"This suggests that a conservative amount of harvest is not detrimental and might possibly be beneficial to healthy native stocks while mandatory release of wild fish offers little if any protection to a wild stock when challenged by cyclic or adverse circumstance."

If you could actually establish a connection, rather than a coincidental occurrence, of harvest and increased run health, than we can talk about this.

How about this one? I wonder what, with the increase in population size during harvest of several thousand fish per year, the populations would be if those fish weren't harvested? Maybe it would be even higher...

With no way to establish (right now) what the relationship between harvest and population size has been on the Quillayute system, either scenario is just as likely as the other...and I'll go out on a limb and say if we had killed less, there would be more, seems to make more sense intellectually.

Try this one, too...while the runs in Georgia Strait are in the sh!tter, I wonder how much worse it would be if folks had been bonking those fish before the (as of yet) not understood phenomena that caused their decline had happened?

Again, no science...but intellectually, it seems that it would be an even worse situation if there were less fish there when the bomb hit.

An enlarged buffer amount of fish when cyclical or adverse situations come around is one of the benefits of wild steelhead release.

While the "critical" point of steelhead populations may not be known with exactitude (the point where a population cannot ever recover, and will decline to extinction), that point does exist, and a few fish up or down could make the difference when those cataclysmic phenomena come around.

Fish on...

Todd