Oh yeah, it's mostly habitat that's the problem, even in areas like Hood Canal that look pretty good but are in reality a series of death traps, particularly for outmigrating juvenile salmon in their critical and sensitive early smolt stage. Here's how it works. Visualize habitat as I-5, a "migration" corridor down which most of our commerce and GNP in the PNW has to travel. Visualize what would happen if you took out the bridge on the Lewis river and replaced it with a rowboat. Well, how well do you think our economy would work if everything we transported had to be unloaded into that rowboat and loaded up into a different truck on the other side to get to your local Walmart? Do you think there might be shortages? Prices might go up? People might starve or be unable to maintain their shelter? Get to their job? Hey, it's just a hundred yards of pavement over 200 miles of highway, nobody should miss that much, right? Well, this is exactly what happens to a juvenile salmon when somebody builds a nice big house out on the beach and surrounds it with a bulkhead. Juvenile salmon have to stay in litterally inches of water in intertidal areas, hide in eelgrass at low tide and shoreline vegetation at high tide, or they get eaten by larger fish or diving ducks. They also rely heavily on epibentic organisms - zooplankton that grow in association with the bottom - for food, if they can't find these they don't eat, and these don't grow when the bottom has been replaced with a house. Hey, it's only a few hundred little 100 foot houses on all these miles of shoreline, that can't hurt much, right? Wrong. Habitat is a continueum, just like I-5, remove a piece that allows fish to get safely down it, and that causes them to expend energy at a critical time to get around it, and you kill their commerce just like removing 100 yards of I-5 kills ours. It's Habitat, it's the hardest problem to tackle, and losing it is going to kill the fish first and us next. <img border="0" alt="[wall]" title="" src="graemlins/wall.gif" />