Well, sadly Sgt. Snackbar has been reported dead but the details are confusing. The official report indicates his tag has not moved for two months hence presumed dead with tag on sea floor (seal poop). Conflicting with that information is that he was shown as having made 4 1/2 round trips from the Devil's Head sensor arrays to those at the Narrows after having reached salt water.

I think this warrants an Independent Counsel investigation!! Is Sgt. Snackbar really dead? If so, when and by what cause?? Or is he happily swimming past Neah Bay under an assumed identity?

Sobering...

And Twitch gets sealed near Bainbridge. All four fish from the Badger family are goners.

Puget Sound. . .tough row to hoe!!

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DAMMMMMMMMMM.....

Gross understatement!! 94% dead in the first 14 days....gonna be a long, tough two years.

That jaw-dropping juvenile mortality rate speaks to the importance of fecundity in getting a population past that life history bottle neck.

On the Keogh they showed that, by decreasing smolt age they increased smolt numbers. Consequently, the run went from non-self sustaining to self sustaining.

Initially, they decreased smolt age by a combination of fertilizing and in-stream habitat improvements. Then, they sustained the nutrient level through spawning salmon. Whenever nutrient levels crashed, smolt age immediately increased.

The above is physical evidence... good evidence that escapement goals must increase as habitat is improved (if we hope to see a "return" on our investments).

I recently had it explained to me that the reason we don't necessarily need to increase escapement to benefit from habitat improvements is that fewer spawners will be more productive spawning in more suitable habitat. I'm sure there's truth in that, but it ignores the other, critical piece of what makes up fish habitat in the otherwise relatively sterile PNW streams: a lot of salmon carcasses to keep nutrient levels high enough to support future generations.

How much longer can we ignore the elephant?

We will ignore the elephant until extinction. You are right that the intent is to make each spawner more productive so we can maintain harvest and lower the goal. I know folks in WDFW who have essentially told the public that.

Note, too, that whenever we remove a barrier to migration the EG is held constant. Essentially, improved productivity.........

Alright boys, what's the attrition down to?

Anybody still got a horse left in the race?

This is a thinker thread to be sure so I would like to throw this in. The world of unintended consequences or how we altered things with out knowing. The best example I know of is Willapa Chum ( hang on a minute / breath ) which met it head on. For years a friend of mine could watch the interaction between predators ( birds in this case ) and out migrants. Then the hatchery production was restricted which good / bad depends on ones view but the out come was bad. Why? Well now all you had was the natural production out migrating and all the birds and others still there feasting on just the much lower natural production so bad is all one can say to the end effect.

The natural order has been altered beyond repair to reach a goal of recreating the natural order and in many ways somewhat like a house of cards that if you start changing things around in the world of fish it tends to have a cascade effect, downward. The inability to make adjustments to the big picture is driven by harvest and MSY which restrict the ability to recognize and react to a situation as it develops because out the gate MSY is about maintaining harvest at all cost. Then this if you harvest the food chain top to bottom just what does one think is going to happen? More fish at the top & bottom of the food chain? Nope all go down which is happening on steroids in PS.

Bottom line is be it Steelhead or any fish really everything is co - dependent so the attempts to save this stock or that stock will have some success in the short run but usually fail long term big picture because you cannot harvest the food chain top to bottom. You cannot build like crazy even with good practices because in the end the accumulative damage that is many times unseen will lead you to the world of unintended consequences.

Note to self: Put soap box away.

That is some interesting insight riverguy, and something that does not seem to have been addressed anywhere. So, if the department suddenly stops planting smolt, like they did on the Snoqualmie system, without first reducing the predator rate, the natural balance is offset. Predators that feed on 250,000 hatchery smolt suddenly see their food train gone. That first year everything left gets hammered. What might make it worse is when a system has staggering migration rates and pumps up several species and leaves the other untouched. Does anyone have a time table for the migration rates of different species? While it may seem odd, perhaps releasing steelhead at the exact same time as another species may encourage them to flush out quicker and face less individual pressure. Perhaps the lower stream quality, along with smaller plants of steelhead, leads to an outward migration all at once that allows a larger predator pool to take advantage of a feed source when it naturally low. An artificially high predator pool being fed by hatchery chinook and Coho and large pink and chum runs, surviving the rest of the year by wiping out whatever is left available.
There are a ton of different outcomes that come to mind when I think of the implications of an out of balance ecosystem. Something that should be considered when looking at release dates and outward migration. I can easily see how a complete cutoff of a hatchery run could instantly doom a wild run.

