Doc,In fact, if you carry the reduced capacity out several generations for pure hatchery strains, you may even have hatchery fish with almost zero reproductive capacity thereby impacting wild stocks minimally. Yes, the hatchery buck will try to fertilize the wild fish eggs, but their reproductive juice will have no pop. So then the wild buck comes in and fertilizes and make baby wild salmon.
Just a thought.
WRONG!
It's a matter of which jizz hits the wild eggs first. If the hatchery sperms get first crack, it's game over... those eggs fertilized with inferior genes are toast. That wild hen's natural reproductive/genetic destinity has effectively been squelched... a genetic dead end for a prime specimen within the population as a whole. Her contribution to the total gene pool is effectively eradicated at the moment hatchery sperms penetrate and fertilize her eggs.
Do that enough times, brood after brood, and the cumulative toll leaves the wild gene pool incrementally more impoverished as the years go by.
***
You did touch on one great point about hatchery genetics being a dead end unto themselves. That is the only reason we see no hatchery pollution of the wild gene pool, and for that we can be thankful.
So to summarize, hatchery fish have no lasting effect on "polluting" the wild gene pool. The detrimental effect that is most evident is reduction of genetic diversity in the wild population via the mechanism I described above.
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