hatchery steelhead. Some do survive, tho.

I forget the biologist's name from Oregon that has found much the same for coho salmon in coastal streams there. The hatchery coho are poor performers in the natural environment. I don't understand that one at all. My experience is that you can create a wild coho run from hatchery coho quite readily. I accept that the hatchery coho are perhaps less efficient at it coming out of the gate, but we've seen hundreds of thousands of "wild", or naturally reared coho smolts come down the upper Cowlitz that were from plants of hatchery fry. And the fry to smolt survival rate was quite acceptable. Of course, coho seem to be the most "plastic" of the salmonids. They take to hatchery culture quite well, and are easily reared, transported, and so on. So perhaps they can be returned to natural production more readily than the other species as well.

I'm not sure about chinook. I would expect that if the spawn timing is the same as natural fish that hatchery chinook could successfully reproduce in the wild, but really, I'm speculating.

Sincerely,

Salmo g.

Salmo g

Sounds like ADFG has a golden opportunity to initiate the study to answer the question regarding spawning productivity in hatchery-reared chinook. How would you go about setting up such a study? How do you measure the productivity (or lack thereof) when the progeny of those hatchery-reared spawners is not marked?

FishNDoc-
Unfortunately my computer skills are even more limited that Salmo's. However some of the authors that have written on survival of hatchery steelhead include: Leider et al. 1990, Blouin 2003, Kostow 2003, McLean et al. 2003, Hulett et al. 1996

For coho - Fleming and Gross 1993

For chinook - Reisenbichler and Rubin 1999

There are a number of ongoing studies as well as some literature comparing hatch and wild survivals for altantic salmon and anadromous brown trout.

The species interaction studies (several authors on the Yakima - (funded by BPA I think) would also likely have some information.

The short of it is that generally the longer the juvenile fish are held in the hatchery envirnoment (yearling smolts -steelhead, coho and chinook) the poor they perform in the wild. In addition the more generations a brood stock has been in the hatchery the poorer they do.

The poor survival is likely due primarily to the domesitication of the fish - that is the hatchey envirnoment selects for different behaviors than a free flowing river. The degree that the returning hatchery fish's spawn timing, behavior, run timing etc is out of sync with that exhibited by the wild fish also play a role in their survival.

To minimize negative effects of natural spawning hatchery fish on the wild populations the best bet is to catch the heck out of the hatchery fish. Two other general statregies have been commonly used. The first typcialified by the early Chamber's Creek fish is to have a large temporal and spacial separation in the spawning of the two populations. In the North Sound area the temporal separation of the two winter stocks is nearly 100%. The other is use native brood stock and to try to selective the brood stock so the smolts produced are representative of the wild population they came from - with prolong spawning and run timing that can be difficult. Any selection that occurs in the wild brood stock will likely result in a hatchery fish that is somewhat different that the wild population however there will be significant spacial and temporal spawning between the two populations.

Each of the hatchery programs present differrent harvest management problems as well. Which is better if any is likely best determined on a case by case basis.

Tight lines
Smalma

S malma

Thanks for the references.... I found the 1999 R&R article on the web but could only get access to the abstract.

click: R&R abstract

To see the whole study costs $30.00 to non-subscribers. OUCH!

Do you have a subscription to any of the on-line scientific papers that would allow you to download that article for free?

FishNDoc

No I don't - It has long been a problem getting hands on the various papers. The references I listed above were in a bibliography of a paper I was reading the other night.

Here is a paper the provides a summary on some of these issues.
http://www.lltk.org/hatcheryreform.html#publications

It is written by the HSRG group (hatchery review). While they may a pro-hatchery bent they and Long Live the Kings seems to have the respect of many.

You might be able to get copies of some of the papers by contacting the agencies that over saw some of the work - for example Lieder and Hullett were employed by WDFW.

While I'm swamped for the next couple weeks if I find a ready electronic source I'll try to pass it along.

Tight lines
Smalma

LT -- Thanks for the apology. No problem now. I appreciate it.

Smalma -- You could add to the list of references a paper by Kostow, Marshall, and Phelps, 2003, Transactions of the American Fisheries Society, reporting on a study in the Clackamas basin wher hathcery summer steelhead spawning in the wild had much lower reproductive success than local native wild winter steelhead. The problem was that the offspring of the wild-spawning hatchery steelhead survived pretty well to the smolt stage. Apparently their poor survival was in the ocean. So they took up food, space, etc. in the river and thereby presumably diminished the survival of juvenile wild fish they were competing with. This study was comparing summer run hatchery fish with winter run wild fish so it might not have too much to say about using broodstock close to the wild fish in a hatchery program.

As far as those of us who have e-subscriptions to (some) journals sharing articles goes, I think this practice is usually prohibited. I'll look into it more and see if it's possible at all. I think there has been a very thoughtful exchange of ideas and information on this thread.

Twodogs -
The Kostow (2003) cited in the list above is the same as the Kostow, Marshall and Phelps paper you quote. I was just sloppy and omitted the other authors.

Thanks for the catch!

Tight lines
Smalma

Here's the fish described above...this obviously ripe hatchery buck was caught mid-April several years ago on the Skagit, below the mouth of the Sauk.



While admittedly rare, these fish are not insignificant. I believe that these "precocious" hatchery bucks are responsible for most, if not all, of the hatchery/wild crossover issues.

Fish on...

Todd.

S malma

I started chewing on that LLTK's hatchery reform recommendations for Puget Sound (2003).

I was a bit perplexed by the concept of rigidly designating 'integrated' vs 'segregated' hatchery programs, and the group's stance against any sort of 'intermediate' programs.

For the rest of the readers:

Integrated program: In a given drainage, the stocked fish are made to be as much like their wild counterparts as is humanly possible (ie in terms of genetics, morphology, run-timing). Co-mingling on the spawning beds is OK, but not necessarily desirable. No more than one third of natural spawners should be of hatchery origin... basically 2:1 ratio of wild:hatchery on the redds. Broodstock for the hatchery should consist of 10-20% wild fish ( in other words, 80-90% hatchery in-breeding).

Segregated program: In a given drainage, the stocked fish should be managed as a distinct stock with ideally no co-mingling with the wild stock. The genetics and run-timing would be very different so as to minimize pollution of the wild gene pool. Ideally no more than 1-5% of natural spawners would be of hatchery origin.

What do you guys think?

FishNDoc-
Science always wants to put biological systems into nice neat boxes - of course nature does not work that way. However we need to understand the simple before the complex.

Todd -
How long ago is several years. When the CnR season started on the Sauk in 1980 as much as 15% of the hatchery run was caught in March with unspawned hens ocassionally seen as late as the 1st of April. Through the continued spawn timing selection of the hatchery brood stock now (post 2000) no ripe hens are trapped at the hatcheries after late February. While there are still some spent and semi-spent males seen in the river in March. The likelyhood of seeing fish such as the one shown above spawning with any wild fish has been greatly reduced - the probability that occurring is likely only half of what it was 5 or 6 years ago.

The real question is how much impact or risk do such fish represent to the wild population. What genetic information that is available shows that on the Skagit that between the early 1970s and the early 1990s (5 steelhead generations) the wild fish become no more similar to the hatchery fish. Presumably with the overlap in spawning between the hatchery and wild fish reduced from 15% in the 1970s to less than 1% today that difference will continued to be maintained. I would expect that any mal-adapted hatchery genes are being quickly selected from the population by the harsh natural selection that occurs in basins like the Skagit.

Tight lines
S malma