I swear the average fisherman's prejudice against dams are worse than the racial prejudices of the early south!!!

The big picture should be taken into account here, and the big picture has three components: 1) Dams, 2) the revenue earned from dams, and 3) the hatcheries put into place to mitigate the loss from dams.

My put here is that item 2) above is neccesary to support 3) and, dams plus hatcheries in many cases can produce a more reliable and robust fishery than mother nature herself was able to produce.

Heresy you say? Outrage you say??? Well, I have the Army Corp of Engineer fish count data to prove it. Please consider the case of the Snake River steelhead runs. The Snake River dams are unique because there is quantitative fish count data available both before and after the dams went in. Guess what? After the dams and the mitigating hatcheries went in the average fish returns went up, not down.

Another example of the positive aspects of dams is the Hanford reach natural run of fall chinook salmon. This run is naturally occuring, but the water flows over the beds are very carefully controlled via Priest Rapids dam. The dam managers make sure the deposited eggs never go dry. They also insure that high water does not wash out the eggs and that juvenile smolts are flushed downstream at just the right time.

Dams are bad because some fish are killed going through them. But dams are good because they control the flow of water and generate revenue to pay for hatcheries.

Also, in a previous post it was inferred that the dead fish propagated undesirable species such as pikeminnows. Well...........if we want to take a positive bend on this......what about sturgeon????? I would say that sturgeon and sturgeon fisherman love dams.