Slab,

Certainly no disrespect meant from this end either, but you've made a couple errors I didn't previously know about. May Creek is already inhabited by wild fish. So when you super-impose your hatchery fry on the wild fry that already live there, both will suffer. But the hatchery guys will suffer more in spite of their superior numbers, altho perhaps not immediately. They won't know where they are and will have to seek suitable fry colonization habitat. That habitat is already occupied by the wild fry that already emerged from the gravel. So both will have to compete for space. Having the advantage of having hatched from gravel, the wild fry will have an advantage over fry that are slightly less fit from hatching in a heath tray (it's an energetics and lipid reserves thing). I'm setting the rule that your hatchery fry are unfed; not giving the little bastards the longer term advantage of being fed fry, which is likely to produce the result of fewer eventual adult steelhead than if the hatchery fry had never been planted in the first place.

That difference in fitness between the hatchery and wild fry at the time of ermegence is small, but I think this is one time where small is significant. A newly emerged fry has about a week at most to colonize suitable fry habitat and begin feeding, or it dies. Starving fish usually end up as prey before actually dying of starvation however. That hatchery fry shares the instinct to feed, but they are not as good at it as the wild fry. I've raised several salmonid species in a hatchery setting; coho are best at going on the feed, steelhead and chum second, chinook third, and Atlantic salmon are the real dumb shits when it comes to feeding - it's a wonder they ever survive at all. Anyway, that hatchery steelhead fry does not go on the feed as readily as his wild counterpart. That's my contention, and I'm stickin' with it.

I've never heard of any indication of weakening because wild fry have to wiggle through the gravel to emerge. Even if they have to move laterally 10 or 20 feet as well as upward maybe a foot. It would only weaken them if they were delayed significantly in beginning feeding. And there is feed in the gravel in the form of very small invertebrates.

So, do you like your dog turds with gravy?

Sg