Originally Posted By: Tug 3
Didn't the Snyder Creek hatchery produce positive results? I don't know much about it. I participated in the Satsop Broodstock program, and it seemed to work. Any hatchery project needs to be scrutinized, not just the same old business as usual, which I think WDFW does too much of.

Many years ago (1970's) the late great John Clayton had hatchery salmon practices on the Kalama that brought about terrific spring Chinook survival and return rates.


Tug,

Snyder Creek produced results. However, in 25 years of doing the program, no one did any kind of monitoring that could conclude that those results were any greater than if the wild broodstock had just been left in the river to spawn naturally. IMO, the results were probably greater based on what I know about fish culture and hatchery and wild survival rates. But that is just an opinion. Same with the Satsop wild brood program. No monitoring. So no one can say definitively how productive the results were. We can say that they "seemed" to work because we saw adult returns from the effort. But that does not provide any quantitative evidence that the results are actually a positive benefit.

RE: John Clayton; after Kalama he moved to Marblemount on the Skagit system where he also conducted some innovative fish culture. Culturing spring Chinook there proved quite challenging, but the seed of the program he worked on there now consistently returns hatchery spring Chinook to this day, although the program remains quite small.