Met'lheadMatt,

The perfect wild broodstock program does what I think you're describing. Only unmarked wild fish are used as broodstock each year. So there are never any hatchery fish in the system beyond F1 fish, which had wild parents, but the F1s spent their juvenile life history in a hatchery environment. This is how the Snider Creek program on the Sol Duc operated as far as I know. This is how the Vedder River steelhead program operates in B.C., and it has been going on since the mid-1970s. Unfortunately, I don't think any genetic profiling occurred pre-program so that the population as it exists today could be compared with the pre-hatchery population.

You mentioned two things about the Satsop broodstock program that need some clearing up. First you said you released juvenile fish early, before imprinting occurs. That's impossible because imprinting begins as early as the eyed egg stage. While it's possible to hold smolts at a location for a couple weeks prior to release and have them return to that site, that site is just one of many locations that the fish is imprinted on. After hanging around the release site for a while, as the fish matures sexually it will try to find sites it imprinted on earlier in its life for a spawning location. What makes the pre-release imprinting site work better is when the smolts are transferred to another river basin, so then they cannot find earlier imprinting sites without leaving the basin they are in.

Another thing about releasing juveniles early, if they are young and a long way from smolting, like a year or so, then they must rear in the natural environment. Two bad things happen there. One, they started their juvenile rearing in a hatchery, so the fish best suited to rearing in natural habitats were already culled out as fry mortalities in the hatchery, and the survivors are the juveniles that were best suited to hatchery culture, and are less fit already for rearing to smolt stage in the natural environment. Two, those juveniles when released into whatever natural rearing environment you put them in will now compete with actual wild juvenile steelhead for food and space. The only way this avoids adversely affecting the wild population is if you have habitat that is not occupied by wild juvenile steelhead, or other wild fish.

You also said that during artificial spawning of your wild broodstock you selected large fish to mate with large fish and got results that pleased you. Well, that's not how it works in the natural environment, and your selective breeding through artificial mate selection may result is some large recruits subsequently, but you'll pay for that over time by unintentionally selecting fish that are less fit, even though you probably thought you were doing the opposite. There is a reason why all the steelhead in the population are not 20 pounds or larger, and the reasons have to do with overall fitness factors. A healthy population needs all size and timing and geographic location elements of diversity if you want the largest number of subsequently returning adult fish.

Minesgold,

Interestingly you're not the last person who still finds it hard to believe that there are any remaining wild fish that have no hatchery genetic trace in them. The reason I find it interesting is because the subject comes up frequently in online forums like this one, and reports are cited that indicate that wild fish, unsullied by hatchery genetics, indeed still exist. I suppose unbelievers still exist because many forum readers either don't bother to read the reports, or don't understand them, or are of the ilk whose minds are already made up, and they will forever remain unconvinced by any evidence that doesn't support their unsupported belief.

The information that dispels your belief is out there, if you're open-minded enough to read it, understand it, and accept rationally supported conclusions. Since you're in Burlington, you may know something about the Skagit River, which happens to be an excellent example. The Skagit has had hatchery fish of one species or another since about 1916 or 17, and it still has wild fish that have remained wild and native. How can that be, you ask? Well, I'm glad you asked, assuming you are asking. First off, the earliest hatchery attempts were dismal failures for the overwhelming most part. Adult broodstock of all species were captured in a variety of locations, and the eggs were hatched out at certain stations around the basin that has been built for that purpose. When the fry were hatched, they were either released on-site or taken back to the stream the adults had been collected from. So what's the harm in that? Well, as hatchery fish culture developed, we learned that un-fed hatchery fry like those were have a survival rate to smolt of almost zero. Not always zero, but almost. So even though a million eggs might have been hatched, they may have produced zero smolts, or maybe a few hundred. Now that we know that smolt to adult survival rates range from less than one percent to ten percent, or only occasionally very much higher, very, very few adult salmon or steelhead ever returned from the early decades of hatchery work in the Skagit. All those adults whose eggs were harvested for hatchery use would have been more productive had that been left in their natal streams to spawn.

OK, so hatchery programs became much better at producing fish. Fortunately, as much as juvenile hatchery fish were scattered around the watershed, a very large number of locations have never been stocked. Why, you ask? Because stocking occurs where it is easy. Easy, as in having a bridge or other convenient place to dump fish from the truck into the stream.

And then we have the more recently acquired knowledge that hatchery fish have much lower survival when they reproduce in the natural environment than their wild counterparts. Lucky us, I guess, because we sure figured those hatchery fish that spawned naturally would produce returning adults, just like the wild fish do. I say lucky because, as much as we unintentionally tried to screw up native fish runs, we were only partly successful. And so, for these reasons, and probably a few others, we still have native wild fish that have either no, or only a limited, hatchery genetic influence. Pretty cool, huh?

2Many,

You can agree with a position that is wrong all you want, but it will never make you right. But you probably knew that.

Sg