Fun5,

I'll address them in reverse order from how you wrote them...

The reason they aren't released as fry is because then they wouldn't have a very high success rate...that's the big bonus of hatchery fish is that by the time they hit the river they are already too big to have to deal with the issues that kill 99% of the fish before they reach parr or smolt stage.

And...since that is true, the fish are not a lot different than regular hatchery fish, and the law requries them to be clipped so that they can be harvested or removed from the river pre-spawn by hatchery personnel at fish racks or other collection facilities.

The biggest concern about tribal fishing and tribal hatcheries is that they DON'T clip their hatchery steelhead, thereby making it all but impossible to count how many wild fish there actually are in the river, thereby not being able to use the reduced amount of wild fish in the river as a reason to curtail commercial netting.

Clipping hatchery fish is one of the easy and fundamental activities that must be used in order to accurately evaluate both wild fish runs and hatchery fish success, and to provide fish for harvest. Always remember that broodstock programs are for providing fish for HARVEST, not for anything else.

Fish on...

Todd.
Fish on...

Todd.