Big Jim,

The short answer is: it depends. It depends on what the fish management objective is, and it depends on the quantity and quality of available fish habitat. If you just want to recover or restore a depressed salmon or steelhead population, generally the best method is to leave them alone. Salmonid populations are extremely resilient, and they can make extreme increases in population size in one or two generations.

The exceptions are cases of extremely depressed populations and or extremely degraded habitat. In these cases, intervention with broodstocking programs can probably work. The only documented instances that I am aware of are Hood Canal summer chum and Baker Lake sockeye and coho. Steelhead broodstocking programs mostly indicate that as good or better production would have occurred by leaving the captive broodstock fish in the river to reproduce naturally.

The main reason for most intervention programs or broodstocking programs is to maintain harvest opportunity and have little or no conservation benefit, unless maintaining harvest is also considered a conservation benefit (it is under many definitions).

The issues you raise have been discussed here almost endlessly. If you search the site, you should be able to find the threads that explain the details and provide citations to the studies and conclusions and supporting evidence.

Fish 4 all,

Read the above paragraph. It's all in here, with all the gory details, but I'm not going to do the search and provide you the link. Search and learn.

Sg