Cost: The hatcheries are also expensive, providing one of the lowest returns on investment of any public expenditure. A single hatchery steelhead harvested from the Nooksack River, has, in recent years, cost up to $2,400 to produce. On the Skagit, where it's a little better, the cost per harvested hatchery steelhead has been as high as $900. I can't imagine our non-fishing neighbors feeling very good about subsidizing a few people's recreation at this rate.
The cost to produce the fish is about $1 each.
If your calculation to determine $2400 is based upon the number of adult fish returning that are harvested only by anglers, then this number might be true, if you didn't account for hatchery escapement and tribally harvested fish. I would wager that the amount of money spent by all anglers targeting these fish is much higher than the cost estimate, even by your standards.
Honestly I can't think of many government services that have ROI, so I have to question why you bring ROI up in the first place.
Science: Every major, peer-reviewed scientific study in the last decade has shown clearly that the presence of hatchery fish is a powerful detriment to wild fish recovery. When you ask WFC to spend money on "real science" or studies, I would argue the evidence is already there.Skookum
There are many major peer-reviewed studies which contradict the studies you bring up. "Every study" is a far stretch, even for a WFC employee such as your self.
Habitat: According to recent surveys, the returns of wild fish are far below the carrying capacity of available spawning and rearing habitat in many Puget Sound rivers. While habitat has been damaged, it isn't the reason we have so few wild fish returning.
We've lost 90% of the historic spawning and rearing areas in the Skagit and over 85% in the Nooksack; most PS systems have experienced the same degradation. To make the claim that the habitat is fine makes me want to smack my head on my keyboard. To suggest that everything in the habitat is fine and dandy is nothing more than a cop-out. Everyone who is involved in some way with recovery programs - government or not - understands that habitat is the primary limiting factor. Every WRIA document confirms that habitat condition is the primary limiting factor in every single region.
We know you want hatcheries gone, but don't pretend the habitat quality is fine so you can fulfill your desires. Doing so sends a bad message and it puts habitat protection and improvements in terrible positions.
The habitat is capable of supporting exactly as many natural origin fish reside in it. If carrying capacity is not being met, then the number of natural origin recruits is lacking. This is not a function of introgression, it's a function of poor survival whether its redd scour or juvenile mortality in the salt. I'm not making the case that redd scour is necessarily an issue, but I'm bring it up to show that mortality occurs at every stage of a fishes life.
Proof: When Mt. St. Helens errupted, for all intents and purposes, it destroyed the Toutle River habitat with enormous flows of superheated ash and mud. The state abandoned its hatchery plants for this very reason. And yet, within seven years, there were more wild winter steelhead spawning in the Toutle than in any other lower Columbia tributary. As soon as DFW saw this and decided to "help" Mother Nature with renewed hatchery supplementation, the wild population crashed.
I'm not very familiar with the Toutle, but looking at various documents on the Toutle, I have to question your assessment. For starters, escapement data was lacking. Second, there appears to be no differentiation between hatchery and natural fish in what surveys did occur. Third, what decent returns may have been experienced also occurred elsewhere.
Correlation does not equal causation.
Proof: On the Salmon River in Oregon, the wild coho run had dwindled to a handful of returning spawners under decades of heavy hatchery supplementation. When the hatchery program was cancelled, the wild coho rebounded spectacularly (and immediately) coming back 3,500 strong within, I believe, less than four years.
Ahh, the famous "oregon coho" argument. It's easy to point blame at the hatcheries, but there are some facts which you and others prefer to ignore: a 90% reduction in marine harvest of those very stocks and greatly improved ocean conditions. Don't you think that a 90% reduction in harvest would vastly improve population size alone?
Again, correlation does not equal causation, but many in your camp seem intent on extrapolating far beyond reason. It's very easy to make extravagant correlations with fisheries data especially when only 2 or 3 sets of sequential data exist.
Proof: Before the hatchery program on the Skagit ramped up to the massive plants we see today, the HARVEST of winter steelhead was frequently more than 20,000 fish per year. As the hatchery plants increased, instead of seeing more fish return, the downward spiral began. Today, the thought of harvesting 20,000 winter steelhead from the Skagit is beyond belief--that number represents far more than the total returns of hatchery and wild fish combined. Consider these numbers when you assess the quality of the fishery we have after decades of hatchery "supplementation."
I think your figures are on the high side, but 12,000 harvested fish at the peak certainly wasn't responsible.
Do you think that exorbitant harvest may have played a role in decreasing performance of the natural population? Part of me says yes.
What was it that I said before... oh yeah -- correlation does not equal causation. Other populations in the Skagit followed a similar path as natural steelhead. Is that to say that hatchery steelhead caused the decline of chum and coho? Or, can we conclude that detrimental factors affected all populations similarly?
Conclusion: Sure, we can continue to blame ocean conditions and plastic ingestion (neither of which we can do much about in the near term) or lack of freshwater habitat (not true) or pollution in the Sound, or commercial harvest, or tribal gillnets...but it's entirely possible, and even likely, that it's our hatcheries themselves that are causing the lack of fish.
OK, let's keep trashing the environment. Let's shut down hatcheries and see what happens. You might as well just say "let's keep shitting on the environment and everything will be fine, because it's just the hatchery fish causing problems."
I'm seeing a really fascinating paradigm shift occurring lately. The people who would typically consider themselves environmentalist but want hatcheries gone are saying environmental conditions are fine, it's just the hatcheries suppressing recovery. Other the other hand, the rednecks who supported hatchery production all along because they want to whack and stack fish are coming around and saying we need hatcheries until we restore habitat because the habitat sucks. This assessment is of course not intended offense against pro-habitat rednecks.
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