Very high cost.... and equivocal yield at best.

For this to be a true "conservation" hatchery project, it must yield at the very least 2 recruits for every broodstock fish taken from the wild just to break even. On the surface, most folks just asssume that's a slam dunk. Perhaps, perhaps not.

The real issue that must be considered is the reproductive fitness of those hatchery recruits when they come back as adults. There is nothing I have found in the literature specifically about the reproductive fitness of hatchery salmon derived from wild broodstock, but if the experience with hatchery steelhead is any indicator, then one would expect markedly diminished reproductive fitness in hatchery salmon when they are allowed to spawn naturally in the wild.

My personal belief is that these programs are good for one bolus of artificially-induced abundance for each batch of brood fish taken from the system. As long as you keep mining the depleted run for broodstock and "successfully" produce hatchery returns, everything looks great... but that's just on the surface. If the hatchery recruits turn out to be piss-poor spawners in terms of their reproductive fitness (i.e. will they or won't they eventually produce viable returning adults?), then there is no real mechanism for the population of natural spawners to increase, let alone maintain itself.

The whole "recovery" effort becomes dependent on the continued existence of the hatchery to artificially bolster the numbers of returning fish. It's got a real "feel-good" appeal, but that folks is NOT recovery. That's just dependence on another techno-fix that solves absolutely nothing in terms of genuine fish recovery. What history has shown is that it's a great way to create another useless bureacracy to bring lots of dollars to a privileged local economy at the expense of Joe Q Public.

The best analogy I can think of is DSHS which must continually dole out welfare checks. That's NOT a system promoting financial "recovery" for the poor. For far too many, it's simply a shot in the arm to get them to their next welfare check... and the next.. and the next! A truly successful welfare program should not be measured in terms of how many checks it passes out, but rather the number of recipients that eventually come off the "payroll."

In that sense, the true measure of success for a "conservation" hatchery is how quickly it can work itself out of a job... in other words, recovery happens when the hatchery is no longer needed.

Maybe I'm just getting too cynical in my old age. The future prospects for runs hanging on by a thread are NOT good. For the sake of the fish, I hope I'm wrong... but I doubt it.