Keith,

Fall Chinook are not a real good stand in for steelhead. Fall Chinook juveniles mostly rear in freshwater for 3 to 5, maybe 6 months before heading to the ocean compared to steelhead's 2 or 3 year juvenile freshwater residence. The N Lewis isn't great fw habitat over all, but it meets fall Chinook requirements pretty well. Consider first of all that there is no flooding of consequence to scour incubating eggs or smother them with silt. So egg to smolt survival is likely quite a bit higher than for fall Chinook in unregulated streams. Then those fall juveniles have a nice long estuary from the lower river all the way to the ocean, and it's rich with forage for juvenile fish. Predators too, however. So it's not all fun and games.

Krijack,

Wild winter runs used to be spread out in river entry timing from around Thanksgiving to the end of March or first half of April, with peak timing being March in almost every winter run river for which I've ever had information on. The main effect of hatchery winter steelhead on wild fish was the increased fishing pressure in December and January, when hatchery steelhead peaked in abundance. High harvest rates on hatchery steelhead during those months also included high harvest rates on any wild fish that were present in the same areas at the same time. The result in short order was that there were very few wild steelhead returning in December and January.

Now that wild steelhead are more protected from harvest throughout WA for a few years, quite a few on some rivers, we are seeing a few early timed wild steelhead in river systems where they had become very uncommon.

Mixing large numbers of wild steelhead in hatchery spawning never happens. I'm pretty confident in that. Wild steehead have very little incentive to enter hatchery entrances. It does happen, and when it does, it's noteworthy because it's infrequent. The main culprit when it comes to spawning is when a hatchery fish spawns with an early timed spawning wild steelhead. And that does happen; it just doesn't happen as often as some seem to believe. The reason is because of the difference in spawn timing for the overwhelming majorities of both hatchery and wild steelhead. When it does happen, the reproductive effectiveness of the wild steelhead partner is reduced, sometimes nearly to zero. This is the most logical explanation for the present day absence of Chambers CK hatchery steelhead DNA in wild steelhead in those lower Cowlitz tributaries where literally millions of hatchery juveniles were stocked years ago.

For the most part, hatchery and wild steelhead juveniles don't compete that much for food. Hatchery folks are pretty good at releasing their smolts at the time when they are ready to migrate. In the cases where they have been followed, they generally pass downstream to salt water in about a week. It's not that they don't feed in that time frame, they do, at least some. The thing to understand about salmonids is that they are extremely well adapted to periods of starvation. So even if hatchery and wild smolts are in the same place at the same time, competing for the same food supply, any shortage in food is likely to have an adverse impact on either the hatchery or the wild fish that is statistically close to zero.

Predators could have built up their numbers in response to the large numbers of hatchery smolts, but their presence in any one area is for such a short duration of time, that it doesn't seem too likely because it is not consistent with optimal foraging theory. And predator-prey relationships almost always have a perfect correlation with optimal foraging theory.

All in all, I'm back to where I began by saying that hatchery fish don't do wild fish any big favors, but trying to portray those hatchery fish as the proximate cause of depressed wild populations simply does not hold up under any close scrutiny that I have been able to apply. As always, I'm open to new and even contrary information. I subscribe to: "let us seek the truth, and go where it leads us."