With respect to your examples, it's a combination of things Rich. For instance, the Lyre River has low productivity and capacity for wild salmon and steelhead, so natural runs would consist of small numbers of fish. Absent hatchery plants the river cannot support much fishing at all. In the case of Goodman Creek, it appears that the presence of early timed (Chambers Ck) hatchery winter steelhead promoted the over-fishing of early timed wild steelhead. That happened all over western WA. Given enough time, the remaining later timed wild steelhead escapements will eventually fill that early winter return timing gap.

But another variable came into play. That is the huge reduction in smolt to adult survival rates (SAR). With SAR of 5 to 10%, the wild run escapement can expand relatively quickly to fill the early run timing void in a few generations. With SAR at 1% and sometimes less, it will take a very long time for that process to occur. It can and probably will still happen; it's just going to take a long time.

Puget Sound pink salmon runs have been volatile for as long as anyone knows, generally less than 2 or 3 million until about 1999. Then through the 2011 cycle there were unprecedented - as far as we know - increases where the returns came in at up to about 14 million. Then when we got some regular winter floods, the pink runs crashed back to "normal" or lower levels for the last few cycles. Given the extreme ranges of pink salmon run sizes to PS over the period of record, I don't think anyone can give a realistic estimate of PS for the productivity and carrying capacity for pink salmon. Only that runs can range from about 1 million to as much as 14 million.

Chum salmon have crashed throughout PS, more in the north sound than the south. The causes appear to be both environmental and some over-fishing. Usually when over-fishing stops, run sizes rebound. But if negative environmental pressures coincide with the period when a run should rebound, it stands to reason that runs would remain depressed. I don't know, but I think that is what is happening. There has been a lot written in the scientific literature recently about the huge hatchery releases of pink and chum salmon from Alaska and Japan. The inference is drawn that this is depressing survival rates and run sizes throughout the north Pacific Ocean and is quite possibly limiting Chinook salmon survival rates as well.

A key take home message from me is that the situation we are witnessing is very highly unlikely to be remedied by planting more hatchery fish. In all likelihood, doing so would only contribute to making the current problems even worse. I think salmon and steelhead are in for bad times for the foreseeable future. And, . . . I sure hope that I am wrong.