Elijah,

You posted: "The Sauk is open not because of a recovered run. It is open because of lobbying. The run is as low as it has ever been and those who promote saving wild fish should not be lobbying to fish on them at the same time (talking out of both sides of their mouth = hypocrites). There is mortality associated with CnR - like it or not but that is another argument. "

As WW pointed out, you got that point wrong. I mentioned that I am all about getting things accurate, and the Skagit/Sauk issue is near and dear to me. The Skagit steelhead haven't recovered because they were never threatened or endangered. The Skagit just happens to be located in Puget Sound (PS), and all of the PS steelhead DPS was listed as threatened in 2007. If it had been done on a river-by-river basis, the Skagit fish would never have been ESA listed.

The Skagit wild steelhead run, like all the PS steelhead runs, goes up and down according to marine survival conditions, and occasionally due to freshwater productivity conditions. The only reason for not fishing on the Skagit run is because fishing is fundamentally not good for fish. And the reason there should be a CNR season on the Skagit is because fishing since 1977 has had zero, absolutely zero, measurable effect on subsequent adult steelhead returns. These are facts that I can live with, and there is nothing hypocritical about it whatever.

About admitting being wrong, it doesn't take a "man." In my experience every intelligent man and woman I've known has no problem admitting mistakes. The not so smart people, well that's another story. I don't appreciate you calling people who follow my posts lemmings. They aren't. I credit them with understanding that I have a history here and elsewhere of reporting information that is reliably accurate, not failsafe, but accurate the preponderance of the time. For the record, I'm 70. Change isn't hard. Physical change is a fact of life. I'm neither as fast nor as strong as I once was. However, it's easy to change my mind or opinion whenever I see new information about a subject, like the effects of hatchery fish on wild fish populations, for example. It's amazing that you think you know what affected how I remembered the Courter article. It could have been some type of confirmation bias, but I honestly think it was as simple as forgetting that the investigators looked at the data time series both before and after PGE stopped passing hatchery summer runs upstream. I remembered the "after" but not the before. Read lots of scientific articles and you too might let a detail or two slip here and there.

I didn't think to mention the Courter study here last year because I thought it had already been raised here and on another web site where I did discuss it in detail. I do not keep a diary record of what subjects I've discussed on what websites, nor do I intend to.

I'm an equal opportunity critic. Hatchery fish are neither intrinsically good nor bad. Hatchery fish can be bad for wild fish when the hatchery population vastly outnumbers the wild population, and both occur at the same time and place and intermix on the spawning grounds, leaving too few viable wild spawning pairs of fish. I don't know of any cases where hatchery fish are "good" for wild fish, but it's hypothetically possible. For instance, where there is a predator bottleneck that a wild population must pass through, it's possible that an intermixed group of hatchery fish could sufficiently satiate the predators such that the overall predation rate on the wild fish is reduced through density dependent mortality by predation. If the predation bottleneck is density independent, then the presence of the hatchery fish will have no benefit for the wild fish, and may negatively affect them by competing for food and space.

I think the Courter study points to the hatchery summer steelhead spawning at a different time and in different locations in the upper Clackamas than the wild winter steelhead. Given what we know about hatchery steelhead not reproducing very effectively in natural environments, I don't find it surprising that no negative effects on the wild steelhead were observed. It's important IMO to understand that effects probably were not non-existant (sorry for the double negative). Since juvenile steelhead move significant distances during their freshwater rearing phase, the wild fish probably did encounter some hatchery summer run offspring. It's just that the amount of such encounters were few enough that no subsequent negative effects on the wild fish could be measured at the population level, i.e., subsequent generation adult steelhead because that is the yardstick by which the effects were measured.

For these reasons I try to steer clear of statements employing the adjectives of "always" and "never" because we seldom have such precise information available when studying fish populations. I'm not biased against hatchery fish. I am biased toward truth and facts regarding what we do know, and what we can reasonably infer, as opposed to what we wish were true or want to be true. From all the research I've examined, the truth seems to be that hatchery fish are not good for wild fish. On the other hand, certain hatchery programs, like hatchery winter steelhead, appear to have a very small negative effect on wild winter steelhead populations. I don't know for a fact, but I think the same holds true for a number of hatchery summer steelhead programs not adversely affecting wild winter steelhead populations because of temporal and spatial separation, as indicated by the Courter study.

The question comes up, what about Skamania hatchery summer run programs on the Stilly, Sky, and Green adversely affecting native wild summer steelhead? The Stilly Skamania fish appear to home on Whitehorse rearing ponds while the native Deer Creek fish ascend their natal stream, keeping the two stocks separate. In addition, it's unlikely that Skamania fish that enter lower Deer Creek will still be there when they would need to ascend the falls to go spawn with the wild fish - instead they home on Whitehorse when the fall rains come. The same thing may be happening on the Sky, although some introgression is reported. The Green never had a significant wild summer run, so the issue is whether the Skamania hatchery fish are adversely affecting the wild winter steelhead. I don't know what information is available describing what's going on there.

Sg