This reminds me a bit of an internal discussion way back in the 80s when WDF was trying to culture and restore Dungeness Springs. The collected fish were reared to yearlings and released because everywhere else that WDF did Springs (mostly Columbia) the best returns came from Yearlings. Scale sample from adult Dungeness Springs showed zero, zip, nada, none, no adults that had been age-1 smolts. WDF's response was that we would continue to do age-1 as it worked everywhere else. There are more than a few times when actual, real data gets overlooked because it must be wrong.