WRONG!
While the progeny of that pairing will hatch as gravel-borne wild fish, the story does NOT end there.
Those wild-borne hybrids co-mingle with truly wild fish.... competing for territory and sustenance, consuming resources within a riverine rearing habitat limited by a fixed carrying capacity. But because of their crappy genes, they fail to make it thru the relentless selection pressures presented at each life stage (fry/smolt/marine subadult/returning spawner), and few if any actually survive to reproductive adulthood.... in most cases, that number is statistically indistinguishable from ZERO!
The hatchery lineage is a genetic dead end unto itself. Allowing it to pollute the population of wild fish thru stray H x W pairings effectively squelches the reproductive potential of the wild fish in the pair. Collectively, the overall effect for the entire escapement is diminished adult recruitment from that brood year. The greater the hatchery stray rate onto the spawning grounds, the greater the reproductive loss.
Hence my crusade that ALL hatchery fish MUST die!
Help me understand this. One part of the equation I don't get....
If you have tribs (for example SW WA) that utilize Chambers creek winter steelhead for hatchery fish that return Oct-Jan with a small handful in Feb, how is it those fish are spawning with the true native stock that returns Jan-April??
I wish there were a way to go back in time and understand what was really here before hatchery introduction and actually see the return/spawning times of the true native fish...
I know I've heard plenty of stories of "wild" fish returning from November on in the 60's-70's but that was in a time frame that they didn't clip the hatchery fish so everything was assumed to be "wild"...
Could the above example (with the chambers creek return timing) be the reason that our native stocks are the strongest returning in March/April now, or is that how it always was before the introduction of hatchery fish?
Keith
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