Originally Posted By: Salmo g.
Originally Posted By: elparquito
Originally Posted By: stlhdr1
Prove me wrong then? Countless amounts of data if you look deep enough that supports my statement.

Keith


Happy to chat with you about it when we are shooting.

The data and studies I'm looking at seem to squarely point the finger at upriver and estuary habitat loss as the largest threats and reasons of a declining (stable at best) wild winter steelhead populations on the EFL.

I would wager a large sum of money that if the studies were done today a new, easily identified threat would be the top culprit, or at least a high contender to the loss/destruction of habitat. The Ocean.

The Ocean and ocean conditions are currently not favorable to a steelhead and a lot of the salmonid species.

Unless I'm missing something, the current data isn't showing any type of significant rebounding effect for the EFL.

It's not crashing in the tank either....but seems to be chugging long at a neutral state with periods of high and low escapement.

Maybe these documents are Fake News.

https://www.ezview.wa.gov/Portals/_1962/...DFW_Feb2019.pdf

https://nativefishsociety.org/watersheds/east-fork-lewis

Historical escapement data says anywhere from 1,000-11,000 seems to fit "the norm".

Escapement goal is 875 wild winter runs.

Look a the escapement graphs. No where close to 11,000 fish....and seems to hang right around the 800 mark and meets escapement.

That just tells me the river isn't outright dying. Not rebounding significantly.

I'm not an advocate for hatchery steelhead, but making blanket statements about how a few hatchery strays and or some magical spawning bed competition and/or hatchery/wild co-mingling in the spawning beds is by far *not* the largest threat to an EFL wild steelhead.

Can flat out guarantee that with absolutely no hatchery turds in the EFL now and in the future, you're never going to see 11,000 returning wild winter runs to that river...... You're never going to see 5,000...or 2,500......

You may see another 1,400 and you're probably going to see sub-800 numbers are well.


Yeah that. See, Paker does still have some biologist in his DNA!

I've written many times that hatchery steelhead don't do any favors for wild steelhead, but maligning those hatchery fish as the number one factor (i.e., proximate cause) of depressed numbers of wild steelhead does little more than deflect focus away from the factors that have significantly greater effects on returning adult steelhead populations.

Keith, since you cling to the studies showing where the presence of hatchery steelhead correlates with depressed wild runs, you could go a long way in explaining that the correlation is indeed causation. Show us why wild runs in river systems with or that have had hatchery steelhead fluctuate proportionately with wild steelhead runs in rivers that have never had any hatchery steelhead stocking at all. Ever.

There are many more steelhead streams on Vancouver Island and the BC coast that have never had a single hatchery smolt stocked than there are that have been stocked. Yet these forever unstocked rivers' populations fluctuate up and down the same as the populations in the Salish Sea and WA coast where hatchery steelhead have been stocked for a half century or more. Every biologist I've talked with about the subject believes that a factor common to both stocked and unstocked streams is the causative factor. And that factor is the fluctuating ocean survival.


Salmo,

I agree that ocean conditions are a factor to overall abundance on large or small years of returns. I didn't reference the ocean as a major factor as it's a given across the board with steelhead. I don't think it's quite the "same" as you put it though (same meaning populations fluctuating up and down along the coast line in consistency), at least not in the CR basin but maybe you have evidence to support that statement. One major factor is the massive amounts of straying that happens everywhere and it's a lot more than biologists see or believe happens. Example, I've caught hatchery summer steelhead in the grays river in September on multiple occasions, I've caught several steelhead over the years with spaghetti tags in river systems that didn't belong there, we catch snake river (upper columbia) steelhead in the lower Lewis in August consistently and in big numbers, both hatchery and wilds and the list goes on.

Salmon numbers do vary more imho though, when it comes to BC and WA/OR coastal rivers and very few rivers are absent of hatchery supplementation. I mean straying is a huge factor here as well and a solid example is the fact that the North Fork of the Lewis hasn't planted hatchery fall chinook since the 70's and it consistently gets 3-500 hatchery fall salmon back to the hatchery every year and that's over and above the hatchery harvest that happens in the river.

Without proof it leads me to believe that straying probably happens all over Vancouver Island and the BC coast line and again leads to hatchery fish on the spawning beds reducing the reproductive fitness of those natives.

Keith
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It's time to put the red rubber nose away, clown seasons over.