LLTK has been charged with the task of making our hatcheries actually fulfill there purpose.Currently our hatcheries do nothing but produce mass amounts of fish,raised in an envirement the does nothing to prepare them for the wild,in hopes that a few survive and return to be harvested.The current hatchery envirement actually kills off the fish that have the very instincts that would make or break a wild fish.How many of you as a kid caught something wild and tried to keep it as a pet of sorts,lets say in a shoe box.No matter what you did,tried to feed it,etc it died.It died because it could not handle the stress of this non wild envirement.It wanted to be wild.Countless generations created it to be wild not an aquariam animal.This drive to be wild keeps it from flourishing in this non wild enviro.So after several generations of these wild fish being raised in a non wild enviro only the ones with the weaker instincts could survive,leaving you with a weak stock of fish."only the strong survive" well in our hatchery enviros the opposite happens.

On top of this our hatcheries do nothing to prepare these young fish from predation.In the wild you learn to deal with the many differant animals that are higher on the food chain than you.Over the years this becomes instinct.Kind of like we humans become immune to diseases and viiruses after contacting them.lltk is looking at using natural pools in a wild enviro with predators and the cover to evade these predators in hopes of heading off this problem.You look at a hatchery and there is no cover whatsoever!Actually the last couple of years the state has figured out this one and is using removable shade covers of sorts.

They are also keeping human intervention down to a minimum.Random feeding times is another one.

Ultimately they are looking at using hatcheries to actually build up the wild stocks,native to a system,Raised in as wild an enviro as can be afforded,in hopes that they can actually come back and reproduce on there own.I am only touching on a few of the things that LLtk is working on but It is based on science and common sence instead of politics and the comercial dollar.I believe that it will be a big step,in the right dierection for our native stocks and the hatchery system. Although a far cry from an easy one.