Boater,

First of all I appreciate the thoughts you are applying to increasing wild salmonid production. I too have often daydreamed about ways to increase our rivers ability to produce fish. As to feeding juvenal salmon hatchery pellets, I do not believe this would improve matters much. If you have a river system that has reduced carrying capacity from limited food supplies I would recommend you look for ways to feed the bugs not the fish. Macro invertebrates, I believe, are the foundation of the salmonids fresh water food chain. As Fatpat and Rockhopper pointed out, salmon carcasses are absolutely the best source for the nutrients needed for aquatic bug production. The nutrients in carcasses are mostly in the form of fixed nitrogen and ortho-phosphorus and not like the chemical fertilizers currently leaching into rivers that can cause water quality issues. One of the historical problems with hatchery programs has been the interruption of the natural nutrient cycling that wild spawning salmon provide. With large numbers of a river basin’s fish returning to a hatchery where they are used for pet food, rivers have been starved for nutrients.
I would recommend that carcass programs be utilized to the maximum extent possible. If a river is TMDL listed and carcass programs are not allowed I would recommend releasing live, spawned out hatchery salmon into the TMDL listed body of water and let your DEQ argue that live fish pose a water quality issue. Because many of the river systems have had one or more individual runs of fish eliminated, the historical supply and timing of nutrients may not be available(no Chum Salmon or Lamprey). In this case I would recommend natural nutrient blocks be used to replace the missing nutrients. Bio Oregon has developed a natural compressed nutrient biscuit that uses a gelatin binding agent for timed release. The only problem with Bio-Oregon’s biscuit is that the dissolution rate is very dependant on water temp. I have been experimenting with a fish oil stearate (and other additives) as a binding agent (kind of like cubes of margarine) to make “river suet cakes”(salmon chunks mixed in gelatinous fish oil) but thus far have not succeeded. I really stink at organic chemistry

Regardless of food supply, habitat should be what focus on for improving. Large woody debris and complex woody debris are the things that are missing the most in today’s rivers and streams. Some recent data from the Nehalem indicates that cover and food in the estuary may be paramount in increasing adult spawners so working hard to increase smolts may have little effect on total populations.

Just keep on thinking, good ideas are found in strange places…