Hatcheries didn't start mass marking until the 80's, before that every fish was a native.

Sorry, Doc, I'm not wrong. You are making generalizations. Yes, the evidence exists from countless studies that reproductive success can go down with hatchery-wild reproductive interactions, thus there will be a slightly diminished egg-to-adult survival rate compared to purely wild offspring. This all happens in the first generation, but what's happening in the 2nd, 3rd or 4th generation? Hmm...

On the other hand, there are studies showing how hatchery fish may actually be supporting or supplementing wild populations throughout the entire north Pacific. IDFG is doing perhaps the most comprehensive study ever done with hatchery-wild interactions with steelhead and spring chinook. Interesting stuff. Entire wild populations of fish are being floated by these inferior hatchery fish. We've argued on this subject before with the feasibility of reintroducing fish to a system only with hatchery fish. Many people claim that no system can be recovered with hatchery fish. I presented the information on the Clearwater River (ID) spring and fall chinook population being extirpated, and later successfully recovered with Salmon River (ID) hatchery stocks. Their genes have changed just in the last 20 or so years. Now there is a healthy population of wild spring chinook throughout the entire Clearwater system. In fact, a large proportion of wild fish that you guys are releasing on the LCR are bound for the Clearwater system.

Look, I'm not advocating the destruction of wild steelhead. In fact, quite the opposite. My livelihood depends on the little buggers. I'm just willing to admit that there's a fine line between preserving fishing opportunity and preserving wild salmon and steelhead. Have we found that fine line? No, I don't think so. Everyone who has half a brain knows that harvest cannot be sustained solely on wild fish. I'm worried that in just a few years the only hatchery fishing opportunity in WA and OR will be in the Columbia targeting Idaho fish.

What your describing is barging smolt around all the dams.
And those studies that are trying to say interaction of wild and hatchery stocks actually help wild fish is right out of the jackwagon play book.
Hatchery breeding with wild = nothing returns.
The Snake River once represented 50% of the salmon and steelhead produced in the Columbia Basin, the four lower Snake River Dams block over 70% of the original spawning habitat on the Snake River.

Crap! Do we have to re-post every frickin' detail from every study of every species ever done to get the same old points across? Every time I begin to think we have a highly informed readership on this forum, some of you will post up the same old incorrect information that has been posted and refuted repeatedly in the past.

First and foremost! It's biology and ecology, so every one of you who makes an encompassing statement and holds it as the universal truth is flat out wrong! There are always exceptions. That doesn't make the general statements wrong. It only means that the general truths are generally true, but not invariably true. And just because there are exceptions, that doesn't make it a good idea to try and make that example into the norm. In fact, that would generally be stupid.

H x H mating and H x W steelhead mating usually but not invariably means the resulting return of reproductively fit adults is not statistically different than zero. OK, that means it's usually zero. But it's not always zero. The take home point is that zero reproductive success is not a good thing, whether it happens every single time, or just almost every time. Therefore such matings are not desirable if the intent is to manage for healthy fish populations.

McMahon,

You're in Idaho, therefore all your steelhead are summer run. If you've been paying close attention to this forum you know that the zero natural reproductive success attends mainly to coastal winter run steelhead stocks like the Chambers Creek winter steelhead. And you would, or should, remember that hatchery summer steelhead, of several stocks, while having initially poor natural reproductive success, is higher than that of the Chambers Creek fish, i.e., greater than zero success. So yes, indeed, naturally self-sustaining summer steelhead populations can and have been created from hatchery origin summer steelhead. However, that doesn't make it a preferred option; it just means that it can be done, and is therefore a useful tool in the fish manager's toolbox.

Wild steelhead populations are being recovered with significant use of hatchery summer steelhead in the Snake River system tributaries and mid-Columbia River tributaries. The use of late-timed hatchery winter steelhead in the Cowlitz River is re-creating naturally reproducing "wild" winter steelhead in the upper Cowlitz River system. The reason hatchery steelhead are being used in these examples is because there were few wild steelhead left, or in the case of the Cowlitz, zero wild steelhead left upstream of the dams. Just because it can be done is not reason enough that I would ever say it's OK to extirpate wild runs cuz we can just bring them back using hatchery fish, because while it will be successful in some cases, we cannot count on it being successful in every case.

Same applies to your chinook example, except that most hatchery salmon do not seem to be as poorly suited to successful natural reproduction as hatchery Chambers Creek winter steelhead.

Steelhead Stalkers,

Your statement is strong proof that our Piscatorial Pursuits educational mission is far from concluded. The short answer is that you're so flat out wrong and far off, but I won't say stupid, just incredibly misinformed. Please pay closer attention to the informative stuff on PP, and you will find that you no longer post stupid sh!t on PP any more.

Stlhdr1,

The amount of good information on historic run compositions is limited. But there is enough to know that wild winter run steelhead entered coastal and PS rivers from as early as Thanksgiving to as late as some time in April. What we don't know so much about is the spawn timing of all the discreet run segments. Topwater gets at some of it in regards to spawn timing depending on spawning location and stream type. However, we don't know that early run winter fish were invariably early spawners. Early run timing is just as likely to have been associated with early spawn timing in low elevation tributaries that warm up earlier in the late spring and summer and decline in flow AND with normal spawn timing in very upper mainstems and upper system tributaries fed by snow and glacial meltwater.

