I'm not going to write both of these articles word for word, they would be way too long.

This article came from the 6/2/01 Daily Olympian. Titled "Teen wows 'em with DNA study" Centralia youth's research on coho wins state, national honors. It seems Ina Nelson did a DNA research study on the coho salmon in the Chehalis River where both hatchery and wild fish have commingled for decades. Her findings -- that the two fish carry different DNA - not only surprised her and her high school science teacher, but also researchers at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center, part of the National Marine Fisheries Service.

There is a lot more to this article, it is pretty interesting.

My question is why does it take a high school student to find this out? Shouldn't this be one of the first studies they should do? We have been led to believe that the hatchery fish have ruined the wild fish by breeding with it. This doesn't seem to be true.
Another case in point is in the August - September 2000 STS page 4 under "More Good Wild - Steelhead News!" Biologist Steve Phelps discovered several years ago that the great majority of wild Steelhead in the state of Washington still possessed basically pure genes even though 40 years of planting hundreds of millions of hatchery smolts had occurred. (there is still more to the article). It seems to me that the hatchery fish aren't breeding the wild fish out of exsintense (sp) like we are being led to believe. What's up?

Fishhead5