Originally Posted By: freespool
What your describing is barging smolt around all the dams.
And those studies that are trying to say interaction of wild and hatchery stocks actually help wild fish is right out of the jackwagon play book.
Hatchery breeding with wild = nothing returns.
The Snake River once represented 50% of the salmon and steelhead produced in the Columbia Basin, the four lower Snake River Dams block over 70% of the original spawning habitat on the Snake River.


Hatchery fish were barged down the Snake and Columbia, not wild fish. I don't know of any article that *tries* to say that hatchery fish are floating wild populations. Many research projects just happen to find this simple fact out by taking genetic samples.

Seeing as you don't think that hatchery fish are capable of producing viable adults, I encourage you to type in "hatchery wild steelhead" into google scholar.

This one is interesting because the authors were already very biased in their assumption that hatchery fish were not capable of producing any viable returning adults, so much that they admit it in the beginning of the discussion section. In the same paragraph, they also admit that they were wrong about this assumption.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/n03443v677584m52/