Smalma,

I promise I am not picking a fight! It is just that you are by far the most knowledgable biological contributor to this never ending debate.

"Using the fish managers for scapegoats for natural variation in survival conditions and society's general p*** poor protection of our river habitats in my opinion is a cheap cop-out."

I think to be fair, you should have said fish 'harvest' managers. But I have a major problem with them NOT being held accountable. That is their job. Does a fund manager get to keep his/her job, when the shareholders are losing $$$, (OR not making enough) because of circumstances out of anyone's control? I could not agree more with your statement about the habitat problem. But I won't let the department off the hook because of it. There are biologists out there that have foreseen this doom and, due to the politics of it all, nothing was done to change the harvest management schemes to PREVENT and/or minimize the collapse.

"How do you define: driven into the ground - to my knowledge there is not one example of a steelhead stock in the Puget Sound or Olympia Penisula whose productivity has been limited by harvest - if that were the case they would rebound immediately once WSR was put into place and none have."

That is a tricky one. How do you know? Is there an example that completely exonerates harvest? The magic cure for the current stock crisis might have ended up in somebody's freezer.

However, lets use the Skagit as an example since it came up later in this thread. Wasn't the record kill over 30K, in one year, back in the 70's? And did the river not average way more fish killed/year back then compared to what is now the entire escapement? How much genetic material was lost during this 'sport harvest' popluation bottleneck? I could hypothetically argue that the critical alleles needed for this population to overcome what ever is currently killing them in the ocean was lost during that time. How much have we interferred with the species reproductive potential from a century of overharvest?

From what I have read the Kamchatka rivers carry upwards of 18 separate year classes of fish. Where are we sitting at, right now compared to historically, on our least depressed rivers on the OP? Now compare that to the Sky and Skagit. How many river specific 'sub-races' of steelhead have been unknowingly wiped out due to the sports over-harvest?

I do realize that the ocean is the X factor for these anadromous fish. And that the freshwater habitat is just as important. And I understand the recent sport harvest is not the smoking gun that killed the stocks overnight (Yet I do hold it accountable from the long term impacts of the past century). But I firmly believe that strictly limiting sport harvest to incidental mortality is the first step in getting the ship turned around to tackle the other sides of the problem.


William