Is there anyway they could try doing the several of these releases next year and see how much difference timing and smolt size matters. Also, perhaps taking a few and transporting them out past the sound. I know it takes money but perhaps it can be raised based off the current results.

The website (https://www.survivethesound.org/home) has a fairly detailed report on each fish.

When they cut off the survival monitoring only 5 of 48 smolt were still considered alive; two from the Nisqually and three from the Skok.

It will be interesting to see how this is integrated into the ongoing bigger study. Also, keep in mind the efforts by the Squaxin tribe and PSRFE group to release marked coho at different points progressively closer to the Strait to try and determine if by doing so they can increase returns by avoiding predation from South Sound to, say, Port Townsend.

Not buying that hatchery smelt help wild smolt. Predators will leave/die if not enough food.

While predators (and their current high populations) are not totally the result of hatchery smolt production I believe the point being made is that in the short term should there be a huge decrease in hatchery smolt those predators would impact wild smolt at a much higher rate than currently being experienced.

To the extent that those hatchery smolt are critical to the predator population their removal would ultimately result in a decrease in predator numbers (along with adverse impacts on other potential food sources).

Ultimately there would be a new balance........but at what cost to those wild smolt?

Thanks, Larry. That was my thoughts on the short term consequences. In the long term everything does balance out, but the damage to a specific run could already been done.

Another major concern of what could be occurring in the sound is that the effect of large releases from hatcheries on the Nisqually, Minter Creek, Chambers Creek, Puyallup, Deschutes and the Squaxin Tribe, along with the current large numbers of Pink and Chum smolts naturally occurring , is causing an artificially high number of predators to survive. If one outward migration comes through alone and in low numbers, it could easily be decimated by these predators, while the bigger hatchery releases would survive fairly good. Very little could be done to prop up these little runs, other than finding some way to create a higher food base during their outward migrations or trying to time them to go out with other migrations that have higher numbers.

It seems odd to me that the smolts released were so easily zoned in on by the predator base (if that is what ultimately killed off the steelhead). In a normally balanced ecosystem I don't think that would happen.

A valid question would be whether those sample hatchery smolt actually experienced a higher attrition rate than (a) other non-surgically altered hatchery smolt released at the same time and (b) wild hatchery smolt outmigrating at about the same time. And if not, what is the variation and why?

Where this is going to get really interesting is when the Orca folks push harder for Chinook to feed the Killers. Maybe pitting Orca lovers against seal lovers. Wow, I'd pay to witness that face off! Just hope we don't end up paying for Chinook and then being told sorry, need'em for the Killers.

HOLY CRAP! Only 5 of 48 smolts made it past the SJdF! That's a 90% mortality rate!

Hood Canal fish are basically toast right at the floating bridge. My guess is that the hatchery selects for good surface feeders and the dam things don't have any instinct to swim down deeper to get around the surface obstruction... so they mill about the surface at the bridge til they get eaten by birds.

OK... never mind. I re-read the LLTK webpage and these were WILD acoustically tagged smolts.

The obscene mortality could certainly have been surgically induced. Then there's the issue of an acoustic transmitter pinging away like a homing beacon for any potential predator making it easier to target would-be meal.

Damn shame ANY way you look at it.

One problem I have with the acoustic results is we have no baseline. We have smelt-adult.

Let's say that you got 10% smolt-adult for steelhead. 10 out of 100. So, say you lose 80% to Bonilla Tatoosh. If half of those return as adults you have your "old" 10% but you know most of the loss is in the early time in the Sound.

I do know of a wild coho run that was getting 10-20% smolt to adult back to rack after all the fisheries. For them, losing 80% in-Sound would mean they all had to survive in the absence of fishing.

I really don't know if that in-Sound mortality is high, or not. I do know, though, with steelhead, that nobody has been able to show me a local wild population where the R/S for a brood from spawn to first return is even equal to 1; they are all lower. Means two things, repeat spawners are required and marine survival isn't that good as a base.