Originally Posted By: GBL
So, everyone has great points and I am learning allot.
Answer this for me--
If we are worried about hatchery plants and why some systems do not recover, why is the Great Lakes so full of fish that spawn very effectivly? The Habitat is not any better than ours in most rivers, They have a huge sport fishery, (no commercial fishing)and the fish are not hatchery brats, they are big strong and look better than most of the fish in Washington, and I am pretty sure that whole fishery started with Skamania eggs, right?



They were an invasive species with no natural predators. This fishery is starting to normalize as the populations of alewife and other bait fish are starting to increase, and the numbers of salmon and steelhead decrease. There are lots of articles associated with the impacts of introducing salmon and steelhead to the GL, I just don't have the links handy right now.

Additionally, there are some places that do have wildly reproducing fish, but in general a lot of there fish are of hatchery descent. I'm not sure what there survial rate of smolt to adult is so I can't say if they can get by with few fish planted.

 Originally Posted By: GBL

Now, most of us have fished the Cowlitz and Lewis, I have caught up to 23lb. summer runs out of the Lewis, clipped hatchery fish. In the 60's and 70's we caught dozens of big Summer Runs out of the Cowlitz, all hatchery fish. I will admit, most of the time we were the only ones on the river, but they were still big, strong spawning Steelhead with good genes.
Even the Skagit had huge Summer Runs in the late 70's and early 80's.
I am sure in most cases we will find that the State took eggs and did not cull the fish for the big ones and slowly the fish got smaller in most systems until all you have left are small hatchery fish returning.



Size is not really a good indication of fitness, as sometimes being big is a disadvantage. Also keep in mind that there is NO way that our selection of fish can even come close to the behavior wild fish take on. The dilution of genetics and the straying there of is difficult to manage, but regardless without a nearly even match of wild to hatchery genetics year after your, you'll end up with a statistical decay over time that will eventually cause it to be nothing more than hatchery fish. This is one of the reasons why some of the proposed integrated broodstock programs are under such fire.

As an example let's assume you have a drop of food coloring that you add to a buck of water. This would be the wild fish. The color is certainly more dilute after adding it to a larger bucket rather than a smaller one. Now lets say that you only add this drop only 1 in 5 bucket fills, and the rest of the time you use a drop or two from the previous bucket to color subsquent buckets. It's plain to see within a couple of drops in the bucket that the water will pretty much be clear. This is an exagerated example of how hatchery selection occurs, and why it's difficult to do genetics management on these fish.

A bad cycle to get into I guess.

 Originally Posted By: GBL

One last point, I understand Todd's position and it is a good one, my point has always been that over 30 years of taking Native Steelhead by all parties and especially the Indians has left us with an empty hole to try and get eggs to support a system. I hate the word escapment, it changes every year to suit the State.
Does not matter if we are talking "in the past", the past is what is establishing our future. Escapment was 50 times what it is today back in the late 70's, why is it not exactly the same as back then, nothing has changed other than the State can't get enough pairs to take eggs from other than some spots on the Skagit and those are just a shell of a run from what it used to be.


To an extent there aren't the same pure strains of "wild" genetics around. But to simply state that the number of fish aren't what they should be because of past harvest practices ignores the other major affects. A lot has change since the 80's and I would say that other factors like habitat, dams, and encroachment have had a larger affect on the fish than genetic straying. But I'd leave that call to the bios who live this...

-- Cheers
-- James