Rich -
Don't accept everything you read at face value!

The article quotes -
"the legacy of hatchery development on the West Coast over the last 150 years have been segregated hatchery programs but there has been no effort to control the genetic or ecological interactions between hatchery and wild fish in the region’s rivers"

Clearly the development of early timed winter steelhead hatchery brood stock has been used to limit genetic interactions between those hatchery fish and their wild counterparts. This of course is clearly a segregated program.

I found it interesting that while the HSRG's general recommendations are for intergrated programs when it came time for regional recommendations regarding steelhead programs the HSRG did not recommend changing those programs to intergrated ones.

The recommendation for the Snohomish hatchery winter steelhead is the same for all the steelhead programs that I have read (Puget Sound regions). It was - "Minimize interaction with natural spawning steelhead when implementing a segregrated program through such tools as differential timing and a decision on benefits and risks on outplanting in freshwater habitats."

It is my opinion that based on the extended freshwater rearing of hatchery steelhead smolts (1 year) and the need to compress what is normally a 2 year rearing period into a single year that for many steelhead populations a segregated program presents fewer genetic/productivity risks to the wild population than an intergrated one. This of course is due to likely domestication of the hatchery fish during this prolong and selective rearing.

I'm not sure what the point was in comparing the relative return rates of hatchery and wild steelhead smolts. Clearly the hatchery smolts would incluce less fit fish that would have been elinimated in the wild. Perhaps a comparison that would be informative would be to look at egg to adult survivals. Often in the wild only 1% of the eggs deposited survive to be a smolt and with a 13.1% average survival 0.13% of the eggs would survive to adulthood. While with hatchery fish often 50 to 80% of the eggs survive to be smolts and with a 5.2% survival 2.6 to 4.16% of the eggs would become adults - a survival 20 to 30 times higher than the wild fish.

While I'm not suggesting that hatchery fish repalce wild fish - clearly the science indicates that wild fish are as much as 8 times as productive as the hatchery fish when spawning in the wild however just as clearly hatchery fish are much more productive in producing returning fish for such things as harvest or even in some limited stock recovery programs.

Yes science should be the compass for our hatchery programs but that science needs to be carefully considered in the full context of each circumstance - looking at the specifics of each river system giving careful and full consideration of the details of the hatchery program, the wild fish needs and the needs of the diverse user groups. In short one size will not fit all needs.

Tight lines
S malma