milt roe - I think every thing you point out is true to some degree. My motivation for the post was to encourage people to expand their thinking about hatchery wild interactions. There are two kinds of interactions, genetic and ecological interactions. As eyeFish points out if hatcheries closed fish adapted to hatcheries would be at a genetic dead end just as when a dam is built without fish passage the fish adapted to spawn in the waters above the dam have to adapt to a new environment.What we humans do alters the path of genetic change of all fish.

This thread is centered around our local region, the northwest, and I think is mostly concerned with chinook and steelhead. The salmon ecosystem is the entire North Pacific region and in terms of populations chinook, and even more so steelhead, are a minor component. The total hatchery production of these two species is also small in comparison to North Pacific total hatchery production of all salmon. To understand ecological interactions of hatchery and wild fish one has to look at the big picture, the ocean is habitat. Chinook and steelhead spend a big part of their life in marine waters. They are also the two species of salmon that are declining (with a few exceptions) across their entire range. It is well accepted that pink salmon compete with steelhead for food in the North Pacific and impact chinook run numbers in Puget Sound. Local management is hampered by what goes on around the rest of the Pacific rim, some years it is effective and at other times not so good. Without some scheme to account for climate change, varying ocean conditions, and the increasing problems of pollution successful management is maintaining the status quo. I am not sure that ending hatchery production would lead to a significant increase of wild fish in all rivers with hatchery production. Alaska and Russia have large pink salmon hatchery programs even though wild pink numbers are huge. There is no need for these programs. Japan on the other hand has the largest hatchery program in the world producing chum salmon. Many years ago they made the decision to get rid of wild fish. Only a few wild chum runs remain and recently there has been some work to preserve/restore the wild chum. So often we humans think we can make things better through management and most often the goal of management is to maintain whatever is being managed in some stable state. Unfortunately to maintain a stable state sources of variability have to be minimized. Wild fish are a source of variability so a management regime that tries to balance hatchery and wild production will never be completely successful for any period of time.