I'll try a few comments...

Without hatcheries, there are many, many fisheries that flat out wouldn't exist...and so there wouldn't be any fishing or fisheries.

Steelhead harvest fisheries pretty much wouldn't exist on all PS rivers, at least not in the winter, or any steelhead fishing in eastern Washington...they would only exist on the few streams that are open for wild steelhead harvest, and my opinion is that those aren't going to last for long, anyway, regardless of any moratoriums or statewide WSR...they'll all be managed by closure unless something drastic changes, because the very few streams that have "harvestable" numbers of wild fish are not going to maintain their recently higher levels unless there are significant, and unforseen, changes in the environment, their habitats, water quality, and harvest regimes.

Unless the reintroduction programs actually work on the Cowlitz, there wouldn't be much of a fishery there except for coho, which it apparently is working for pretty well already.

Almost everywhere that there are chum fisheries, they are naturally producing, or the natural production constitutes the great majority of the fish, so they wouldn't really be affected at all by hatchery closures.

The biggest hatchery production for chums takes place on Hood Canal, and in my opinion, causes many, many more problems than benefits. They produce artificially gigantic runs of chums, of which only a small amount are actually harvested, and their commercial harvest continues to push wild coho and steelhead in Hood Canal closer and closer to extinction every fall and winter.

Those hatchery programs do much more damage to fish and fisheries than they do good, in my opinion, and as long as they exist, there won't be steelhead fishing in Hood Canal, and it will be very hard to get any significant returns of the historically gigantic coho runs back there, either.

The Wallace River hatchery produces some summer Chinook for harvest, not a ton, but some...enough to fish for. There would be no Chinook fishery on the Sky without it, that's for sure, since the rest of the Chinook are ESA listed.

The coho produced there, however, don't do much for the fisheries. The natural production in the Skykomish for coho is massive...it dwarfs the hatchery production, and the hatchery fish (except in the Wallace itself, at times) don't really bite, anyway. Hatchery coho production on the Wallace likely costs a lot more than it is worth.

Hatchery production on the Skagit for steelhead is an absolute joke...it's never worked well, and it really hasn't worked at all for many years. The amount of money and effort to plant 500k smolts, plus the documented damage all those smolts do to wild steelhead runs there, makes that a waste of money and time, in my book...spend the same amount of money on habitat and stream flow protection at the dams, and you'd probably see an increase in wild production that far exceeds what any hatchery production can do there, with no hatchery/wild interaction problems.

I don't know what the naturally producing coho numbers are for the Skagit, but the Marblemount Hatchery produces quite a few fish...a lot are caught in the terminal area, but I don't know how much they contribute to saltwater or mainstem fisheries...I suspect not much, since they pretty much shoot right up to the hatchery, but there are so many that quite a few are probably caught in salt water fisheries.

Humpies are the same as the chums...they don't need hatcheries, and seem to be providing fish and fisheries wherever they are, in some record breaking run sizes lately, both on the Skagit and on the Snohomish systems.

Those are just a few general comments...there are lots of different hatchery programs that would fit into similar categories as the ones above, but others that have their own set of cirucumstances, too.

"If we close the hatcheries, it seems to me that rivers like the Cowlitz would "die".That river has a very robust return of hatchery fish"

I'm not sure what you mean by robust, but if you mean a high number of fish, then you're right...but if you mean a very successful productivity/return rate, then you're not. Cowlitz hatchery steelhead return at a dismal rate...but they put in lots and lots and lots of smolts, so even a dismal return rate correlates to a good amount of adults.

"In my thinking, the biggest threat that wild steelhead face, aside from natural predators, is the use of gillnets by Commercial and Tribal fishers. Closing the hatcheries won't effect this in the least, will it?"

Habitat destruction has contributed more to the destruction of steelhead runs, probably by a factor of ten, than all harvest combined...and continues to be the most limiting factor for most wild steelhead runs. Not only that, but habitat destruction is actually used as the justification for many wild steelhead harvest fisheries (tribal and non-tribal) because the managers show that the habitat is so degraded that it somehow can't handle all the fish coming back.

Closing hatcheries would have a very significant effect on commercial fisheries, especially non-tribal. Most non-tribal commercial fisheries are justified by large hatchery runs...the wild runs wouldn't be able to handle the harvest levels...they can't even handle the incidental harvest levels that those commercial fisheries entail. If there were no artificially high hatchery returns, non-tribal commercial fisheries would decrease dramatically.

Tribal commercial fisheries are still limited to half of the harvestable portion of the runs, and half is just half, whether it's half of 300k hatchery fish returning, or half of 1200 wild fish returning. While those fishers and fisheries aren't going anywhere soon, their harvest levels would plummet without hatchery fish, too.

I look at the whole issue as a series of questions, not as just one black and white question of "should we have hatcheries or not?"

What are you seeking to protect? Fish or fisheries?

Except in a very few circumstances, caused by extreme risk of extinction in the Columbia River watershed due to the Federal Hydropower System, no hatchery has ever helped a wild run of fish, and very, very few have had benign effects...

They mess up the gene pool, they create artificial abundance that is over fished, and the small component of the run that is the true wild fish is fished into extinction while chasing after the hatchery fish.

They give fishermen, and especially fish managers, false assurances that all is well, when it is not.

Got a habitat problem? No problem...just toss in another 100k smolts.

Need a dam? No problem...build a hatchery at the base of it.

Need to divert an entire stream into an irrigation ditch to water your apples? No problem, we'll toss in a few thousand smolts from this other river...it'll all average out in the end.

This doesn't solve the problem...it just masks it, until it's too late.

The hatchery fish are horribly unfit, and they need habitat, too, as well as clean water, flowing rivers, and healthy upland habitat.

Why does the federal government try so hard to get everyone to agree that hatchery fish are just as good as wild, even when every single credible scientific report ever written comes to the exact opposite conclusion?

Because as long as there are hatcheries full of fish on the lower Columbia, then there is no problem with the Federal Hydropower System, or the Corps of Engineer dredging activities, or water withdrawals, or development, or any number of other habitat destructions.

The hatchery fish mask those problems until, as usual, it is too late...and when it gets close to "too late"...we'll just toss in a few more smolts and call it good.

If protecting fisheries is your goal, then hatcheries are part of the answer, but only part. They have to be operated so that their bad effects are minimized, and their productivity maximized (not the amount of smolts they release, but the quality and percentage of adults they return...performance standards).

Habitat, water quality, dam operations, and harvest regimes all have to be considered for hatchery fish, too.

The easy, and frequently incorrect, solution is that whatever the problem is, throw more smolts at it. This rarely returns more fish, and is also used as a justification to destroy more habitat, use more water, mess up the dam operations, and conduct more intense sport and commercial fisheries.

There's no trade off, because there is no return for the investment.

Hatcheries are an integral part of fisheries in the PNW, but where they are not needed, they are not needed, and they can't be used as mitigation for habitat and hydropower projects, because they don't replace what was lost, and soon you're back to no fish, only now there is no habitat, either.

Run them responsibly where necessary, work just as hard, or harder, to fund habitat protection and restoration projects, and to put greater buffers in harvest regimes, and for better dam operations, or they won't work very well to provide fisheries.

Looking back, that's a pretty long and rambling response...but there might be a few nuggets of useful information in there.

Fish on...

Todd