It comes down to the fact that living systems are complex. Every time some one has a simple explanation for you, you can bet dollars to doughnuts that they are wrong. Generally, but not always, you will win (see reference to general statements above).

Study hard friends; there will be a quiz next week, and your score will be entered into your PERMANENT record.

Sg

An easy refresher course would be to just read the archives...it's all been gone over, ad nauseum, dozens of times...

Fish on...

Todd

Kind of like Aunty M's cooking

I will point out that I did NOT stick my foot in something this time.............

arent the great lakes steelhead, possibly the best fishery in the lower 48, from hatchery skamania stock?

arent the great lakes steelhead, possibly the best fishery in the lower 48, from hatchery skamania stock?

A steelhead, by definition, spends a good part of its life in the ocean. The ability of a steelhead to reproduce has everything to do with the ability to have its progeny successfully go to the ocean and then return. The journey to the ocean is a lot more complicated and dangerous for a smolt than a journey to a Great Lake.

Those same Skamania fish were planted in the upper Clackamas for 30 years and did produce many smolt (too many for the wild smolt to compete with). However, the H-H smolt rarely returned as adults..............

I rec'd the following links the other day. Canneries were not the only culprit in the destruction of our rivers and streams. The damage done due to log drives/splash dams is still evident today.

********
Given the wide spread use (impacts) of this technology from 1880 thru 1950’s I would think these videos would be useful for educating folks as to why our streams look/ function the way they do today and how it effects the density of aquatic organisms?

http://www.opb.org/programs/ofg/segments/view/1761
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJDD9VCSfpY&feature=related

Jake,

I'm well aware of the difference of hatchery/native steelhead... I've chased them for years.... I've even been lucky enough to handle some sizable ones...

But one thing Freetool stands strong behind is what he reads, he'll keep preaching it and if it's in print it must be real....

Spring Chinook is where I feel there is an error in the belief in "native" fish #'s... Cookie cutter natives just don't make sense to me, not when a large % are identical to hatchery fish in size/dimensions.... Sure their are wild spring chinook left but I think its a bit more of a foggy # than what we're trained to believe...

What ever happened to the big native spring chinook I used to see when I was a kid on the CR? Perhaps they started clipping them??

Perhaps someday Bonneville dam will count hatchery vs wild chinook? I wonder why they don't at this point anyhow?

Another great example, the Lewis river coho fishery. It's a joke... Some years you catch very few mis-clips and other years they're 30% of what you catch...

Keith

Keith, it you really want get the fact about CR migrating stocks, here's a great source of real information, for both adult and juvenile migrations. If you have any questions about the data, give them a call, they would be happy to answer your questions.

http://www.fpc.org/

Loud and Clear Jake...

Keith

Hatchery fish were barged down the Snake and Columbia, not wild fish. I don't know of any article that *tries* to say that hatchery fish are floating wild populations. Many research projects just happen to find this simple fact out by taking genetic samples.

Seeing as you don't think that hatchery fish are capable of producing viable adults, I encourage you to type in "hatchery wild steelhead" into google scholar.

This one is interesting because the authors were already very biased in their assumption that hatchery fish were not capable of producing any viable returning adults, so much that they admit it in the beginning of the discussion section. In the same paragraph, they also admit that they were wrong about this assumption.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/n03443v677584m52/

Both hatchery and wild fish have been barged and trucked down the Snake River to below Bonneville Dam. I know because I had a job loading them a long time ago.

From McMahon's link:

"Although hatchery females (N = 90 and 73 in the two consecutive years of the study) produced offspring that survived to emigrate as smolts, they produced only 4.4–7.0% the number produced per wild female (N = 11 and 10). "

And that's just surviving to the smolt stage, right? Doesn't this just further confirm that hatchery fish are terrible at reproducing in rivers? I don't understand your point.

I'm afraid your being fed dam hugger wishful thinking junk science.
Here's what the Fish Passage Center had to say about the viability of barging fish.
Further, it's not my opinion that hatchery fish are inferior when it comes to breeding in the wild, it's what most fisheries scientists that don't work for hydro electric producers have been saying for years.

http://www.bluefish.org/survival.htm

Collection and Transportation by Barge
During migration season, salmon and steelhead are collected, transferred and transported by specially designed barges where they are released below Bonneville dam, the last dam before the ocean. For decades, the Army Corps of Engineers has suggested that collection and barging provides adequate salmon survival. The recent "Comparative Survival Study" by Fish Passage Center (11/26/3) suggests otherwise:

Little or no transport benefits were evident in most years for Snake River wild chinook based on available PIT tag data, 1994-2000.
Delayed mortality was evident for transported Snake River chinook smolts, which died at a greater rate after release below Bonneville Dam than smolts that migrated through the hydrosystem.
Smolt-to-Adult return ratio (SAR) of transported and in-river migrants were much less than the 2-6% SAR needed to recover Snake River spring/summer chinook.