Spoonfed,

They did it every year because it was popular, and the supporters believed it was successful. But believing without evidence is more about faith than it is about knowledge.

We know - by the evidence of marked fish - that wild broodstock programs do return recruits. But what we don't know, and this is critical to understanding how successful it is, is how many more recruits the program returned than would have returned had the broodstock just been left in the river to spawn naturally.

The Quinault program is not a wild broodstock program. Broodstock were initially collected from the wild population. But the program runs on returning hatchery fish from that initial wild broodstock. In a wild broodstock program, the brood is collected from the wild population every year. That is an important distinction. It seems to be working in OR in the very same way. That is, they know the program returns recruits. But like programs here, they don't know what the smolt to adult return rate is, or that the program returns more recruits than if the broodstock had just been left in the river to spawn naturally. That's a lot of effort and money to spend without knowing that you're doing significantly better than not doing anything at all. I hope you can see and understand the difference.

They are fishing and we are not. Maybe it's because OR doesn't have a steelhead management plan that says no fishing when run forecasts are lower than the escapement goal. Does OR even have wild steelhead escapement goals? So who is playing games?