Freespool,

You could be seeing a mirage. Something is there but it has been distorted by other factors. Your answers could lie in Russia.

This might interest you because of the similarities of Kamchatka steelhead and Oregon steelhead.

Comparability of Kamchatka and eastern PacificO. mykiss populations
Although once considered a separate species (Behnke1966), conspecificity of Kamchatka populations with
O. mykiss in North America is now well established (Behnke 1992). Molecular data from nuclear (Okazaki
1984; Pavlov & Kuzishchin 1999) and mitochondrial (McCusker et al. 2000) loci suggest a closer relationship
of Kamchatka populations to coastal groups extending through Oregon and California,

The project now involves fishery management agencies and universities in Russia, Canada and the United States. International cooperation has resulted in a dozen scientific papers, life history data collections from 14 rivers, and a range of efforts to protect steelhead from illegal overharvest and habitat destruction.