Bank walker

Hatchery fish are just as capable of naturally spawning as wild fish are. As example, for the first few years while WDFW was trying to gets its act together and figure out which run of steelhead they wanted to use for the upper Cowlitz River BPA Reintroduction program, they only allowed male steelhead to be transported above the dams because they were afraid that whichever stock of steelhead they were to going to use would likely succeed. The wild salmon policy forced them to create this new "wild gene" stock of Cowlitz steelhead. That way, WDFW could keep their other hatchery programs going at full speed. The reality is that those special late-run winter steelhead have inbreed so much by now, that they have created their own new set of genes that is unlike any other lower Columbia river steelhead stock. That fact alone was a concern to many biologists. No other hatchery on the lower Columbia has produced more steelhead then the Cowlitz. All Cowlitz gene stocks were mixed together to create large or smaller run of steelhead depending on who was doing the steelhead management in Olympia at the time.

WDFW claims that this stock is from a unique set of genes. That's almost imposable to believe when you know for a fact, that WDFW never did any genetic testing at that time, and their own records show that all of these fish were killed and spawned by hand and the eggs and sperm were mixed by WDFW staffs little hands.

In fact, we were told by top WDFW management staff, at the time, that the habitat was a natural for summer run steelhead. In fact, it was do darn good for natural production that WDFW was afraid that if summer run were used in the reintroduced program in the upper Cowlitz that it would eliminate the need to use the Cowlitz Trout hatchery for rearing of summer run fish. That would mean that some of WDFW people might loose there honey-hole jobs. You know how far that one went!

Some wild trout do still have there original "pure" genes but lots of wild trout genes have been hand mixed with hatchery genes just like what's been going on at the Cowlitz Trout hatchery for over 30 years

Cowlitzfisherman

Is the taste of the bait worth the sting of the hook????


[ 08-19-2001: Message edited by: cowlitzfisherman ]