Slab,

It may not be impossible to do that test. I was thinking it may have already been done, sort of, but it would require accepting a few assumptions. With dog turds on the table, I thought you'd hesitate.

As I understand your experiment, we begin with 4,000 hatchery steelhead eggs and 4,000 wild steelhead eggs. Yes, you'll end up with around 3,760 hatchery fry and 400 to 1,200 wild fry because of the protective hatchery environment. But the race quickly shifts. Because the hatchery fry hatched in hatchery Heath trays, they are already slightly less healthier than their wild counterparts. The poor little bastards, due to having hatchery parents have no idea what natural food looks like, and because you didn't know about the BC study I mentioned in my post to GBL, you didn't scatter plant them correctly. You hauled them in a couple bucket loads and dumped each of them in two large holes in a creek or river side channel.

The wild fry will upon emergence from the gravel immediately seek out suitable fry habitat that is shallow and slow and begin feeding. Your hatchery fry are in the wrong place, but because they are hatchery fry, they don't know it, but they will seek slower current because they cannot maintain themselves in the faster current. However, the water is deeper than they should be in (deeper so that you could dump your bucket with splashing them on the rocks). What happens next isn't pretty. Your hatchery fry (which are the traditional unfed, rather than fed fry) are going to get hungry and may starve to death (fry need to eat within a week) before they figure out what natural food is and where to find it. Fortunately most of them will be put out of their misery by predators before they starve. Because you dumped almost 2,000 fry in one spot, they will attract predators: dippers, kingfishers, herons, mergansers, raccoons, weasels, and maybe otters; no, they're too small for otters.

This is not to say that the wild fry won't be preyed upon. They will. But not before they even begin feeding. Since they feed immediately, they will avoid predation better. Within one month of your bucket stocking of hatchery fry, the wild fry will outnumber your hatchery fry.

Although brief, that's a pretty fair description of what happens. Now you have to eat dog turds.

Shifting gears now, and sticking with steelhead, you allege that if wild fish had kept up with harvest, we wouldn't be where we are today. False. Wild steelhead didn't keep up with harvests, especially in PS rivers. However, steelhead are very resilient as are all salmonids. WDG increased steelhead conservation measures beginning in 1976 and 1977, resulting in increasing wild spawning escapements. Wild steelhead populations began increasing, and provided the pretty darn good fishing we now long for in the 1980s. Incredibly, the 1980s are now the "good old days." Wild steelhead harvests have been limited in every PS river system that I am aware of since that time. That's not to say there has been no commercial or sports harvest. There has been. But the number of wild steelhead harvested did not jeopardize spawning escapements. During the years that there was any significant wild steelhead harvest, there also were good spawning escapements. Consequently, it doesn't hold up to say that the runs were over-harvested in recent times, and the over-harvests of the 1960 and 1970s were made irrelevant by the recoveries during the 1980s.

The upshot is that I cannot say that harvest has any bearing on the current status of PS steelhead. Because steelhead rebounded so well in the 1980s, it seems like hatchery steelhead are also not responsible for the current status of wild steelhead, but it may not be that simple. There may be hatchery:wild interactions that have reduced the reproductive fitness of wild steelhead, but even if that is true, it doesn't appear to be the proximate cause of the current status of wild steelhead.

As an aside, WDFW, Skagit tribes, and Seattle City Light have begun a comprehensive genetic survey of O. mykiss throughout the Skagit watershed. In about three years we should have a darn good idea of the degree of hatchery introgression in the wild population. Previous genetic testing showed very little, but the sample sizes were small and the testing was not comprehensive. Now that the wild population is tanking, we're going to do the study that should have been done 30 years ago. (However we didn't have DNA testing then.)

Shifting again, you asked about stopping destructive practices in regards to deliberate over-fishing of wild stocks. The case in point is coho, but applies to chinook as well. The reason is that there were benefits associated with fully harvesting co-mingled hatchery populations. Managers knew for decades that hatchery runs could support harvest rates in excess of 90% and that wild fish could support harvests ranging up to 75%. (In the early 20th century, when habiat conditions were better, some wild populations could actually sustain harvest rates of 80 and 90%, like their hatchery counterparts, but that obviously didn't last. With vested interests like commercial fishing and a growing recreational fishery, mangers thought it acceptable, if not actually prudent, to sacrifice wild stocks in river systems that had really productive hatchery populations in order to satisfy commercial and recreational fishing. So they did.

Regarding knowingly lied, in my opinion, yes. There are differences of opinion, and executives may actually believe what they say. However, my opinion is that they knew, or should have known, that certain things said were not true. Case in point. I've heard the Director and managers say they want or intend to restore naturally self-sustaining populations of wild chinook in Puget Sound that provide a harvestable surplus. While this could be true for the Skagit, and maybe the Skykomish, it's flat out dillusional for the rest of the PS tributaries if one examines human population and growth trends, natural resource use per capita, and the present trend between chinook habitat protection, restoration, and continued degradation. It is well shy of rocket science to conclude that the recovery goal of harvestable wild chinook is dillusional or dishonest, take your pick. Yeah, heresy, I know.

Yes, truth should be a prerequisite barring some odd security reason, but truth can turn people off and evaporate hope. And hope is critical to the human condition and to have any chance of recovery success at all. Not to mention justifying the millions of dollars spent on chinook recovery projects in river basins that will never produce a harvestable wild chinook. But this is a major shift in topic, so I'll drop it now.

Nothing personal? I'm OK with personal. And no offense taken. I work for you.

Sg